Conservation of Natural Resources
W. E. Howland
Professor  of   Sanitary   Engineering
Purdue   University
The depletion of our natural resources, through both direct waste
and unwise rapidity of utilization, is a matter for grave concern. As
Kenneth Markwell, Assistant Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, has written:(1)
"Recklessly we mined the soil of our farms and allowed it to
waste into our natural waterways. Ruthlessly we cut away the forests
that conserved moisture. Lush grasslands which provided our supply
of cheap beef were overgrazed. Floods devastated millions of acres,
and streams were polluted."
In 1934, the Mississippi Valley Committee declared:
"If certain present-day trends were to be projected unaltered into
the future, the map would be a sorry one. We would be compelled
to show increasingly large stretches of once fertile lands stripped of
their life-giving humus, rivers breaking forth in floods of increasing
severity as the denuded slopes permitted an ever swifter runoff,
industry and agriculture becoming ever more precarious, the life
of the people on the land becoming more and more disorganized, and
a steady increase of farm tenancy and economic dependency." (2)
What does the sanitary engineer have to do with these problems?
In an important sense the whole activity of the sanitary engineer
is conservation. It is conservation of health through a wonderfully
successful attack upon water-borne disease; it is also the conservation of water; it is restoring the quality of the water of the streams
through the building of sewage-treatment plants, and increasing the
minimum rate of stream flow and extent of water surface areas through
the building of reservoirs. All of these enterprises add to recreational
opportunities—in swimming, boating, fishing, and just living along
the streams and rivers of the countryside.
Indeed it is impossible to disentangle the great problems of public
health that are the concern of the sanitary engineer from those
of conservation. As the soil and its fertility are washed away, the
people who live upon it lose their vitality, suffer vitamin deficiency
diseases  like  pellagra,   and   fall   an   easy  prey  to  communicable   ail-
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