The people's voice. [volume] (Helena, Mont.) 1939-1969, 1958-12-19

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land which was built through endless
cons to lush fertility has been de-
stroyed, rendered incapable of sup
porting life in few short centuries.
MAN CIVILIZED?
DEBATABLE QUESTION
Did l say man had claim to being
civilized? | am not sure Teddy Roose-
welt would agree. In his last Annual
Message to Congress he said, "Any
really civilized nation will so use all
of these three great natural assets
(the soil, the rivers, and the forests)
that the nation will have their benefit
in the FUTURE
Is the United States a civilized ma
ton by Teddy Roosevelt's standard?
There is good reason to wonder. We
know that in this country today three
hundred million out of our four hun
dred million acres of farm land are
eroding faster than they are being
replaced. We know that fifty million
acres are already lost to any decent
farm usage and another 100 million
severely damaged. Do you remember
our dust bowl which resulted from
less than half century of exploita-
ton? Have you watched the Mississippi
pi in flood stage draining the life
blood of a nation, pouring the rich
top soil equivalent of forty-six 100
acre farms into the Gulf of Mexico
every day?
And what about our farm policies
are they really calculated to pro-
vide the best possible stewardship of
the lands fertility? Joseph Meisner
of The National Catholic Rural Life
Conference. speaking last month in
Denver at the Theodore Roosevelt
Conservation Conference referred to
the ancient maxim "a Masters foot
prints are the best fertilizer" Think
of the implications of that the next
time you hear that two million farm
city within a twelve-month period, |
that the family farm is thing of the !
past and the corporate farm is the |
farmer insist on the same loving care |
of the land as did the family farmer
who knew it must support his son and |
his grandson-and their families?
And the forests? Take look some
time at the stubble-dotted and erod-
ing hillsides which were once the
magnificent forests of northern Mich
igan-and know that the same scene
can be found in greater or less de-
gree in almost any State in the Ma
ton. U. S. News and World Report
of April 4, 1858 contains an article
on our timber resources based on a
U. S. Forest Service report. This
article points out that by 1875 we
shall be cutting 49o more saw tim
Der than is being grown each year. a
loss of 9.6 billion board feet per
year, and that by the year 1000 we
shall be cutting 1870 more than is
being grown, increasing the annual
loss to over 80 billion board feet. The
article further points out that at
present there are 81 million acres of
potential forest land standing idle
and unseeded, even in the face of
our terrible needs of the decades
just ahead. Are we obeying Teddy
instructions? In his Eighth
Annual Message to Congress fifty
years ago next month he said:
eff there is any one duty which
more than another we owe it to our
children and our children's children
to perform at once, it is to save the
forests of this country, for they con-
stitute the first and most important l
element in the conservation of the
resources of the country"
He went on to describe at length l
the same conditions in Northern {
China which DR.. Lowdermilk discusses c
in his paper. And then Theodore {
Roosevelt, whom Senator Murray has |
called the godfather of conservation,
gave us this grim warning: :
"The lesson of deforestation in =
China is a lesson which mankind =
should have learned many times al =
'eady from what has occurred in
)ther places. Denudation leaves naked
soil; then outlying cuts down to the ,
)are rock and meanwhile rock waste
)uries the bottom-lands. When the q
ioil is gone, men must go; and the q
process does not take long" !
What about our water resources? Z
are we using them to produce "the W
greatest good for the greatest num- g
,er for the longest time?" Look at C
he polluted streams all across the 81
ountry, from the Potomac and the 81
Delaware Rivers of the East to the o
oastal streams Of the Pacific slope, il
yhere the pressure of population and 81
inadequate treatment of sewage and 3
Industrial waste already warns us of a
ne future danger. In the process of tC
DING some research recently for SEN t
tor Jackson on the use of water in I'll
lie United States, I prepared proiec- m