What Forestry Is
Forestry is the business, or the art, or the science, depending on the point of view from which you look at it, of handling forests for timber production or stream-flow protection. It does not, as is often mistakenly thought, have anything to do with fruit trees, or even with street and park trees. The care of these comes under horticulture and arboriculture. Forestry is distinct from either in that it has to do primarily with entire stands of trees, or forests, rather than with individuals. Forests are really nothing more nor less than tree societies, or communities, comparable in many ways with human communities, every member of which has an influence upon and in turn is influenced by its neighbors; and it is this fact that gives to forestry its distinctive character.
Forestry should also not be confused with lumbering. Lumbering has to do merely with harvesting the trees on any given area, with cutting them, transporting them to the mill, and converting them into lumber or other products. While the chief task of the forester is to manage forest lands, he has to do with the production of trees as well as with their utilization. Forestry is concerned fully as much with the future as with the present. Like agriculture it looks forward to keeping the land continuously productive by the growth of successive crops. Only in the case of forestry the crops instead of being wheat, or rye, or corn, are trees, which in turn can be converted into fuel, fence posts, telephone poles, railroad ties, wood pulp, lumber, and a host of other wood products. How much the forests mean to the economic development of a community through the crops which they produce and the employment which they offer is evidenced only too plainly by the desolation which has followed destructive lumbering in many a once prosperous forest region.
In addition to yielding crops which have a commercial value, forests in mountainous regions perform another important function which is none the less valuable because its benefits are difficult to measure in dollars and cents. By decreasing erosion and regulating stream-flow the mountain forests conserve water for domestic supplies, irrigation, power, and navigation, and at the same time help to lessen the damage caused by destructive floods. So far-reaching is this influence and so great is the population affected by it, that the treatment which such forests receive becomes a matter of vital interest to the general public. One of the primary concerns of forestry is to see that they are handled in such a way as to afford the maximum amount of protection, even if this involves, as it not infrequently does, the restriction or entire prevention of lumbering operations.