1942: Conservation

If 'defense' was the slogan for 1941, 'conservation' superseded it in 1942. The American public has been asked to conserve everything from paper to coffee, and from rubber to manpower. Much of the program of conservation has become involuntary through the actual exhaustion of supplies or through anticipated shortage which have led to the priorities system of distribution and use. And in recent weeks some of it has become compulsory through the medium of rationing.

While the public is sensitive about conservation, it is timely to make a few distinctions. Some critical shortages may be traced to the disquieting fact that the main sources of supply are in Axis hands. This is the case with tin and rubber. Others may be laid to the hazards of overseas shipping and the diversion of ships to other runs, as in the case of coffee. Shortages of most foods and some clothing merely reflect the planned sharing of our goods with our allies. Gasoline and fuel oil rationing is a revelation of limitations in the system of distribution. For all these the immediate or ultimate remedies are evident: The defeat of the Axis; the re-establishment of disrupted economics and industries; the reopening or the resumption of normal shipping lanes and shipping schedules; the commercialization of synthetic rubber; the construction of pipe-lines or new transportation systems — these and other obvious objectives, military and industrial, will undoubtedly restore the routine which has been upset since September 1939, and wrecked since Dec. 7, 1941.

It would be a grave mistake, however, to believe that the end of the war and the end of conservation will be coincident for all commodities. Our minds may still be trying to grasp the magnitude of a $108,000,000,000 budget for the fiscal year 1943. Grim as is the prospect of expending as much money in twelve months as we have expended in all the rest of our history as a nation, still grimmer is the prospective expenditure of our national resources, many of which are irreplaceable. The war will not have to last long to reduce our supply of high-grade iron ore to a point where all our inland steel furnaces cannot be fed. Thereafter Latin America will become our main source of supply unless there is a transformation in ferrous metallurgy. Similarly, our overtaxed copper mines will no longer compete effectively with the cheap and abundant ores of Rhodesia and the Congo. Domestic lead and zinc will be at a premium, and the entire world may have to search hard for commercial ores of aluminum and chromium. Even the abundant scrap, which is war's only salvageable by-product, will be left on foreign soil. Only the forests will come back, with careful management, but the mineral raw materials will be gone in amounts that would normally have sufficed our highly industrialized nation for a generation.

For these 'perishable' natural resources, it seems probable that conservation is with us to stay. Scrap will take on a new significance in American economic life, and our national concern will extend beyond the metals to the fuels, the forests, the waters of the land, and the soils. Indeed, conservation will no longer be an American concern but a program of international scope and planning. Even before Pearl Harbor, American scientists were scouring the Western Hemisphere for critical raw materials, and the search has been intensified during the past twelve months not only in the two Americas but in Africa as well. Emergency agencies like the Board of Economic Warfare, and regular agencies like the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Mines, the Forest Service, the several divisions of the Department of Agriculture, to name but a few, are taking inventory of known reserves, are seeking new sources of supply, are experimentally developing new methods and technologies that will permit the use of different raw materials and of substitutes.

The feverish program of exploration and research will unquestionably expand the known supplies of natural resources, and the information assembled should be utilized as intelligently in making peace as it is now being used for making war. The unconcern displayed in 1918 by international statesmen, with regard to the international significance of raw materials, can not bear repetition, for the preservation of resources by wise use must permeate a state of international affairs in which the highly industrialized and populous countries become increasingly dependent on the less industrialized agrarian republics and dependencies of the tropics, the southern hemisphere, and Asia.

The ideal of conservation as Theodore Roosevelt conceived it has thus been supplanted in 1942 by applied conservation. Wild life, soils, forests, waters, and minerals have not been forgotten, though the conservational projects of the thirties no longer command the interest or the appropriations they did when we were preoccupied with droughts and floods, and with farm incomes and unemployment instead of war. Conservation in the future should be a basic principle of national and international economy. That it is becoming a matter of keen concern to practical people and wage earners is clearly evident in the resolution on forest conservation drawn up and submitted to Congress late in 1941 by the International Woodworkers of America, a union of lumbermen and sawmill workers who have realized that their livelihood depends upon wise forest management. When we all realize that our welfare, our standard of living, our American way of life are intimately and inextricably geared to our resources, we shall all feel the same anxiety about them as the woodworkers. If it takes a war to bring this realization to us, the war will not have been fought in vain.