ignorance on this vitally important conservation question; leading
public thought in the right direction; and providing both the seed and
the stock for practical efforts in behalf of the Farm by the Side of the
Road. I am going to claim a bond of brotherhood with you in this great
work, basing my claim not upon my small activities in nut cultivation,
but rather upon the fact that I was one of the conservation pioneers in
New York State in the advocacy of planting profitable trees--nut trees
and fruit trees--along the public highways.

That eminent conservationist, Gifford Pinchot, addressing the National
Council of Farmers' Co-operative Associations in 1915, defined
"Conservation" as "the wise use of the earth for the benefit of the
people who live on it." That would be a perfect definition, if it did
not invite the query: Should it not be enjoined upon the people who live
upon the earth today, while enjoying its benefits, to keep faithful
stewardship of the interests of the inhabitants of tomorrow?

About the time Mr. Pinchot enunciated this famous definition, the New
York State Conservation Department summed up the purposes of practical
Conservation as: "The correction of past indiscretion, the perfection of
present utilization, and the formation of future accumulation with
respect to natural resources."

Conservation activities must repair errors of the past which have left
denuded forest lands and empty game covers and waters; they must afford
and direct the present use of the forests and the streams; they must
safeguard the future supply, if they would meet the requirements of a
conservation which shall raise the standards of life and lower the cost
of living. 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 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 thi