Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/95

Rh the time of water surfeit. Again, while rivers become torrential and destructive, submerging valuable farming lands and taking a toll of property and lives, yet, because the spring waters were allowed to pass quickly away unstored in soils or reservoirs, these same streams at other periods are found to be so restricted in volume and so checkered in course by accumulated drift that the pathways of natural transportation are more or less effectively closed.

It is clearly within reason to say, then, that no other form of material waste can be measured against the stupendous aggregate resulting from the failure to conserve and control and utilize the available supplies of water. It is easy to understate the importance of water conservation, while overstatement would almost seem beyond our powers. Water-power development and the conservation of coal deposits, soil conservation and the reclamation of arid and semi-arid lands by irrigation or by "dry-land" methods, reforestation and flood control, reclamation of overflowed lands and maintenance of inland waterways, stream pollution and fisheries—these several objects, each of great importance by itself, are all, in large measure, aspects of the one comprehensive problem. Each of these admitted obligations has a direct relation to our duty of storing the available water supply in soils or in reservoirs, of regulating its flow from source to sea, and of utilizing it to the maximum at all stages, for power and navigation, for farms and forestry, for sanitation and fisheries. Stated in this way, with all its manifold bearings, the general problem may assume an exaggerated appearance of complexity. Surely water conservation is broad in its relations, and surely its complete realization will not be attained in a day or in a generation, and yet the stages of the solution of the entire problem may be just such matter-of-fact steps as we are repeatedly taking in the ordinary course of practical progress.

Fisheries have been named just above as related to water conservation. The relation might be obvious and yet insignificant: this may be called the prevailing impression. Fresh-water fisheries have been practically entirely disregarded in connection with the conservation of water; nevertheless, it can, I believe, be made apparent, first, that the possibilities of food-supply from fresh-water fisheries in public waters will be realized only as water conservation becomes a reality, and, second, that the proper development of fish-raising as a principal or incidental occupation may, in a very practical and simple way, promote the general object of water conservation.