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.