The movement for recovery of waste lands dates from the beginning of the 19th century, and to-day reforestation by state, communal and private effort encouraged by legislative acts during the last sixty years, has restored well-nigh more than 3,000,000 acres of ground which had been lost to forest production.
There are four definite regions of large extent in which systematic effort in this direction has been made, namely, the sand dunes of Gascony and the Landes of Southwestern France; the sandy plains of La Sologne; the limestone wastes of Champagne; and the mountain slopes in the Vosges and Jura-Alps.
The sand dunes on the coast of France comprise around 350,000 acres; those on the coast of Gascony in Southwest France alone have an extent of nearly 250,000 acres, these being the most important and having for a long time endangered the adjoining pastures and fields. It seems that the land occupied by dunes was originally forested, and that these were created by deforestation.
As early as 1717, successful attempts at reforestation were made by the inhabitants of La Teste, and from that time on sporadically small plantings came into existence. But the inauguration of systematic reforestation was begun only after a notable report by Brémontier, who, in 1786, secured, as chief engineer of the department of Bordeaux, a sum of $10,000 to be employed in ascertaining the possibilities of draining the Landes by means of a canal, and of fixing the dunes. As a result of this beginning, the method for their recovery having been, by 1793, experimentally determined by Brémontier, 275,000 acres of moving sand have been fixed during the last century. The revolutionary government, in 1799, created a Commission of Dunes, of which Brémontier was made president, and annual appropriation of $10,000 was made, later (in 1808) increased to $15,000. In 1817, the work was transferred to the Administration des Ponts et Chaussées. The appropriations were increased until, in 1854, they reached $100,000 a year, and in 1865, the work being nearly finished, the dunes were handed over to the forest administration. There being still about 20,000 acres to be recovered, this was achieved in 1865, when 200,000 acres had been reforested at an expense of about $2,000,000, and an additional expense of $700,000 to organize the newly formed pine forests—Pinus maritima was entirely used. These, at present, with their resinous products and wood are furnishing valuable material. An unfortunate policy of ceding some of these forest areas to private and communal owners, who claimed them as of ancient right, and also of sales was inaugurated just as the planting was finished, so that at present only 125,000 acres remain in the hands of the state. The returns from the sales, however, reimbursed the cost of the reboisement in excess by $140,000, so that the state really acquired for nothing, a property, now estimated to be worth $10,000,000.
A similar plantation on moving sands, of 35,000 acres, is found north of this tract.
To the eastward of this region of dunes stretch the so-called Landes, a territory triangular in shape, containing 2,000,000 acres of shifting sands and marshes, on which a poor population of shepherds (on stilts) used to eke out a living. In 1873, Chambrelent, an engineer of the administration of bridges and roads (administration des ponts et chaussées), conceived the idea of improving this section by reforestation, and at his own expense recovered some 1,200 acres in the worst marsh by ditching and planting. The success of this plantation invited imitators, and, by 1855, the reforested area had grown to 50,000 acres. This led, in 1857, to the passage of a law ordering forestation of the parts of the land owned by the state as well as by the communities, the state at the same time undertaking the expense of building a system of roads and making the plans for forestation free of charge. The communities were allowed to sell a part of the reclaimed land in order to recover the expense, and sold some 470,000 acres for 2.7 million dollars, of which less than $300,000 were used to forest the 250,000 acres belonging to them. From 1850 to 1892, private owners imitating the government and communal work, altogether nearly 1,750,000 acres were covered with pine forest at a cost of $4.00 to $5.00 per acre, or, including the building of roads, for a total expenditure of around $10,000,000. In 1877, the value of the then recovered area was estimated at over $40,000,000, this figure being arrived at by calculating the possible net revenues of a pinery under a 75 years rotation, which was figured at $2.50 per acre, with a production of 51 cubic feet per acre and 200 quarts of resin (at $3). An estimate of recent date places the value of the recovered area at $100,000,000.
Centrally located between the valleys of the Loire and the Cher, near Orleans, lies the region of La Sologne, a sandy, poorly drained plain upon an impenetrable calcareous sub-soil giving rise to stagnant waters; this region too had been originally densely wooded, and was described as a paradise in early times; but from the beginning of the 17th century to the end of the 18th it was deforested, making it an unhealthy, useless waste. By 1787, 1,250,000 acres of this territory had become absolutely abandoned.