OF ATLANTA, GA.,
CHAIRMAN EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, FOURTH NATIONAL CONSERVATION CONGRESS
The lumberman as a class, because he is honest and useful as a class, should be accorded the same encouragement as a captain of desirable industry that is accorded the leader in agriculture or irrigation who develops possibilities of utilizing our resources and supplying our needs. And as a class, because whatever may be true of the past he now sees his livelihood dependent upon forest preservation, he is a stauncher supporter of forest reform than any other class. He will utilize the present crop closely, and grow a new one, whenever these are business possibilities. The most efficient and liberally supported fire organizations in America are the lumbermen’s co-operative patrols inaugurated in the Pacific Northwest and now spreading eastward. Most of our best State forest legislation has been promoted by lumbermen. Where this is not true, we can make it true quickest, as Judge Lindsay has found with his boys, not by censure and compulsion that make them sullen or antagonistic, but by learning their troubles and working with them hand in hand toward the ends which in the very nature of things must in the long run be of mutual advantage. And this means that we must talk a common language; that here, too, forest Conservation must be expressed in practical terms of fire prevention, just taxation, and business encouragement.
What I have said of propaganda for State and private action applies to our appeal to the ordinary citizen, with this difference that because his number is greater, and his interests are more varied, we must add to the list of our specific personal arguments and to the list of our publicity mediums for carrying these arguments. Every vocation, every trait of character, every selfish and unselfish motive, has its best avenue of approach.
Immediate tangible results come most surely from immediate injury. Even good laws are of small use unless the public of today is sufficiently warned to insist on their enforcement. Do not think me lacking in ideals when I say that our greatest need is vigor and skill in appealing to human selfishness. The altruist comes to us unsought. But to reach the hand with the torch, the vote withheld, the word unspoken; we must find the man, make him listen, and show the cost of forest destruction to his particular home and pocketbook. We will not have forest Conservation till we have done this, and we will not do it until we master and apply the technical knowledge of mediums and psychological appeal that go into any successful advertising campaign.
The definitions of Conservation I have outlined are those used by the Western Forestry and Conservation Association. Its field is the five Pacific forest States—the Nation’s woodlot—containing over half the country’s standing timber and capable, by reason of rapid growth, of growing an adequate supply forever. In this field we practice what we preach. Our constituent local patrol associations spend from $300,000 to three quarters of a million a year, all paid by lumbermen, but protecting your resources and mine.
Our booklet reached that school boy and three hundred thousand more. Through every modern avenue of publicity—newspapers, circulars, posters, railroad folders, telephone directories and a dozen others—we carry the lessons of forest economics to every citizen in terms he can best understand and apply. Although you had not made that scientific man style himself a conservationist, we had secured his help in passing a model fire law. We wrote that law. Under it State, Government and lumbermen work hand in hand to protect practically every forest acre, sharing the cost, and the lumbermen in that one State contribute $150,000 a year.
But, best of all, we provide a common meeting ground for all four agencies in our entire territory, each having the hearty support and confidence of the others, and we talk only of our joint business of actual, practical, constructive work. We talk not needs, but methods, and find means to apply the methods.
We believe in this National Congress of Conservationists. We think it will enter a permanent future of still higher usefulness when it develops a more sectional organization, giving the real workers in every branch opportunity to get the very most out of meeting their own colleagues, and this not only in the technique of application but also in the lagging art of promoting the prosperity insurance of Conservation in terms and policies the public can understand and cannot evade.
President White—It will now be necessary to drop a curtain in order to arrange a screen for the illustrated lectures that are going to follow, so everyone will retain their seats. We shall not be detained long. While the curtain is dropped, Secretary Shipp will make some announcements.
The announcements were made by the Secretary.