Wasteland

“ If they attack before then we can hold them off long enough to get that barge into the river. Once we get into the river with it, we'll be safe. We can float her down and into the sea. Somewhere along the coast we'll land and wherever it is will be fine for us. We'll have licked the Children. They know we've found the only eatable food stores in God knows how many thousands of miles in this goddamned wasteland. ”

“ But there are few who realize that land that is neither [Pg 153] built upon nor cultivated is also essential. Our barren moors and bleak hillsides, “wastelands” as we call them, are absolutely necessary as collectors of the water by which we live. From them our springs take their source; and they supply our cities with the first necessity of life. ”

“ We were the only human beings who lived and moved upon the wide waste. Nothing else was visible—not a deer, not a tree—all was prairie—a wide unbroken sea of green—where hollow succeeded hollow, and the long grass waved on the hills, with a heavy surge-like motion, until at last it was blended with the hazy atmosphere, which met the horizon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Prosperous rural communities with thousands of happy, rosy-cheeked children, blooming orchards, broad, fertile fields prolific beyond comparison, and flourishing cities replace wastes of sand and sage-brush. ”

“ Here, too, we find in this fearful waste, this howling wilderness, this country vast and desert idle, places scooped out of the solid rock, and the mighty foundations of the round world laid bare, that the lower organism of God's human family may find their proper sustenance ”

“ Waste were the golden fields of grain upon which we gaze with such rapt admiration. Waste, too, were these mills with their whir of industry. The fury of war fell on those sunny acres like a great pestilence, and their usefulness and beauty became desolation. The only grist mill not burned by Sheridan and his men when they went through is still pointed out to the traveler. But Nature has again asserted her right and on this delightful morning the valley smiles beneath its veil of dreamy blue like the peaceful glow that spreads over the countenance of some great and beneficent soul. ”

“ More than enough to supply all our needs. If any one could gather together in one vast pile our houses and barns, our furniture, our wagons and carriages, our farm implements, all our home conveniences, our railroad cross-ties, our trolley and telephone poles, our papers and magazines, and burn them all, the whole world would be roused by the fearfulness of the loss. But we sit idly by and see the materials of which all these things are made and must be made in the future, and with them our shade, our water-sheds, the soil of the forest-lands itself destroyed, with never a word of protest. ”

“ Not all is lost by evaporation, however; possibly119 the greater part sinks into the porous rock waste. And the rock waste?—perhaps it may be twenty, fifty, or one hundred and fifty feet deep. At all events, the water sinks until it reaches bed rock or clay through which it cannot pass. Then it flows along what may once have been an above-ground channel until fierce winds and cloud-bursts buried it deep.
But the half-savage dwellers of the desert know just where to tap these underground reservoirs and streams; even the dumb animals know instinctively where to look for water. ”

“ The purpose of these chapters is to present the characteristics of these waste places. Most of them have been conquered by man, and their resources have been opened wide to the world. Possibly others yet remain to be conquered, but "what man has done, man can do." ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 have taken note of the great natural wastes: [Pg 315] how two-thirds of the wood cut is wasted, and how insects and fire destroy the standing timber; how the soil is washed down into the valleys, taking the best from the farms; how we are steadily robbing the soil of its most necessary elements; how our waters are unused and we pay for this non-use by the use of other resources that we can ill afford to spare; how millions of acres of land which might be profitably farmed lie useless for lack of water and other millions are useless because they are covered with water. ”

“ All the human and animal manure which the world loses, if returned to the land instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world. Do you know what those piles of ordure are, collected at the corners of streets, those carts of mud carried off at night from the streets, the frightful barrels of the night-man, and the fetid streams of subterranean mud which the pavement conceals from you? ”

“ In the villages there is very little waste. The sewage is applied directly to the land, and so becomes a source of wealth instead of being emptied into great subterranean reservoirs, to generate poisonous gases, which by a most ingenious arrangement, are then poured forth into the very heart of our dwellings, as is the case in the great cities. Neither is there any waste of broken victuals. The villager has his pig or his poultry, or if he has not a pig his neighbour has one, and the collection of broken victuals is conducted as regularly as the delivery of the post. ”

“ One is thankful for small mercies; "some of the solid refuse is retained." But the "offal from the slaughter houses," and the "tip" to which all refuse is taken! And the sewage which there is "no attempt to purify"! What grizzly nightmare could be more grizzly than this?
However, we get soon now above the range of pollution by mill or town. Peebles only remains; thereafter we have really a river as it used in its entirety to be, and, above Peebles, as it may still be called, "the silver Tweed." ”

“ It is to be expected that the eternal vigilance which seizes every waste, once it has become such, putting it in places of usefulness, must contribute much toward the destruction of breeding places, and it may be these nations have been mindful of the wholesomeness of their practice and that many phases of the evolution of their waste disposal system have been dictated by and held fast to through a clear conception of sanitary needs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At this moment the country, with its waste, unreaped crops, tying in a state of plashy and fermenting ruin, and its desolate and wintry aspect, was in frightful keeping with the appearance of the people when thus congregated together. ”

“ WASTE AND GARBAGE.
The attractiveness of a rural home depends largely upon the promptness with which all kinds of waste material are disposed of. The abundance of space around the house is a great temptation for the members of the household to use it as a place for storing rubbish and useless, worn-out things. Sifted ashes are easily utilized in earth closets and upon walks and roads, to make them compact and firm. ”

“ But the dunes themselves, unless their surface sands are kept moist, and confined by the growth of plants, or at least by a crust of vegetable earth, are constantly rolling inwards, and thus, while, on one side, they lay bare the traces of ancient human habitations or other evidences of the social life of primitive man, they are, on the other, burying fields, houses, churches, and converting populous districts into barren and deserted wastes. ”

“ If a city has been laid waste, and one wishes to rebuild it, he at once demolishes completely the things that are ruinous and fallen, and so begins to dig and to lay, his foundations where he dug, and to carry up the building, though there is as yet no house; and he who wishes to make a pleasure garden in a waste, ill-smelling place begins first to clean it up, and to make a fence round it, and to prepare water-courses, and then he plants, and the plants grow, that thus after a long time the garden may bear fruit; so the purposes of men since the fall are dried up, laid waste, and thorny. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every waste on earth must be peopled, rocks removed, lakes and rivers everywhere connected; a portion of the soil must be awarded to every human being; the teeming hosts of the living must far outnumber the multitudes who have perished ”

“ The change from plenty, even great excess, to need, has come so gradually that few persons, even those living in the forest regions, have realized until within a very few years how general is their destruction. Those who, riding about a small portion of the country familiar to them, have been struck with the disappearance of the woods and the cultivation of the lands, have looked upon it wholly as a sign of progress, and have not realized that the same thing is going on in every part of the country. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some people think when they see how much over-ripe fruit is falling to the ground, and how much more there is than can ever be gathered by human hands, that nature is wasteful. Perhaps this is why these [93] same people and others who did not think at all, have been so very wasteful of our country's natural resources, and brought about such a really alarming state of things in our forests. ”

“ Except for this provision of nature, the accumulation of organic wastes since the beginning of the earth’s occupation by human beings would be so great that the earth would be uninhabitable on account of the deposits of waste matter which would have formed by this time. ”

“ The holding back of these flood waters in the upper part of the rivers, and so preventing these overflows, is termed storage of waters.
In still other regions the rainfall is abundant, and the land low-lying. Large areas are always covered with water. Such lands are called swamps or bogs, and when drained, they become the richest of agricultural lands. Irrigation, storage and drainage are the three methods employed to make waste lands valuable and useful. The land is saved or reclaimed, so all these methods of balancing and distributing the water supply are called reclamation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In thus tracing backward the condition of a now fair and productive place of human dwelling and subsistence, it may easily be recollected, what a vast number of the earth's inhabitants there are whose places of dwelling are in all those states of worse cultivation and commodiousness, and what multitudes leading a miserable and precarious life amidst the inhospitableness of the waste, howling wilderness. ”

“ All the grass and herbs that could be found in the city were used as food by those who were destitute of any other means of subsistence; and many of the poorest of the people would steal out, and wander by night down the ravines, in the hope of picking up something to allay the torments of hunger. ”