A forest in North Carolina. (U. S. G. S.)
The Economic Value of Trees. Protection and Regulation of Water Supply.—Trees form a protective covering for parts of the earth's surface. They prevent soil from being washed away, and they hold moisture in the ground. The devastation of immense areas in China and considerable damage by floods in parts of Switzerland, France, and in Pennsylvania has resulted where the forest covering has been removed. No one who has tramped through our Adirondack forest can escape noticing the differences in the condition of streams surrounded by forest and those which flow through areas from which trees have been cut. The latter streams often dry up entirely in hot weather, while the forest-shaded stream has a never failing supply of crystal water.
Working to prevent erosion after the removal of the forest in the French Alps.
Erosion at Sayre, Pennsylvania, by the Chemung River. (Photograph by W. C. Barbour.)
The city of New York owes much of its importance to its position at the mouth of a great river with a harbor large enough to float the navies of the world. This river is supplied with water largely from the Adirondack and Catskill forests. Should these forests be destroyed, it is not impossible that the frequent freshets which would follow would so fill the Hudson River with silt and débris that the ship channels in the bay, already costing the government hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to keep dredged, would become too shallow for ships. If this should occur, the greatest city in this country would soon lose its place and become of second-rate importance.
The story of how this very thing happened to the old Greek city of Poseidonia is graphically told in the following lines:—
"It was such a strange, tremendous story, that of the Greek Poseidonia, later the Roman Pæstum. Long ago those adventuring mariners from Greece had seized the fertile plain, which at that time was covered with forests of great oak and watered by two clear and shining rivers. They drove the Italian natives back into the distant hills, for the white man's burden even then included the taking of all the desirable things that were being wasted by incompetent natives, and they brought over colonists—whom the philosophers and moralists at home maligned, no doubt, in the same pleasant fashion of our own day. And the colonists cut down the oaks, and plowed the land, and built cities, and made harbors, and finally dusted their busy hands and busy souls of the grime of labor and wrought splendid temples in honor of the benign gods who had given them the possessions of the Italians and filled them with power and fatness.