Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation

by Mary Huston Gregory

The first great step in conserving our forests is to stop the unnecessary wastes in use. The next step is to take measures to prevent the great destruction of our forests by fire.

Those who have never lived in a great forest region can have little idea of the extent of the damage caused by these great forest fires. The loss of life of both man and animals, the sweeping away of houses and crops, the homelessness and misery of those who have lost everything they had saved, are not to be taken into account here, but only the loss of the forests themselves.

It is estimated that the loss by fire is as great as the entire amount cut for use in the entire United States. The National Conservation Committee reports that 50,000,000 acres of woodland are burned over yearly. This probably includes all burned-over lands, in much of which the standing timber is not destroyed, but the saplings and seedlings are killed as well as the grass for grazing and for the protection of the roots. Much land is burned over in this way year after year until hope of future growth is gone, though the damage to the large trees has not been great. In one way this loss is even more serious, as it shuts off the hope of future forests, but the loss of our full-grown standing forests is grave.

In 1891 this loss amounted to 15,000,000 acres, or nearly forty thousand acres every day in the year. Since then the work of the Forest Service in fighting fires and the great clearing of the forests, has reduced this somewhat, but it still amounts to no less than 30,000 acres of our best salable timber a day. This is the really great and serious loss of the forests.

All the wood that is used goes to make our country a better place to live in, to make its people more comfortable and happy, but all that is lost by fire is a loss to all the nation in comforts for the future, and in the present it means high prices for lumber because our forests are disappearing so rapidly.

And we are letting them burn at the rate of thirty thousand acres every day! More than enough to supply all our needs. If any one could gather together in one vast pile our houses and barns, our furniture, our wagons and carriages, our farm implements, all our home conveniences, our railroad cross-ties, our trolley and telephone poles, our papers and magazines, and burn them all, the whole world would be roused by the fearfulness of the loss. But we sit idly by and see the materials of which all these things are made and must be made in the future, and with them our shade, our water-sheds, the soil of the forest-lands itself destroyed, with never a word of protest.

In a paper prepared for the National Conservation Congress, it was stated that in some years government survey parties were unable to work in the Rocky Mountains for whole seasons on account of the dense smoke, and the fires were allowed to burn till the snows of winter put them out. The writer further stated that he believed from observation that the Forest Service, by checking fires in their beginning, has in the last few years saved more timber than has been used for commercial purposes.

Private owners of large tracts should be compelled to use the same care in preventing fires that is exercised by the government. This care, and the breaking up of the forests into smaller tracts by clearing the land in alternate sections would soon reduce the fire loss so greatly as almost to save us from anxiety for the future of our timber lands.

The next great loss to the forests is from insects. When insects have bored into wood it becomes honey-combed by the canals cut by the little insects and is utterly valueless. The loss to fruit and forest trees will be taken up more fully in the chapter on insects. At present it is only necessary, in order to show how much our forests suffer in this way, to state that the yearly loss from this cause is placed at no less than $100,000,000 a year, and the loss to fruits is counted at one-fifth of the entire crop. Some slight idea of the danger to our forests will be seen by the simple statement that forty-one different species of insects infest the locust tree, eighty the elm, one hundred and five the birch, one hundred and sixty-five the pine, one hundred and seventy the hickory, one hundred and eighty-six the willow, while oak trees are attacked by over five hundred!

This is exceedingly difficult to control and can perhaps never be entirely checked. Some remedies will be suggested later, and by having smaller forests, more carefully watched, some personal care can be given to the trees. In Germany the trees are as closely watched as are other crops, and the saving in value well repays this extra care and expense.