UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE WASHINGTON: 1945 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington 25, D. C. Price 50 cents Division of Personnel Supervision and Management Interior Department Museum . 291 293 305 309 313 Index. 317 III THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR HAROLD L. ICKES, Secretary 茶 MY DEAR MR. PRESIDENT: This annual report seeks to show how the mobilized resources of this Nation contributed to victory over the Axis nations. It also reveals how near that victory came to being a Pyrrhic one. At the beginning of the period here covered we were still searching the earth for the minerals that were needed in ever-increasing quantities to equip our own fighting forces as well as those of our allies. While we were searching for these minerals with meticulous diligence we were spending them with wanton prodigality. By the end of the period of this report our natural resources had been tapped, processed and sent to the battlefields in such prodigious quantities that Nazi Germany already had collapsed, and Japan was about to do so. But the drain on our national natural assets had been staggering. Only nine of the major minerals remain in our known domestic reserves in great enough quantity of usable grade to last 100 years or more. Our known usable reserves of 22 essential minerals have dwindled to a 35-year supply or less. Our assured domestic deposits of petroleum would last from 14 to 20 years at our present rate of use, but our prospects of making good on some of our losses in oil are fairly good. In some other fields of conservation, the damage of war has been just as real, though it may prove to be temporary, and certainly it has been less severe. We were obliged to complete our huge powerproduction facilities ahead of schedule to energize war plants where there was no comparable peacetime manufacture to sustain the plants after the war. We must find new markets for those facilities or suffer the consequences of unemployed power which is scarcely more healthful economically than are unemployed men. The war has reduced much of Europe and Asia to such a shambles, physically or economically or in both respects, that great populations abroad cannot provide the essentials of existence for themselves. But they must be maintained so that, if for no other reason, they can sustain our economy. We must provide these peoples with as many of their needs as we can provide, especially food. We equipped ourselves during the war to produce more food, but not enough more to meet the postwar demands at home and abroad. The inadequate expansion of our agriculture is just as certainly attributable to the war as is the increased demand for food. We had to put as little material and work as possible into irrigation facilities so that we could put as much as possible into dams and power plants that would produce fighting equipment. It is only fair to interrupt this gloomy recital long enough to say that some advantages, aside from military victory, also came our way between the beginning of the war and my transmittal of this report. The danger of defeat sped our improvement of new methods of exploring for mineral deposits, and for processing ores. We have acquired jurisdiction over the Continental Shelf, which is about 760,000 square miles of underwater land from which we may replenish some of our depleted mineral reserves. Other Federal agencies have discovered or improved certain techniques and devices, radar among them, that will enable us to explore the shelf and to extract its riches more quickly than we could have hoped to do had science developed at its peacetime pace. We have several advantages in the programs which this Department formulated for the express purpose of regaining our balance in conservation after victory. We have begun an accounting of the minerals that we still have in our reserves, and when the tally is complete it will be as valuable to us as a clear statement of its assets would be to a corporation. We have made studies that show what the prospects of sucesss are for various industries that might buy and use the power that we produce when war contracts are cancelled. These studies, which were made in cooperation with other Federal agencies, States, municipalities, colleges and industries, tell prospective contractors for our power which raw materials would be available to them, in what probable quantities, at what probable prices, what markets they might expect, and many related facts which may hasten the sale of power by facilitating the prospective buyers' preliminary surveys. We have already contracted for the sale of some power and the outlook for additional contracts is not discouraging. Within the past fiscal year, also, we have made much headway toward achieving regional development. This is about as accurate as so brief a statement of our principal gains and our principal losses could be, but we cannot use it as a balance sheet. The losses that are listed are indeed losses; the ores that we have taken out of our mines will not creep back into the ground, but the "gains" are not so conclusively gains. Oil deposits in the Continental Shelf remain an unknown factor. We will have |