Forest Service Circular No. 35 Forest Preservation and National Prosperity

FORESTS AS PUBLIC BENEFACTORS.

His Excellency J. J. JUSSERAND,
The Ambassador of France.

The forest has one singular and providential advantage over most of the earth-produced elements of our industries. When we have exhausted an iron mine, a gold mine, an oil well, a supply of natural gas, when the oil has been carried in immense pipes from Chicago to New York, and from thence to our private lamps, it is finished. We can consume the thing, we can not make it. Not so with the forests. It is in our hands to improve or impair them, to kill them or make them live.

*** In France our forests,^a like all the other inhabitants of the land, have their own code of laws. Since the early times several laws have been passed, all of them to fortify and to improve practically the dispositions of the code of 1827. One of them is the law of 1860, which provides that every landowner who possesses mountain slopes is obliged, whether he wills or not, to reforest them if denuded. In 1882 a new law, perhaps a little less stringent, but more practical, was enacted. According to this law, which is still in force, the Government has the right to serve an injunction on any owner of mountains who has not reforested them. The owner has the right to refuse, and in that case the Government expends a fair sum of money and plants the trees for the good of the community. The results have been very happy. In every part where these rules have been applied it is noted that the temperature is more equal, that the water supplies from springs have been more regular, and the torrents less destructive.

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^aThe French forests cover an area of 23,517,485 acres, or nearly 18 per cent, of the total land surface. The net annual yield is approximately $2.50 per acre, or, in all, about $58,793,712.

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* * * In the same mariner another great mischief was being done along the coast of the ocean. For years and for centuries the sand encroached upon the land. Part of it was becoming a desert, and as the years went on the sand invaded the country more and more; it was like a death powder covering the land. Exactly a century ago we thought a stop should be put to it, and we thought of that great friend of man, the forest, and the forest did not fail us. Trees now cover all that sand country, and it has become one of the most useful in France. And now villages and towns have grown where before there was nothing.

AUBREY WHITE,
Commissioner of Crown Lands, Province of Ontario, Canada.

So far as the Province of Ontario is concerned, we derive our principal revenues from the sales of pine timber, there being no state tax. We do not pay one five-cent piece for state purposes. Our great revenue comes from two sources; one, a grant by the federal government, and the other, the proceeds of the sale of our timber. This last year we derived from timber alone $2,800,000. When we want to dispose of our timber we survey it into blocks, or "berths," as we call them, and invite people to come and bid for them. We sold 1 square mile at our last sale and got $36,500 for it. So we have a very valuable asset and are taking care of it—we are not giving it away.