Sheep, Soil, Good Sense

Last week two very different groups of people did some concentrated worrying about conservation. Colorado rangers of the U. S. Forest Service fought a strong push by Western sheep ranchers to graze their flocks without restriction on public lands. The sheep-men were lobbying hard and effectively in Congress. All the same time in Washington, a group of soil experts, engineers, and other conservationists met in what they called the National Emergency Conference on Resources. No Congressmen bothered to show up.

These two incidents are pretty indicative of how little the nation is worrying about its natural resources at the present time. The forest rangers in Colorado may be able to keep a wave of close-cropping sheep out of the remaining federal lands, but theirs is an isolated fight. The Mississippi is still depositing thousands of acres of fine mid-western farmland into the Gulf of Mexico; Army Engineers and the Department of the Interior have bogged down in a jurisdictional dispute over who should cure the river's problems. Loggers in Northern New York State are still leaving hanging tree-tops as they timber, making a fine dry roadway for fire above their forests. Old-fashioned farming methods are threatening the Great Plains with another dust bowl.

These conditions are not isolated; the Washington conference brought out a lot more of them. And it deserved much more than a cold shoulder from the government. The experts talked about new books like William Vogt's "Road to Survival" and Fair-field Osborn's "Our Plundered Planet," which describe the squeeze population growth is putting on our food supply. They discussed synthesizing food from chemicals, flood control, and atomic power sources, and large-scale projects such as the proposed Columbia Valley Authority. They worked on crosion. But most of all they worried about what one speaker called the "the greatest obstacle . . . public apathy."

This is probably the main conservation problem. As long as nobody bothers them, Congressmen will go right on supporting the sheep-owners' demands to chew the life from the grazing lands. As long as nobody bothers them Congress will go merrily on, allowing the nation's resources to float down the drain.

Conservation directly affects the public. But Congress has been ducking action on numerous resource-saving plans for an inordinately long time. A little more active public pressure could do a lot of good.