L 
Erosion                                          April 17, 1923. 
Memorandum for Mr. Leopold; 
I have read with appreciation your article "Some Fundamentals 
of Conservation in the Southwest". It certainly deals with tunda- 
mentals both in fact and theory and while I am inclined to feel that 
you have overdrawn the picture in one or two places. I believe that 
your article is worthy of a permanent place in scientific litera- 
ture. You asked me what use should be made of it. It has the 
scientific and literary quality and the general style which would 
make it most fitting in my judgment as a monograph and would un- 
doubtedly be so published by one of the southwestern educational 
institutions if they were equipped for that sort of work. The 
first part is so localized to the Southwest that I doubt whether 
it would find place in the national magazines published in the 
East, other than American Porestry or some similar publication, Uut 
the latter part discussing conservation as a moral issue supported 
by some of the southwestern data and some from other districts 
would be of national interest and worthy of place in World's Work 
or The International Interpreter. 
I have mentioned that I think you have overdrawn the picture. 
At the bottom of page two you state tbat "broadly speaking, no net 
gain is resulting" by the additions to irrigate areas because of 
the loss through erosion. Acre for acre, this may be true, al- 
though I seriously doubt whether as many acres of really valuable 
agricultural land have been destroyed by erosion in the past two 
decades as have been made available for irrigation under private 
and public relamtion projects. i'urthermore, the lands being de- 
veloped are usually topographically better adapted to intensive 
cultivation. They have superior soil, are better located as to 
market, and are more adapted to economic utilization than those 
that are being lost, so there is an economic gain. 
On the next page you continue the discussion by a statement 
that replacement is not replacement, but rather slicing at one end 
of our loaf while the other end sloughs away in waste, and that some 
day the sloughing and slicing will meet. Oratorically, the figure 
is very nice but I am inclined to question its accuracy. The end 
 
altogether we~ed and the 
sing". The only way that the 
ie process of erosion on the 
whereby a new agricultural area 
ture of a peneplain all topo- 
aat time 'naturally watered for 
onstruction of the surface of 
a and climatic conditions. 
 
You may say that I am looking at the matter geologically instead 
of historically and through too long a period of time. Neverthe- 
less, it is the process which will ultimately overcome the present