Inexhaustible resources still a popular myth

By Patricia Nelson Limerick
Center of the American West

In its prime, the rock at Teapot Dome truly looked like a teapot. But the years have been hard on that rock. Its identity-defining spout was one of the first parts to go. Eight decades after its moment of national fame, the teapot is now just another odd rock in a stark Wyoming landscape.

Government decisions about fossil fuel development in stark Wyoming landscapes have returned to the news these days, but the value placed on those landscapes has been transformed. In the 1920s, an appreciation for nature was already a growing feature of national life.

And yet Teapot Dome was the kind of place that fell outside the bounds of that sentiment. This was open, raw territory, unforested, wracked by wind and determined not to be "pretty." No one, in that time, would have known what to make of a plea to stop the devastation of the unique and precious ecosystems of Wyoming's arid-lands.

Thanks to one of the West's remarkable characters, Secretary of Interior Albert Fall, Teapot Dome escaped from the anonymity of its surroundings and became a famous name. Allowing a private company to develop the naval oil reserves there, Fall had gone outside the boundaries of existing law.

As a result, he lodged on the historical record as one of the first members of a presidential cabinet to serve a jail term, convicted of bribery and heavily fined.

"In appearance, Fall resembled Buffalo Bill, or perhaps a grim Mark Twain," his biographer David H. Stratton wrote. UnlikeTwain, Fall soon found ways to harmonize his business ambitions and his principles. As a rancher and large landowner in New Mexico, Fall sometimes referred to the territory as "corporation country," and he meant that in the most positive way.

Fall did not have to struggle with torn loyalties when he became a federal employee. He had always hated governmental regulation of business, and becoming Secretary of the Interior did not require him to rethink his opinions.

"I have long believed," Fall said in 1918, that laws "should protect ... capital and should be so enforced as to offer an inducement for its investment."

For Fall, the opportunity to hold national office added up to a neat reversal of the phrase John F. Kennedy would later offer to citizens: "Ask not what you can do for your country." Fall's practices could be summed up as, "Ask what your country can do for you. Ask your country for plenty, and don't take ‘no' for an answer!"

In giving business the advantage of governmental "inducements," Fall acted as a man of a certain faith. The core of his faith was simple: Since nature's resources were unending, there was no need for humanity to restrain its ambitions and desires.

"All natural resources should be made as easy of access as possible to the present generation," Fall declared. "Man cannot exhaust the resources of nature and never will."

That last sentence was not itself grounds for imprisonment. Under the First Amendment, it is any citizen's right to make statements of doubtful factual accuracy and even of outright fantasy. But the sentence was an indication that Albert Fall's mind was missing some key working parts when it came to realistic assessment of the planet's resources.

In the 1880s, alarm over the depletion of the nation's forests had provoked a number of advocates into warning of a "timber famine." By Fall's heyday in the 1910s and early 1920s, various experts had expressed concern about the limits of the domestic supply of fossil fuels. In hindsight, those predictions were unnecessarily alarmist. And yet, even if their timing was off by decades, the prophecies of doom have proven quite a bit more accurate than Fall's faith in infinite resources.

And yet these early predictions of scarcity and depletion produced an unfortunate cynicism among the American public. Neither oil nor coal "ran out"; new discoveries restored optimism and mocked caution. After any number of false alarms, Americans understandably developed a kind of "immunity" to warnings.

A public official like Albert Fall could declare that natural resources were inexhaustible, and many Americans would willingly believe him. If such predictions were accurate, the American consumer's tolerance for waste and desire for material comfort were entirely justified and reasonable.

Yet a number of his contemporaries challenged Fall even before the scandal hit. The "New Republic" labeled his appointment as Secretary "unspeakably bad." "Sunset" magazine declared that Fall found "wise conservation of natural resources . . . hateful to his every instinct."

These were not statements of approval.

Brushing off his critics, Albert Fall stuck to his own "environmental ethic," and followed it with zeal and with the support of comrades.

The immediate response to the Teapot Dome scandal looked like a victory for honest government: Wrongdoing was exposed, and perpetrators were punished. Observers at the time might even have expected the scandal to have a lasting impact, installing a healthy doubt in the minds of American citizens, causing them to raise a critical eyebrow the next time someone promised them a never-ending feast of resources.

And yet, years after the Fall Regime, his faith in unfettered development and unending abundance retains a surprising potency. Every time an SUV driver pulls up to a gas pump, Albert Fall gets a pardon and a vote of vindication and exoneration.

In 2002, his faith in never-ending natural resources comes reinforced by a faith in endless human ingenuity in the design of technology. In quite a striking contrast to the battered rock at Teapot Dome, the faith in endless resources resists erosion. Whatever our position on the propriety of drilling in the stark settings of Wyoming, we are light years away from reaching the high ground that would allow us to stand in judgment of our unfortunate forefather, Albert Fall.

Patricia Nelson Limerick is the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West in Boulder, Colo.