(Excerpt from Conservation: An Address
T was with conside...)
Excerpt from Conservation: An Address
T was with considerable pleasure, and much trepidation, that I I accepted the call of the president of the Institute to address you upon the subject of conservation. Pleasure, because it would afford me an Opportunity to face again an audience of oil men and renew old acquaintances once more while perhaps presenting to them some thoughts that may be worthy of consideration; trepidation, because of my conviction that I should fall far short of doing justice to a subject which must with each succeeding year become more and more of paramount importance.
In the future, when most of the great problems of today are solved, our descendants will find before them in ever increasing importance the vital question of Conservation; and in the far distance, when the world is dying and the last human beings are eking out a miserable existence fighting for the last grains of wheat or drops of water, it is Conservation that will be uppermost in their minds.
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Mark Lawrence Requa was an American mining engineer and political leader.
Background
Mark Lawrence Requa was born on December 25, 1865 in Virginia City, Nevada, the older of two children and only son of Isaac Lawrence and Sarah Jane (Mower) Requa. His father was of Huguenot ancestry, the family having come from France late in the seventeenth century, settling eventually in Tarrytown, New York. Isaac Requa left Tarrytown for California at the time of the Gold Rush, moving afterwards to Virginia City, where he became superintendent of one of the early bonanza mines. There he met and married Requa's mother, who had come west with her family from Bangor, Maine. The Requas moved to Piedmont, California, in 1876.
Education
Mark Requa was educated by tutors and at private school and reportedly passed the entrance examinations for Yale, though eyesight trouble prevented him from going to college.
Career
In the 1880's he began work with the Central Pacific Railroad at Ogden, Utah, and between 1898 and 1906 he was president of the Eureka and Palisade Railroad. He explored for new mines in association with his father and in 1904 organized the Nevada Consolidated Copper Company.
He also built - as part of mining operations - the Nevada Northern Railway. In San Francisco he was a member of the mining engineering firm of Requa, Bradley, and Mackenzie. In 1905 Requa had become acquainted with a fellow mining engineer, Herbert Hoover. When the latter was appointed United States Food Administrator by President Wilson in 1917, Requa joined Hoover's staff.
In January 1918 he became director of the oil division of the United States Fuel Administration, a post he held for a year and a half. Impressed by the needless losses in oil production, the practical and realistic Requa secured the cooperation of the competing companies in agreements at the facilitated fulfillment of the government's wartime needs. In the early 1920's Requa devoted much time to opposing proposals that natural resources be developed by government agencies. His The Relation of Government to Industry (1925) was both an articulation of his view that the government ought to regulate - but no more than regulate - industry and agriculture in order to prevent pernicious behavior, and a demonstration of how the public might be educated to accept the view that its "own best interests demanded retention and protection of American individualism, with full reward for individual effort. "
But natural or necessary monopolies, he believed, such as great utility corporations, were not inherently individualistic, and these should receive government "supervision. " Requa had been active in California politics, particularly in opposing the candidacy of Hiram Johnson for the presidency in 1924.
Identified with the movement to make Hoover the Republican nominee in 1928, he was chairman of the California delegation to the Republican National Convention in that year. Requa held no office in the Hoover administration, but with the approval of the President, and often as his acknowledged spokesman, he carried on the campaign for conservation of resources and for the cooperation of national and state agencies.
He warned a World Engineering Congress in Tokyo in 1929 that the world would "return to a pastoral existence unless the nations stop wasting oil. " President Hoover appointed him chairman of a conference of representatives of the oil-producing states in June 1929, the purpose of which, according to the plan of the President and Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, was to diminish excessive drilling and waste of oil and natural gas without engaging the federal government in close regulatory activity, though no satisfactory results were achieved.
In 1931, as the Hoover forces consolidated their hold on the Republican party in California, Requa became the California representative on the Republican National Committee, and he served as such for six years. Although he gave much of his time to this task - in travel, in correspondence, and in conference - he found it impossible to unite the opposing factions in California and in the nation, and he came to the conclusion that the Republican National Committee under its successive chairmen was inefficient and defeatist
In later years Requa made his residence in Santa Barbara, California. He died in St. Vincent's Hospital, Los Angeles, of recurrent gastric ulcer, and was buried in Santa Barbara.
Achievements
His own contributions were most marked in urging an aggressive campaign on behalf of Hoover's reelection in 1932.
It was Requa who made a final, though unsuccessful, attempt to bring Senator William E. Borah, whom he had known for many years, to Hoover's support.
