The great cattle and
sheep ranges of the West, because of overgrazing, are capable, in an
average year, of carrying but half the stock they once could support and
should still. Their condition affects the price of meat in practically
every city of the United States.
These are but a few of the more striking examples. The diversion of
great areas of our public lands from the home-maker to the landlord and
the speculator; the national neglect of great water powers, which might
well relieve, being perennially renewed, the drain upon our
non-renewable coal; the fact that but half the coal has been taken from
the mines which have already been abandoned as worked out and by
caving-in have made the rest forever inaccessible; the disuse of the
cheaper transportation of our waterways, which involves comparatively
slight demand upon our non-renewable supplies of iron ore, and the use
of the rail instead--these are other items in the huge bill of
particulars of national waste.
We have a well-marked national tendency to disregard the future, and it
has led us to look upon all our natural resources as inexhaustible. Even
now that the actual exhaustion of some of them is forcing itself upon us
in higher prices and the greater cost of living, we are still asserting,
if not always in words, yet in the far stronger language of action, that
nevertheless and in spite of it all, they still are inexhaustible.
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