Using Up the Stockpile: An Environmental Warning from 1952

I didn't know my mother's father very well.  He died when I was just six years old.  He had served in World War I, was Harvard educated, and made a living before the great depression as a chemical engineer.  And he loved to read.  One of my most precious possessions is his complete set of the works of Charles Dickens.

Recently my mother shared a letter he had written to her about one month after she and my father were married.  She was just nineteen at the time.  I hadn't seen the letter and was astounded by his prescience.

It is written on a three sheets of stationary that were already twenty-eight years old when the letter was written in 1952.  They were personalized not with my grandfather's name, but rather his father's name.  Winfield T. Sherwood, along with the town where he lived, Sidney, NY.

He starts the letter greeting my mother with his pet name for her, "Dear Squirt"--I never knew that was what he called her!  I knew she adored him, and clearly, he adored her.  He begins by talking about the stationary itself, recounting the history that had transpired since its creation.  The Great Depression.  World War II.  And what he calls "a nice social revolution taking place in the US."  "Which," he wrote, "mostly goes to show you that you can keep a useful article over quite a period of history if you spend a dozen minutes of care on it."

And then he makes an observation that sounds like something right out of today's environmental movement.  "This country is going to have to revive the ability to take care of things before many years.  They have cut down, dug up and blown in a very respectable part of what was given them in this country when we inherited it from the Indians.  Over the last fifty or a hundred years scientific methods of use and manufacture have made some progress in utilizing renewable things, but no faster than the population increase.  Mostly the new knowledge has just helped us use the stockpile faster by creating new gadgets and keeping us alive longer to blow them in."

Wise words of warning, Grandpa.  Might we all pay heed!