Waste land

“ Here these unskilled fellows find happy and useful occupation, waste humanity taking waste land and thus not only contributing toward their own support, but also making over land that would otherwise be useless.
One reason for building inexpensive buildings is that having cleared a large tract—say 1,000 acres—the workers can be moved to another waste tract and by brushing, clearing of rocks, draining and what not, increase its value sufficiently to keep on moving indefinitely. ”

“ Ten per cent is a moderate allowance for this loss.
We waste more largely and less noticeably in carelessness of our natural resources, as is now beginning to be realized. Waste of timber is followed by waste of water, and that by waste of land. The earth's surface of arable soil is being washed into the ocean at a wholly unnecessary rate, the foundation of all wealth—of our very life on earth—thus slipping away from us unobserved. Every barren, naked hill is a ruined garden; every yellow, muddy river is leaking gold dust from our pockets; every choked harbor is a loss in money. ”

“ Nothing else so quickly and easily responds to proper treatment, no other resource is so easily conserved. All the soil needs is proper treatment.
Every bit of waste land should be cultivated for either use or beauty, or both. If all the lanes and neglected places could be planted with fruit and nut trees, berry vines, and bushes, herbs or flowers which need little cultivation after they are planted, our food, in variety and quantity, would be greatly increased. ”

“ Sewage is eminently adapted to the feeding of sandy soils and other land which, at the moment, is considered too poor for agricultural purposes. If this manure were reserved for such land many thousand additional acres might be brought under cultivation in these islands. At the present moment these acres are being allowed to run to seed, constituting what we erroneously term waste land, but only waste because we are not sufficiently enterprising and energetic to reclaim it. ”

“ There are no laws that fix the boundaries of the immense stretches of waste-land within our country, nor a careful study of climate, geology, and production. There is not, to [200] my knowledge, any report establishing the best methods of making all our territory productive either through sales or the renting of all lands that cannot be tilled by their original owners. Our own elements, as we have tried to demonstrate in this article, are either heterogeneous or too scarce and insufficient to accomplish the task of carrying the nation onward on the road of aggrandizement. ”

“ In the quantity of waste land which abounds in the hills, a ready livelihood is offered to those who will cultivate the soil for their daily bread; but this alternative involves a forfeiture of their dearest rights, and they would rather follow any precarious pursuit than submit to the disgrace. ”

“ There is any amount of waste land in the world, not far away in distant Continents, next door to the North Pole, but here at our very doors. Have you ever calculated, for instance, the square miles of unused land which fringe the sides of all our railroads? No doubt some embankments are of material that would baffle the cultivating skill at a Chinese or the careful husbandry of a Swiss mountaineer ”

“ The poorest land of a farm is always found on the hilltops, because even with the greatest care there is always considerable waste of the top-soil. This land, then, should never be used for field crops. It should constitute the woodland, or if this is not possible, the pasture-land of the farm, for the grass roots protect the soil and prevent it from washing away, and the profits on the hay are at least as great as any other crop which could be grown on hill land. ”

“ In many communities a tract of land which is not well suited for general agriculture may be obtained for the benefit of the school, and some simple work in forestry may be undertaken by the pupils. Sometimes a farmer may be induced to give a small bit of waste land where the experiment may be tried. ”

“ They are to investigate the capabilities of waste lands, while cultivated lands lie waste beside them; they must find out why land-owners like money, and tenants hate paying it; and why a people hold life very cheap when they possess little means to sustain it. ”

“ The fair acres of which we have been despoiled, will make their appearance in some other form and fashion as the land of the future; just indeed as the present land represents the consolidated sea-spoil of the past, which by a process of elevation has been raised from the sea-depths to constitute the existing order of the earth. Waste and repair are simply the two sides of the geological medal, and exist at the poles of a circle of ceaseless natural change. ”

“ The creation of soil by the weathering of rock is a very, very slow process. Years may have passed in making soil that, if unprotected, may be washed away in an hour. Therefore, today an observer in the Old World might see myriad landscapes once rich with farms where now only poverty-stricken men creep about over the ruined land, while their sheep and goats, scavengers and destroyers, pick the scanty browse that struggles for life in the waste. A handful of men are now living uncomfortably where once there were prosperous villages. ”

“ That is a conservation embracing both the aesthetic and the economic, the only kind worth while. It is a conservation wherein the arable areas and the so-called waste lands and waters have a very intimate interrelation of interests. And, I submit, Gentlemen, that the American people too long have failed to recognize and to account as in the class of waste lands, "The Farms by the Side of the Road." ”

“ The preservation of the forests means the preservation of the soil, and the destruction of the forests means the destruction of the soil. This is the universal law. First the forests were cut down and the hillsides left bare. Then the streams wore great ravines down the unprotected hillsides. Steadily the work of destruction by erosion has gone on, until time beyond our possibility to comprehend must pass before the land can be made productive again. ”

“ Different villages are very differently endowed with grazing land. On some there is a common waste, and a common pasture in addition of superior quality, so that the waste can be left to animals which will thrive on rough land. On others there is not even a common waste, and the tenants have to do the best they can on the stubble which lies open after harvest. ”

“ As maturity is past and the relief of the land is lessened, a smaller and smaller load of waste is delivered to the river. It now has energy to spare and again degrades its valley, excavating its former flood plains and leaving them in terraces on either side, and at last in its old age sweeping them away. ”

“ This, then, is the lesson we should learn in regard to our forests: To guard against waste in cutting and use, fire, and insects, and to plant trees until our future supply of timber is assured, till the head-waters of our streams are protected and our waste lands made into valuable forest tracts; till every farm has its wood-lot, and every community its fruit and shade. It is a work in which every one of us may take some part and from which good results are certain to come. ”

“ The diminution in the amount of labor applied to the soil, consequent upon the removal of the laborers from the land, lessened the quantity of food; while the consumption of that food in cities and towns, and the waste of the fertile ingredients which should be restored to the soil, tended to exhaust the land, and led to vast importations of foreign and the manufacture of mineral manures. ”

“ The large number of waste lands, attested by the facility with which any one who was willing to cultivate them might obtain them, bears witness in its turn also to the depopulation of the country, and the deplorable condition in which property existed. ”

“ Our knowledge of the "forbidden land," as it is called, has been obtained chiefly from adventurers who have travelled through it in disguise, and from a few others who took more desperate chances by forcing their way in. ”

“ It is in dependency upon this law that all those innumerable proposals for cultivating waste-lands, as in the Scottish Highlands, in the Irish bogs, &c., are radically vicious; and, instead of creating plenty, would by their very success impoverish us. ”

“ If we go on as we have been within the few last years our ‘bold peasantry,’ as they’ve been termed, will disappear altogether, and I’ll tell ’ee why. There’s fresh commons enclosed and bits of waste lands constantly taken into cultivation, arable lands increases every year, but the population don’t ”

“ The reclamation of waste lands is a compromise between the activities of the Conservationists, who claim that in the more thickly inhabited portions of the United States the cultivated or semi-cultivated areas are out of sane and safe proportion to the wild forest sections, and the advocates of intensive and extensive agriculture. It is not the purpose of this article to take sides in that controversy, but rather to invite attention of both sides to a safe and practical field for their endeavors, namely, the reclamation of the "wasted lands" along the roadsides, the farms along the highways. ”

“ The hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous sands. A twisted thorn-tree still in the evening stands Defending the memory of leaves and the happy round nest. But mud has flooded the homes of these weary lands And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the West. All day has the clank of iron on iron distressed The nerve-bare place. Now a little silence expands And a gasp of relief. But the soul is still compressed: I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Vast forests have disappeared from mountain spurs and ridges; the vegetable earth accumulated beneath the trees by the decay of leaves and fallen trunks, the soil of the alpine pastures which skirted and indented the woods, and the mould of the upland fields, are washed away; meadows, once fertilized by irrigation, are waste and unproductive because the cisterns and reservoirs that supplied the ancient canals are broken, or the springs that fed them dried up; rivers famous in history and song have shrunk to humble brooklets ”

“ The destruction of the coast towns and harbors, which furnished markets for the products of the plains, the damming up of the rivers, and the obstruction of the smaller channels of natural drainage by the advance of the dunes, were no doubt very influential causes; and if we add the drifting of the sea-sand over the soil, we have at least a partial explanation of the decayed agriculture and diminished population of this great waste. ”

“ Is the change from a once cultivated area to a barren expanse the result of decreasing rainfall, or of the emigration of the former inhabitants to other lands? The difference between a country formerly well irrigated and fertile, and a present-day sandy, inhospitable waste may be the result of a former compulsion of the people, by a strong governing power, to till the soil and to irrigate, while now, without that compulsion, no attempt is made to keep up the work. ”

“ We shall go far toward realizing our ideal of a beautiful America if we understand that the conservation of our resources means beauty, and that waste means ugliness. Proper conservation of our mineral resources will include the removal of the ugly, unsightly piles of culm, slag, and other refuse that lie about the mouth of the mines, and disfigure some of our most beautiful mountain scenery, for, as we have shown elsewhere, this should be used and not wasted. ”

“ We are not accustomed to think of the water as wasted, since it seems beyond our control, but as we are taking a careful account of stock, and seeing how our forests, our fuels and our minerals are disappearing, and our soil being carried out to sea by the rushing waters, it is well to consider, also, whether this great resource may not be so used as to benefit mankind in many ways and at the same time lessen the drain on other resources. ”

“ It is in very much the same manner that a huge log is cut in twain as it is pushed against the saw. The mountain range, as it is pushed upward, represents the log; the river, which is stationary, represents the saw.
One might look a long way to find the wealth created by this muddy torrent. But the wealth is there, though it is certainly a long way from the canyon; moreover, the rock waste itself is the wealth, and great wealth it is. ”

“ No other question of to-day is of such vital and far-reaching importance as that of the reclamation of the millions of acres of sleeping arid lands in the western part of our country. Mines may be exhausted, forests slain, and cities annihilated, but wastes made fruitful through the potency of water will remain everlasting sources of wealth to the nation. ”

“ The preserving of the forests on the great mountain ranges of the country, where nature has placed them, will mean in the one matter of soil-wash, fruitful lands and bountiful harvests, instead of barren, wasted lands, desolated by floods and seamed by great ravines, carrying desolation to the lands below them. ”