It is ours to use and conserve for ourselves and our descendants, or to destroy.

The fundamental question which confronts us is, What shall we do with it?
That question cannot be answered without first considering the condition of our natural resources and what is being done with them to-day.

As a people, we have been in the habit of declaring certain of our resources to be inexhaustible.

To no other resource more frequently than coal has this stupidly false adjective been applied.

Yet our coal supplies are so far from being inexhaustible that if the increasing rate of consumption shown by the figures of the last seventy-five years continues to prevail, our supplies of anthracite coal will last but fifty years and of bituminous coal less than two hundred years.