A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF FORESTRY.
BY THE REV. S. W. POWELL.
In this country many people have only just begun to know that there is such a thing as forestry. Very few understand clearly that it is both a science and an art, and is one of the most important subjects which can come before the mind. For convenience we will treat it under two heads:
A, the value or benefit of forests; and
B, How shall we get the greatest benefit from them?
A. We may regard forests:
I. As yielding a vast amount of products necessary for civilized people.
II. As efficient in preventing certain evils, such as:
(a) Washing soil from hillsides;
(b) Depositing this material where it does great and lasting mischief;
(c) Droughts and floods;
(d) Harm done by drying, chilling or malarious winds;
(e) The shifting of wind-driven sands which, when not held in place by forests, often cover and ruin fertile land, and even bury fences and buildings;
(f) The undue multiplication of insects harmful to vegetation.
III. As beautifying a region and affording healthful retreats for tired and sick people.
But forestry treats not only of this use and value in the woods, but also tells us:
B. How to make them of use: that is, how to manage forest property so as to make it yield the greatest benefit in the long run, to the individual owner, to the community, and to future generations. This involves the study of a great many questions which we may classify as follows:
I. On what kinds of soil and in what situations shall we keep or plant trees?
II. What kinds of trees shall we raise in any particular place?
III. At what age, and in what way shall we cut the trees of each kind in a given region?
IV. What are the methods of marketing forest products which will secure the greatest profit?
V. How shall we protect trees from disease, from robbery, and from fires?
Few Americans have studied forests with any other design than that of getting from them the greatest possible amount of immediate profit. Scarcely anywhere has care been taken to so use them that they should continue to yield their many sided benefits to succeeding generations. Neither have they been regarded as of much use in the present except as sources of certain products, such as lumber, timber, tan-bark, charcoal, turpentine, resin, tar, wood-pulp, etc. As a rule, no consideration has been given to the effect they have upon climate, rainfall, droughts, floods, health, or the beauty and attractiveness of a region.
The first settlers cleared off, in the quickest and cheapest way, great forests of the finest trees which, if standing now, would be worth far more than the ground on which they stood can ever be worth for farming. These splendid forests of species of timber that now bring a high price—from $45 to $150 per thousand feet for the best quality—were cut down, hauled together, skidded up in piles and burned to get rid of them. And this was called improvement of that land!
They often cleared in this way steep hillsides which, after yielding two or three good crops by means of the rich vegetable mould that always accumulates under a forest, were almost worthless, even as pastures, and entirely so for tillage. As a result, in large regions so improved, springs and brooks fail in the dry season, and in a wet time floods become more and more destructive. Had these hillsides been kept as forests—that is, cut over in such a way as to ensure a new growth of equally good trees—they would have kept on affording in winter steady and remunerative employment; springs and streams would have preserved a more even and permanent flow; climate would have been more favorable for the production of all kinds of crops, and especially of fruits; men and animals would have enjoyed better health; and regions now barren, uninviting, and thinly inhabited by poverty-stricken and unambitious people would furnish a good living to large and vigorous populations, and would beside be attractive to summer visitors in search of health or recreation.
In a word, we may say that forestry—using the term as meaning the science and art of getting from the woods the greatest and most lasting benefits—has never been studied except by a very few of our people. One reason for this is that until quite recently all forest products have been abundant, and the injury to water supply, health, farming, manufacturing and navigation resulting from the destruction of the woods has only just begun to appear.
Besides, these mischievous results are not by most folks assigned to their true cause, e. g., certain parts of the lower peninsula of Michigan are far less adapted for raising wheat, corn, clover and peaches than they were before, to so great an extent, the great sheltering forests of that State were cut off.
A commission appointed in 1867 by the legislature to examine the subject, reported that for forty years the winters had been growing more severe; and that thirty years before the peach had been abundant, and the crop rarely failed, frost being unknown from May to October; but that at the time of the report it was very uncertain on account of unseasonable frosts. The further statement was made that:
“The destruction of the wheat as well as the corn crop is becoming a matter of great anxiety to our farmers in many sections, and the winter-killing of the clover in the eastern part of the State last winter, not by ‘heaving,’ but, apparently, by being frozen dead in the ground, as it appears black and rotten in the spring, may be another proof of climatic changes of great significance to the farmers and the dairymen.”
It was estimated that the damage to winter wheat by its exposure to cold, wind and sun for want of its former usual covering of snow, caused a loss of half the crop, or 5,000,000 bushels in a single year. (United States Department of Agriculture, Report on Forestry, 1877, p. 271.)
Yet, notwithstanding this evidence of the injury done by forest destruction, it aroused no such general demand for the preservation of at least shelter-belts across the tract of injurious winds that the legislature felt obliged to interfere and secure such preservation. Since 1867 the destruction of the forests of Michigan has gone on much faster than before.
Prof. B. G. Northrop, of Connecticut, who has done so much to promote the observance of “Arbor Days,” says that in visiting the regions where the floods in the Ohio river in 1883-4 did so much damage—that of 1883, it was estimated, destroyed $60,000,000 worth of property, beside a great many lives, and that of 1884, which was five feet higher, did less harm only because that of 1883 had left less property within reach—he often met, even among the sufferers, a doubt or denial that cutting away the forests on the head-waters of the Ohio had much effect in causing the floods.
Another reason for our apathy is that people get used by degrees to changes in climate, springs and streams; in the adaptedness of a region to raise fruit, vegetables, grain or stock; or in the price and quality of forest products. In all these respects, large portions of the country are already suffering great loss, but most of it has come on gradually. Of late years, however, so much has been said in the papers and magazines that floods, drought and injurious changes of climate are more generally attributed to forest destruction. But people do not seem as yet to be very uneasy about the waste and destruction of the valuable material afforded by the woods. We had so much when we received this continent from God’s hand that it never seemed as if we could suffer from lack of it. In fact, few people realize how great is the money value of what every year we draw from this bank. Most folks would be greatly surprised to learn that what we get from the woods is worth more than any other one crop. No one yield of cotton, corn, wheat or hay is worth so much in dollars and cents.
In 1880, the last census year, these products were worth the enormous sum of $700,000,000, which is one and two-fifths times the value of our breadstuffs; two and one-eighth times that of the meat we raise; two and one-half times that of all the steel and iron we make; almost three times that of the woolen, and three and one-eighth times that of the cotton goods turned out by our mills; more than three and one-half times that of the boots and shoes; four and one-half times that of the sugar and molasses; eight and one-fourth times our total outlay for public education; ten times the output of our gold and silver mines, and three times that of the entire product of coal and ores of all sorts.
Now, this immense sum is what the raw materials afforded by the forests are worth. But these raw materials are themselves the necessary foundation of a vast number of the most important industries, such as the manufacture of furniture, wagons, agricultural implements, railroad cars, pianos, organs and other musical instruments, house-building, etc., etc. It would be a useful exercise to write out a list of the trades and occupations one can think of which must have forest products, or something more costly, as their raw material. We should find that those industries which depend directly on these products include the most important ones, while every branch of manufacture and every kind of work is indirectly dependent on them. Different branches of industry are more and more interwoven with and dependent upon each other, as civilization advances. The greater the number of parts entering into a machine, the greater is the loss from the stoppage of the whole if any one breaks down. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.
Another reason for our indifference is that most things made from forest products are, as yet, cheap, because improved methods and machinery, together with sharp competition, have lessened the cost of finished articles. Men employed in getting these products out of the woods and carrying them to the consumer, are constantly devising more efficient methods of work. A modern saw mill, planing mill, sash and blind or furniture factory, is as much more efficient than anything known fifty years ago as an express train is better than a stage coach. Then, too, wherever the ground is moderately level, the narrow-gauge railroad often takes the place of the old fashioned sleds or trucks drawn by teams. This makes loggers independent of high water for floating their logs. A train of twenty-five cars, containing 40,000 feet of logs, is on the average loaded in seventy-five and unloaded in nine minutes, and the train will run, one day with another, 160 miles. By this means much timber is now reached that grows so far from streams that it would not have paid to carry it to the mills by the old methods. A dollar or a day’s work will, by means of these contrivances, accomplish so much more now than it used to, that under the pressure of competition, most of the finished articles made of wood in whole or in part, are sold cheaper than formerly. But really good lumber and timber in the tree or log is very much dearer, and this because our enormous consumption is exhausting the stock. But since people in general are impressed by what a finished article costs when they buy it, we are not likely to be goaded into the necessary measures by feeling the lack of forest products until the greater part of our woods have been used up. Nothing but agitation and educational work, such as that done by “Arbor Days,” will arouse us in time to prevent the destruction of our forests.
Before leaving this part of our subject, which has to do with the value of the forests as sources of valuable products, it may be well to say a word about the important matter of forest fires. All experts agree that they consume at least as much as the axe and saw, and that is not less than $300,000,000 worth a year, which is about $5.00 for every man, woman and child in the country. But the indirect damage they do by preventing the proper care of old, and the planting of new woodland, will, quite possibly, prove greater than that which they do by destroying what we already have. The most profitable tree culture is that which produces mature and good timber, because it always will command a high price; while there is now, and probably for a long time there will be, a large supply of, and a low price for, immature and cheap timber. But to raise mature trees, we must wait longer for the profit on the time and money expended. Most of our hasty people want quick returns, and if anything makes the long investment risky, these two objections—delay and risk—will weigh more than any arguments that can be put into the other side of the scale, and it is so hard with our present laws and habits to keep fires out of the woods, that it makes it hazardous to spend time and labor in keeping and caring for trees long enough to get the best timber from them, and therefore few undertake it.
II. But we were to give a glance at the usefulness of forests as preventing certain evils. Taking these up in the order named, we come first to (a) The washing of the soil from hillsides. It was estimated by the exact and cautious George P. Marsh (“Earth as Modified by Human Action”—a book that no one can afford not to read—pp. 282-3), that during the last two thousand years there has been washed away from the portion of Italy drained by the river Po, enough soil to raise the entire surface forty-five feet! Had the woods been left on the steep hillsides as they should have been, most of this havoc would never have occurred. For lack of that soil many districts once fertile are barren, and much of the material of which they have been robbed has been deposited where it is an almost unbearable nuisance. E. g., it has little by little raised the bottom of the Po itself, and the dykes have been built higher and higher to keep the river from flooding the plains through which in the lower part of its course it flows, so that it runs far above the surrounding country, in a sort of aqueduct. The same thing has occurred in the lower part of the Mississippi. From the deck of a steamboat, for a long distance above New Orleans, one looks down on the plantations. This elevation, of course, makes the pressure of the water and the cost of keeping up the dykes, or levees, greater every year, and when a break occurs in time of high water, of course it is more destructive, because it pours down from a higher level.
Now, were all the steep land in the Mississippi valley kept covered with trees, as it should be, this enormous amount of sediment would not come down to raise the bottom and the dykes, and to do much other harm. In time it may break through its banks and make new channels for itself, leaving important towns high and dry, and, of course, destroying much property where its new route is cut. The vast mass of vegetable mould, ashes, etc., which will be washed down into the Hudson—if the forests of the Adirondacks are ever destroyed by fire, as there is danger that they may be—by the great floods which denudation of those mountain sides will often cause, will quite possibly ruin the navigation of that river and the harbor of New York, not to speak of the destruction of farms, factories, and towns lying where those floods can reach them.
Next in our list of evils prevented by forests come Droughts and Floods (c). The annual supply of water from rain and snow, if held back by woods on steep hillsides until it can soak down to the underground sources of springs, or if stored up as in a sponge by the mass of fine roots, dead leaves, decayed wood, moss, etc., which often accumulate on the surface under old forests to the depth of two or three feet—may be made to last through a whole summer. There falls from the clouds—one year with another—only a certain amount of water in any particular region. If there is nothing on the hillsides to hinder its rush down into the streams, it is lavished like the money of a spendthrift, where it does little or no good, and very likely much harm. The difference between the two is that between feverish, riotous waste and sober plenty. “Waste not, want not,” is as good a maxim for the management of water as for that of cash.
A torrent is a stream liable to extreme and sudden increase and decrease—usually very small or quite dry in a dry time, but liable to rise suddenly to a great height, and as quickly to shrink to its former size. By the loss of its once rich forests, the Ardêche, a tributary of the Rhone, became such a torrent, its principal branch often being entirely dry. It has been known to rise sixty feet and dwindle back to almost nothing within a few days. The upper Hudson has apparently all the conditions necessary for becoming such a torrent if once its forests are exterminated. It descends some 4,000 feet in a short and steep course, from a region where there falls a great deal of rain and snow.
As the headwaters of this important river, unlike those of the Ohio, lie almost within the limits of a single state, and the control of a single legislature, great efforts have, within the last two years, been made to secure the appropriation of the great Adirondack region, which is entirely unsuited for farming, to be kept forever as a forest. It has been objected that this would cost too much, and that if such laws were enacted as would enable the State (which now holds mostly by tax title some 750,000 acres) and the permanent owners of large tracts to protect their land from fire and timber stealing, those who hold smaller lots, and do not care to keep them after cutting off the spruce and hemlock they contain, would let them pass into the possession of the State by non-payment of taxes. But a recent judicial decision renders it very doubtful whether in this way a sufficiently valid title could be secured. There are strong arguments against any effective measures. Most men who have invested money in lumbering, tanning and pulp mills, and iron works requiring charcoal, have been accustomed to carry on their work in such a way that it has made the destruction of the woods liable or almost certain to occur sooner or later; and they are not willing—indeed, they declare they are not able—to go on with their business if there is added the cost which would be involved in the changing to safer methods. They are certainly mistaken in their violent opposition to legislation which aims to protect the woods. They would, were a proper system of forestry once put in practice, find that their tracts of land would yield so much more, and so much better material, and that their losses from fires, floods, etc., would be so diminished, that in the long run they would be gainers, and at any rate the damage which would result from the denudation of those mountains would be so vast and so lasting that all the possible cost of paying these men a fair equivalent for any loss such protective measures might occasion would be a mere trifle in the comparison.
As to the value of forests in preventing damage done by drying, chilling or malarious winds (d), there can be no doubt that it is very great. It is probable that all through the region between the eastern boundary of the Indian Territory, Kansas and Nebraska, and 105° west longitude, dry winds from the south and west are very detrimental to both vegetable and animal life. If any species of trees can be made to grow there—and by doing this over areas large enough to warrant the cost of irrigation and other protective measures the undertaking might succeed where it would not if attempted on a smaller scale—it is very probable that in the line of such belts of timber other species and many crops might thrive which can not now be raised.
It is certain that everywhere in the northern prairie states a grove that breaks the force of the cold winds from the north and west adds greatly to the value of a farm. And it is gratifying to learn that so much tree planting has already been done in those states. Some have even been so sanguine as to predict that when the soft and hard timber of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota is gone these new prairie states may be able—at least partially—to supply the needs of those just named, whose forests were confidently asserted to be inexhaustible.
The effect of certain trees—indeed, of almost any—as fences against malarious winds has been carefully studied in France and Italy, and the verdict is that it is very great.
Marsh (“Earth as Modified by Human Action,” p. 159) says: “It is well known that the great swamps of Virginia and the Carolinas, in climates nearly similar to that of Italy, are healthy even to the white man, so long as the forests in and around them remain, but become very insalubrious when the woods are felled.” He quotes Jules Clavé, a French expert, as authority for the statement that “the flat and marshy district of the Sologne, in France, was salubrious till its woods were felled. It then became pestilential, but within the last few years its healthfulness has been restored by forest plantations.” Marsh also thinks that in Germany and India belts of trees have been found very beneficial in warding off cholera. A lumber journal recently asserted that cholera has never prevailed in pine-producing districts.
Lanisci says that in the time of Gregory VIII. (who came to the papal chair in 1572 and reformed the calendar) Rome became much more unhealthful when a pine forest lying to the south was cut down because infested by brigands. The abbey of Trois Fontaines, considered one of the worst places in the fever infested Roman campagna, was much improved in three years by plantations of the Eucalyptus, and this tree has been used with good effect for the same purpose in the French settlements in Algeria (Hough, U.S. Forestry Report for 1877, p. 285).
Of the service rendered by forests in preventing the drifting of sands (e) the most remarkable instance is afforded by the once dreary regions in the extreme southwestern part of France, where plantations of the maritime pine have, in the departments of the Landes and Gironde transformed over 4,000 square miles of poverty-stricken country into populous hives of an intelligent and thrifty population. In the lower part of the valley of the Wisconsin river, much loss and inconvenience is experienced by the drifting of the sand which, driven by the prevailing west winds, covers and ruins fields and gardens, and in many cases, even fences. A few belts of timber running across that valley would be worth many times their cost in preventing this nuisance.
Woods prevent the increase of noxious insects (f) in two ways: They shelter birds, nature’s great insect-police, and they stop the progress of many species, such as the grasshoppers, which scourge some of the western states, and the chinch-bug, so much dreaded by wheat growers. It is said that the latter pest never traverses a belt of thick trees as much as seven or eight rods in width. So, too, it is affirmed on apparently good authority, that winds carrying the fungus called wheat-rust deposit their baleful load if they find a forest in their track.
III. Scarcely any room remains to speak of the important service which forests render in beautifying a region. Besides preventing the disfiguring ravages of wind and water, they add a positive element of beauty. No one accustomed to the palpitating glow of autumn color in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts; or to the more subtle attractions of the shifting half-tints in which spring drapes budding trees in the same region; or to the splendor of a wooded mountain side with the diamonds of an ice-storm glittering in the sun; or to the restful coolness of a dark hemlock grove in July heat, can ever feel quite at home in a treeless region.
B. How shall we manage forest property so as to make it yield these benefits and ward off these evils? The questions arranged under our five heads have for more than a hundred years been exhaustively studied in Germany and France. Germany thinks that before a man is put in charge of the immense interests which center around her forests, he needs from ten to fourteen years of hard work and study after he has as much education as the average graduate of an American college. The science elaborated in these schools, and in the forests under the charge of their graduates, is embodied in a large, learned and rapidly growing literature. The application of these principles to any particular region must be learned upon the spot. For this purpose, one of the first things which our national and state governments should do is to establish in different parts of the country experiment stations connected with large tracts of land.
At these stations we could work out specific answers to the questions suggested under our second main division (B). It is plainly impossible in the limits of a single article to do more than give a hint of some of these practical questions. Not even the most expert German forester could give adequate answers until he had before him the results of years of experiment conducted in different parts of the country by able men. Even then such answers would fill many books.
The end aimed at in this paper has been reached, if the numerous readers of The Chautauquan get from it some distinct impression of the magnitude of the interests with which the science of forestry has to do, and of the pressing need that the American people begin at once, and in earnest, to protect, to improve, and to extend the forest estate which up to the present we have been so heedlessly wasting.