Now that man’s conception was the result of Conservation activity, certainly. Without our agitation there would have been no counter agitation. No doubt he has read of these congresses every fall and of countless other forms of our work. But, apparently, only one interpretation, and that a mistaken one, had ever reached him in a form definite enough to make an impression. How else can you account for getting effort and sacrifice from the irresponsible barefoot school boy, but no realization by a citizen of the highest type that Conservation wants his help in some way that he can give it?
To what extent these remarks apply to your work along other Conservation lines, I am not competent to say. In forestry, there has been, I will not say too much debate, but certainly too little other use of our Conservation machinery in presenting clear-cut principles of forest economics in the specific local forms and with the specific local needs that are necessary to engage and direct accomplishment. This is true of what we do at these meetings and more true of what we do when we go home.
What our forests need most is more patrolmen, more trails and telephones for them to use, more funds and organization to marshal fire-fighting crews when required, better fire laws and courts that will enforce them, public appreciation that forest fire departments are as necessary as city fire departments, more consideration for life and property by the fool that is careless with match and spark, realization by more lumbermen that it pays in more ways than one to do their part, State officials who will handle State lands intelligently, tax laws that will permit good private management, consumers who will take closely-utilized products, and a few other things that demand specific study and specific action. Very few will follow automatically after any amount of agitation under the general term of forest Conservation. Do you suppose this would have sent the boy down the hill after water? No more will it write a good forest code and drive it through the devious channels of legislation. No more will it organize a hundred busy lumbermen and install a trained co-operative patrol. No more will it supply the necessary systematic campaigning to teach the people of your State and mine in just what ways their homes and pocketbooks are touched by every injury to forests or forest industry and exactly what they, as individuals, must do to prevent such injury.
Without decrying their sentimental aspects, these are business problems. They call for all the exact facts, all the systematic planning, all the decisive action, all the appeal to human motives, selfish and otherwise, that are essential to any business. We have a commodity to offer. By whatever name we call it, fire prevention, reforestation, or more vague yet, forest Conservation, we are really offering prosperity insurance. It must be paid for by the community in currency of individual and collective effort, by individual care with the forest and by public policies enforced at public expense. To make the community pay for this commodity requires the same methods that make it buy life insurance; the same devising of a sound, attractive policy that the buyer can see and understand, the same skilful advertising, the same personal persuasion by its agents. I believe that if this were a congress of life insurance agents they would be talking mostly of just these things, particularly of improved methods to close with procrastinating “prospects,” with a view to putting these methods into the most definite kind of practice the day after they got home. We do not need argument on the merit of Conservation any more than they would on the merit of life insurance. We are converted, or we would not be here. But we need a whole lot of instruction in salesmanship, and I believe we fail to make this the feature of these congresses that it might be.
Let us look ahead, we agents of prosperity insurance, to see what is to be done after we get home.
The Government needs little but our moral support. The Federal Forest Service is our highest authority in technique, the national forests are our most conspicuous examples of practice. But the task of the Forest Service is stupendous, not only in protecting these vast forest areas and the lives within them, but also in replanting denuded areas and managing great timber sales, so new growth will follow. Congress does not appropriate anything like enough for this work. The forest rangers out West are working for you and me, not for Congress. We want more of them, and better facilities for their work, and it is up to us to say so at the right time, to the right men, and so emphatically that there will be no misunderstanding. Petty politics and “retrenchment” would not be practiced so much more vigorously when dealing with the lives and resources of the people than when dealing with the “pork barrel” if we Conservationists were half as free with telegrams as we are with resolutions. Yes, this means you. So long as you stand for having the appropriations for preserving the Nation’s forests from three to twenty times less per acre than the lumberman is spending on his contiguous holdings, or for any congressional attack upon the integrity of the national forest system, your Conservation preachments are going to the wrong address or are not properly spelled in words that look like votes.
There is even greater need of definitions that apply to the situation of our States. Many have done nothing. Others have ill-balanced laws passed by some one agency without due consideration of the needs of others or of the greater need of bringing all into harmonious co-operation. In few is there a far-seeing comprehensive policy financed and executed. Here, of all places, forest Conservation must narrow itself to specific issues. Scattered ideas do not pass good laws or prevent the passage of bad ones. Propaganda work must be as forcible and carefully directed as blows with an ax, to cut out one by one the local foundation of every obstacle. In presenting our remedy we must prove our knowledge of the principles and technical frame-work which will insure freedom from politics, just distribution of cost, effective organization, strict and enforceable fire laws, systems of patrol and fire-fighting, facilities for educating lumber men and public management of State-owned lands, fair taxation, and, above all, co-operation with and stimulation of endeavor by private owners. Without such knowledge, and skilful publicity and campaigning, your very success in general agitation may result in legislation worse than none.
All this involves considerable knowledge of the problems of the private owner. After all, he controls most of our forest area. His use of it, our use of it, and the effect of our relations on our joint use of it, largely determine our forest destinies. And there is entirely too much forgetting that forests are useless unless used; that not forests, but forest industry, is what we really seek to perpetuate. Except from their protection of stream-flow and game, the community has little to gain from forest preservation unless it also preserves, on a profitable and permanent footing, the industry that makes forests usable and worth preserving, that employs labor, affords market for crops and services, pays taxes, and manufacturers and distribute an indispensable commodity. Forest wealth is community wealth, but not without forest industry to coin it.
E. LEE WORSHAM