Taming Our Forests

STARTING NEW FORESTS

It is one problem to get this perpetual harvest from a primeval wilderness, to tame a wild forest so that it will give us the greatest amount of exactly what we want year after year. It is quite another to start a new forest on land that has been cut over or burned over, or which has perhaps never grown trees at all.

If forests are to give us more houses; if wood is to replace steel where it can; if it is to furnish pulp for more paper; and cellulose for more rayon and Cellophane and plastics and movie films; and more turpentine and rosin for paints and varnishes—then we must not only use all the wood without waste, but we must have more forests to grow it.

That means that we cannot wait for the slow action of nature. We must speed her up, hurry her along, apply the spurs and induce her to break into something better than a slow walk. The forests must march out across the bare acres much faster than their natural rate, which is determined by the fact that a tree drops its seeds not much farther from its trunk than twice its height and by the fact that on cut-over land there is grass to keep them out of the ground.

Not just more trees do we want, but special sorts for special purposes. And of these, the sorts that will give us the largest crop in the shortest time with the greatest certainty. We want from our forest servants special qualities, and when we cannot find them we must develop them by the same method used to produce improved strains of plants and animals—we must breed them.

New varieties of trees can be produced by cross-breeding just as new varieties of vegetables can be. By grafting we can increase one valuable tree a million times. But we cannot wait for the tree breeders to develop the perfect tree or the nurseryman to increase the number of valuable trees by grafts before we plant more forests. We must use what we already have.

Idle acres.