POVERTY OR CONSERVATION

Forest and Bird, Issue 52, 1 May 1939, Page 10

POVERTY OR CONSERVATION

(By Jay N. “Ding” Darling.)

Condensed from “National Wildlife Federation Bulletin” for January.

“To conserve does not mean to refrain from human use and enjoyment but rather to use understandingly and with respect for nature.” —Frank A. Kittredge, in “Recreation.”

WE have, as a nation, specialised on exploitation. We have exploited our forests, exploited our rivers and lakes, exploited our soils and exploited our wildlife. The question is, how long can we continue to live by exploitation alone? It was Benjamin Franklin who wrote “Forever taking out and never putting anything in soon exposes the bottom of the meal barrel.”

Conservation is the reverse of exploitation, and unless we begin soon to counteract exploitation by the practice of conservation, how soon shall we find ourselves at the bottom of an empty barrel, looking out though the bunghole at our departed standards of living. The term conservation has too often been accepted as though it applied only to forests, fish and game, and the beauties of nature. Quite universally conservationists are looked upon as close relatives of “Ferdinand the Bull,” whose sole ambition was “just to smell the flowers.”

Within the ranks of conservationists we discover group self-interests whose motives are only slightly removed from those of the exploiters. The landman thinks only of land conservation; the birdman thinks in terms of saving the birds; the fisherman thinks conservation means more and bigger fish. Each is, of course, an integral part of conservation, but we can no more succeed by thinking of conservation in terms of a single pet resource by itself, than we can think of the legs of a man functioning without a body. Land, water and vegetation are just that dependent on one another. Without these three primary elements in natural balance, we can have neither fish nor game, wild flowers nor trees, labour nor capital, nor sustaining habitat for humans.

To attempt to remedy the lack of fish in our streams or game on our uplands without attacking the ailments of our land, water and vegetation, would be like trying to cure consumption with Smith Brothers cough drops. Building ten thousand new fish hatcheries will not restore

the fish unless we first restore the condition of the waters in our lakes and streams so that fish can live in them.

When water goes, vegetation departs with it. When vegetation departs, soil goes. When soil is gone man can no longer remain. Neither man nor beast can live without vegetation and vegetation cannot exist without water and soil. If I read aright the signs in the skies, these more fundamental aspects of conservation have been, and are still, a blind spot in our social, economic and political vision. If we continue to ignore them we shall have not -only no fishing or hunting, but we shall be heading our nation into social, economic and political bankruptcy. Savants of culture have traced man’s progress from his lowly beginning with a stone axe in his hand and little on his mind, up to and Including air-conditioned homes, luxurious transportation and universal education but these same experts have consistently failed to note that where natural resources failed, culture, progress and civilisation died.

Scientists have deciphered the secret formulae of chemistry and physics to transmute sawlogs into silk, to deaden pain and lengthen the span of man’s existence with products distilled from nature’s organic laboratory, but have they given thought to perpetuation of the source of organic materials with which they perform their magic? That problem remains practically unapproached.

Political scientists and economists have devised formulae for wealth, and labour has claimed to be its sole creator, but none has paused long enough to observe that without natural organic resources there would have been no labour, no political scientists, no wealth and no human life.

Can it be that all our planning and hope of prosperity is based on the false assumption that nature’s resources are inexhaustible? Crumbling ruins where ancient civilisations once prospered would indicate that other races and other nations before us have miscalculated their

wealth and degenerated to poverty because of the same error our economists are now making.

Boiled down to the fundamental truth, the history of civilisation, since man was created, is largely made up of the rise and fall of empires through the exhaustion of resources. History, therefore, in reality turns out to be the story of hungry man in search of food. Conservation is the job of so managing our soils, waters, and gifts of nature on this continent of ours that man’s search for these necessities shall not be in .vain.

If we do neglect conservation as history has ignored it in the past, and any considerable portion of our population does search in vain for existence, we shall have increasing poverty, social upheavals and, in spite of our high ideals and worship of peace, we shall have more wars instead of fewer, for wars are the spawn of empty stomachs, and empty stomachs follow as the night the day—the excess of demand for natural resources over the supply.

Wealth will continue to exist on this continent only so long as the natural resources of our soil and water continue to yield up their riches in proportion to the requirements of our population. That population already includes a widening margin of want and unemployment. When these resources are further depleted, as they have vanished from vast areas on other and older continents, prosperity, standards of living and social contentment among our people will vanish.

Few are aware of the incalculable cash losses which have been ignored by the people of this continent through the persistent habit of calling everything profit which we rip from the soil. We have left no debit slip in our national cash drawer for the exhausted resources which have gone for ever when we harvest and remove any considerable crop from the soil.

If nature’s pantry had been wisely guarded, our relief rolls would have been a fraction of their present appalling magnitude.

The time will surely —indeed if it is not already —when the widening fringe of unemployment and hunger will threaten the stability of our social institutions as it has upset other governments and other nations before us, when bulging populations have hurst through their geographic and legal boundaries and involved themselves and their neighbours in

bloody warfare. Japan has already passed the crossroads. If she had stayed within her boundaries she would have starved.

We may juggle our currency, we may substitute dictatorship for democracy, we may set up devices for redistribution of wealth and social security, but none of these, nor all of them together, will restore the sustaining land we have wastefully depleted. It will not put back the forests on our eroding hills, it will not restore the fish in our polluted streams fnd vacant waters of the seaboard. Only we ourselves, by studied processes, can accomplish this recovery.

Conservation becomes, then, not a matter of sentimental appreciation of the beauties of nature. It is no idle humour of the experimental laboratory; it is grim business for statesmen.