Southern Appalachian Digital Collections

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Report of the Secretary of Agriculture in relation to the forests, rivers, and mountains of the southern Appalachian region

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  • SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN REGION. 189 It is, or should be. an accepted principle that the.Government is to provide for public needs when private enterprise, for any reason, can not be induced to make adequate provisions. * * * Such truly imperial gifts have greatly enriched a part of this country; it will be well, before the remnants of primeval nature have vanished, that the other parts of our realm should have like share in them. [Prof. W J McGee in the Worlds Work, November, 1901.J The geographer in studying the Appalachian region perceives that in the wooded wilderness nature provides a vast reservoir system for the storage of storm waters—a system at once so perfect and so economical that all the year's rainfall (and light snow fall as well) is first appropriated to the uses of plant life, then conserved for a time in the subsoil against drought, and finally carried by subterranean seepage to the lower levels, where only the excess above local plant needs and animal demands is allowed to flow through spring and stream and river down the long way to the distant ocean. * * * Now he may turn another leaf to the closing lines of his lesson and read of that delicate interrelation of natural conditions which has resulted throughout the Appalachian region in the development of a fioral mantle to stay the storms, and thus at once to sustain the flora itself and to estop destructive erosion. These final lines run deep into earth science and into plant science and need not be followed save by the specialist. Yet the ultimate axiom is simple, so simple that he who runs might read, so simple as to make it a marvel that observant men did not grasp it at the beginning of knowledge rather than wait until the end—it is the simple axiom that life prevails over death, that plant power is stronger than rock power. Nor can the geographer in the Appalachian region fail to apply the axiom. He may call the application theory, argument, policy, cause; he may whisper it in private council, may announce it in scientific conclave, may proclaim it in legislative halls, may send it ringing through the world and up the corridors of future time to benefit all mankind; he may smother itcravenly in coward breast, or he may sacrifice it to paltry greed, yet if he is honest with his facts and with himself he can not fail to "realize that the forests must be preserved, else the mountains will be destroyed. Only a generation ago science plodded wearily along one side of the pathway of human progress, while statecraft flitted airily along the other side of the straight and narrow path, both led in part by hereditary theories. Put within the work time of men now living science and statecraft have drawn well into the main pathway of practical humanity, and in this country at least, they have joined hands firmly; to day science stands in the Federal Cabinet in all the dignity of an
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