George Washington to New Hampshire, 29 December 1777 (Detail, GLC03706) Visions of the American Environment The Conservation of Natural Resources by Theodore Roosevelt by Patricia Stellati St. John the Evangelist Seventh Annual Message to Congress Dec. 3, 1907 The "wilderness" in 1901 seemed to be a large, vast and inexhaustible supply of resources. Such men as John Muir, John Burroughs, and Theodore Roosevelt had the foresight to recognize the danger of abuse of these resources. Consequently, they waged an uphill battle to conserve what they already saw as a limited supply. To the Senate and House of Representatives: The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life..As a nation we not only enjoy a wonderful measure of present prosperity but if this prosperity is used aright it is an earnest of future success such as no other nation will have. The reward of foresight for this nation is great and easily foretold. But there must be the look ahead, there must be a realization of the fact that to waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. For the last few years, through several agencies, the government has been endeavoring to get our people to look ahead and to substitute a planned and orderly development of our resources in place of a haphazard striving for immediate profit.. ..Optimism is a good characteristic, but if carried to an excess it becomes foolishness. We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so. The mineral wealth of the country, the coal, iron, oil, gas, and the like, does not reproduce itself, and therefore is certain to be exhausted ultimately; and wastefulness in dealing with it today means that our descendants will feel the exhaustion a generation or two before they otherwise would. But there are certain other forms of waste which could be entirely stopped - the waste of soil by washing, for instance, which is the most dangerous of all wastes now in progress in the United States, is easily preventible, so that this present enormous loss of fertility is entirely unnecessary. The preservation or replacement of the forests is one of the most important means of preventing this loss. We have made a beginning in forest preservation, but,..so rapid has been the rate of exhaustion of timber in the United States in the past, and so rapidly is the remainder being exhausted, that the country is unquestionably on the verge of a timber famine which will be felt in every household in the land..The present annual consumption of lumber is certainly three times as great as the annual growth; and if the consumption and growth continue unchanged, practically all our lumber will be exhausted in another generation, while long before the limit to complete exhaustion is reached the growing scarcity will make itself felt in many blighting ways upon our national welfare. About twenty percent of our forested territory is now reserved in national forests, but these do not include the most valuable timberlands, and in any event the proportion is too small to expect that the reserves can accomplish more than a mitigation of the trouble which is ahead for the nation.. We should acquire in the Appalachian and White Mountain regions all the forest-lands that it is possible to acquire for the use nation. These lands, because they form a national asset, are as emphatically national as the rivers which they feed, and which flow through so many States before they reach the ocean.. ____ 1. What problem does President Theodore Roosevelt say underlies every other problem of our national life? 2. Explain in your own words what will undermine "in the days of our children" the very prosperity we should hand down to them. 3. How has the government attempted to correct the problem? 4. What is one of the most important means of preserving the resources of the United States? 5. What recoomendation does President Roosevelt make to Congress as a step toward a solution?