Taming Our Forests

IDLE ACRES

Our wasted, idle lands are appalling things to see.

Up in the Lake States, the cut-over land sweeps away to the horizon—mile after mile after mile—with nothing to break the view but the trunk of some old tree charred and black. Over these millions of acres fire has followed the lumberman, burning the young trees that had seeded when the forest was still there; burning the litter of fallen leaves and branches that protected them. Year after year, fire—till there is no seed left in the ground to sprout.

In western New York and Pennsylvania are round hills rising between valleys cut down by streams that send their water to the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Allegheny, the Ohio, and the Mississippi. Once all these hills were covered with forests of spruce and fir, pine and hemlock, maple, oak, elm, and ash. Now some of them are as bare of trees as a concrete pavement. And because the trees are gone, the soil is washing away, and along the sides of these hills rocks stand out bare and gray. There are no trees left to seed again these bleak slopes.

They Cannot Reseed.

All through the pine country of the South are patches of no man's land, where one-third of the trees have died because they have been mistreated by the turpentiners, where fire has swept through like a furnace blast to destroy the few parent trees left standing, leaving only such things as broomsedge to cover the ground. This forest cannot reseed itself.

Up above Boulder, Colo., near the spot where some of the streams flow by way of the North Platte into the Mississippi and others into the Gulf of California by way of the Colorado River, up where the air is thin and clear, are wide strips of Englemann spruce which have been felled by fire. Their great trunks lie tangled together like a handful of jackstraws dropped on the table. The winter winds eddy round above these valleys and lay down on the peaks of the "Never Summer Range" thick covers of snow. Under the sun of late May and early June there is the constant drip of snow water. It is the perfect place to grow Englemann spruce, but down in the spaces between the fallen trees is nothing but a carpet of mountain flowers—Indian paintbrush, Mertensia, fireweed—blue and red and gold. Not one single young spruce or young tree of any other sort! Not a single old spruce was left to begin seeding a new forest.

From New England to New Mexico; from Florida to Oregon; all up and down and back and forth through our country is forest land from which the trees are gone—land for which trees are the perfect crops.