The Sentinel=record., 1914-06-16
PRESERVATION OF
 NATURAL RESOURCE
GOVERNMENT CALLS ATTENTION TO THE NECESSITY OF RIGHT
 FUL USE OF RESOURCES.
Director of Bureau Finds if Difficult to Get People to Believe That These Things Must Be Conserved.

l natural TtSOuiNG6, AhNh H' o~-f
 natural gas and the other miners, ana l that unchecked waste means poverty and ruin to any country, was the warn | ing issued by Dr. Joseph A. Holmes, director of the United States Bureau of Mines to the members of the Nat ural Gas Association of America at their recent convention in St. Louis. The director of the bureau, who be- lieves that conservation of these re- sources is one of the most important problems confronting the people of the country today, said, I'm not in terested in any way ia that sort of lconservation which looks toward the | locking up of the natural resources of the country for the future when we need those resources ourselves during the present generation. l think we will all agree as a practical doc Urine of conservation, that while we have a right to use everything we
 need at the present time, we have ID right to waste unnecessarily what is the heritage of generations yet to
 come. It is hard, l find, to get peo- pie to realize the importance of con serving our natural resources under this principle, especially in view of the fact that we have new, and ts some extent, undeyeloped country, but in
 talking with people from the older countries like Great Britain where
 they have operated industries for a thousand years as compared with our one hundred years, 1 find that they realize what a thousand years means
 and they realize how the resources
 which they are now using at so rapid
 a rate will, in a few hundred years, be practically exhausted and that when
 those resources are exhausted it
 means almost annihilatioa for any
 country situated as Great Britain is,
 and which is so entirely dependent
 for it's commercial success upon the
 development of its various mineral
 resources, with which it has been so
 generously blessed. And when we re. alize the importance of preventing the
 waste If mineral resources, drawing our information from the experience of
 the older countries. 1t makes us more serious in dealing with this important
 problem in this country.
 Tn the last few decades, we have become a great manufacturing and in- dustrial nation. In the earlier years of our history we were an agricultural pa r.e. but when you look at our pro
 Sctio1 Of coal, which is becoming more and more an index of the great industrial progress Of the nation, it makes us realize pointedly the impor- taDce Of conservation in view of in- creased demOnd, for you will find that during the past one hundred years it was just about one hundred years ago that we began to use coal in the
 United States-we have doubled our consumption of coal every decade. In other words, from 1900 to 1910 we
 used aimC st as much coal az we had used during the 75 years preceding.
 When you say that Go a man he s apt to reply 'Of course that can not keep up indefinitely but why may not con sumption of coal increase enormously?
 We used thirty years ago al, ut one
 ton Of coal per capita. During ths
 past year we used nearly six tons of coal per capita
 More and more we are becoming a
 'aborsaying country; more and more
 we are becoming q manufacturing country; more and more we are be-
 coming q country of transportation
 and all our industries depend upon the utilization of our natural fuels.
 My opinion is that replacement of fuels by water power Is going t. be somewhat like the replacement of the street transportation facilities of d great city like New York by subways and elevated roads. You may remem. Der when the construction of elevated
 roads in New York City was proposed people said that these roads would de- stroy the surface lines, but they are crowded; and when the subways were
 projected they were to accommodate everybody, and yet the surface cars
 are just as crowded now as they were before the elevated or the subways
 were used. I don't believe we will
 ever notice a difference in cur con sumption of coal or natural gas-ex- 1 lcept locally-through the development of our water power, for that will be an incident, not big factor, in the future development of this country.
 These great resources with which na- ture has provided us are resources which we ought to use wisely and by
 using wisely l mean that they should
 be used with common sense, with
 rigid economy and without any upnec. essary waste"
 ----------<J----~ -