CONSERVATION: Mississippi Remake

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"Life in the Mississippi Valley of the future need not be poverty-stricken or precarious. ... Its quality can be enormously improved. It need not go the way of the valley of the Nile, the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates . . . the stripped valleys of China. . . .

"The future cannot undo all the Binders of the past. . . . But there are things we can certainly draw into our map of the future if we wish. Such a map might show the disastrous kind of erosion finally checked. Instead of gullied hillsides and slopes ... it would show terraces; alternations of tilled land and grasslands; new forests springing up in belts and patches. ... It would show ... the scientific uses of all the land in the Valley, determined after long studies of soils and climatic conditions. No farmer would be trying to grow corn on land fit only for timber, or wheat on land best fitted for grazing, or anything at all on land best fitted for recreation and the preservation of wild life.

"The rivers might not be entirely under control in times of major floods, but the crest of the floods would have been lowered. . . . Power lines would have flung an intricate, interconnected network over the whole region. . . . Every farmer's family would find its work lightened by the use of electricity. New manufactures, perhaps new inventions, might have restored some of their lost traffic to the rivers. Possibly recreational uses would have supplanted commerce on most of them. Playgrounds of all sorts . . . would be more extensive and more thickly spotted over the map."

Such was the vision conjured up last week by a committee of technicians and scientists which President Roosevelt year ago set to studying the use and control of water in the Mississippi Valley. For chairman the President had chosen a sturdy, handsome, enthusiastic Philadelphian whom he, as Governor of New York, had put on that State's Power Authority. A topnotch consulting engineer and one-time president of the Taylor ("Scientific Management") Society, Morris Llewellyn Cooke was an old hand at broad-gauge planning through service on the War Industries Board and the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care. As members of PWA's Mississippi Valley Committee he and his eight colleagues had the inspiration of a President to whom vast schemes of national betterment are political meat & drink. Exalting, too, was their vast field of operations—sweeping from the Appalachians to the Rocky Mountains, from the pine forests of Minnesota to the cypress swamps of Louisiana, containing more than one-third the total area of the U. S.

Exuberantly the Committee set out to produce a plan which in grandeur and sweep should be worthy of its subject. Power, navigation, flood control, low-water control, erosion control, water supply, sanitation, irrigation, industry, commerce, water storage, forestry, recreation, wildlife conservation and employment were woven into "a pattern on which are dependent the lives and happiness of millions now living and millions still to be born." Chief components: