FORESTRY AS A VOCATION 



BY H. H. CHAPMAN 



WITH the return of nearly two million young men 

 from the trenches and the varied activities of 

 military life in France, comes a heightened inter- 

 est in forms of outdoor employment. The appeal of 

 forestry as a vocation has always drawn a class of young 

 Americans whose love of the woods and of the hardships 

 of the trail is combined with a desire for public service 

 for scientific achievement, and for clean, practical efTort. 



Probably no profession holds a greater lure for those 

 who rebel against the confinement of indoor occupations 

 and have a genuine love for the woods and mountains, 

 yet no calling is so little understood in America today as 

 this modern vocation of forestry. 



Forestry is the art of maintaining forests for the 

 benefit of mankind. It is, first and foremost, a land 

 question, for forests are the product of forest soils. 

 Since forests as such must occupy land to the exclusion 

 of agricultural crops or of fruit trees, forestry is based 

 on the proper segregation of lands into the two funda- 

 mental classes, agricultural lands and forest lands. The 

 forester's vocation usually excludes agriculture, but he 

 is frequently called on, in co-operation with agricultural 

 and soil experts, to conduct these land classifications. 

 For this reason, a knowledge of farming is of great value 

 to the forester. 



The status of the land once determined, the forester's 

 object is so to manage these forest areas that the greatest 

 possible sum or combination of benefits may accrue to 

 the communities dependent on them. These benefits are 

 threefold. First, may be mentioned the use of the forest 

 for recreation. This use has the widest appeal to senti- 

 ment, and is invaluable for maintaining health of body 

 •and mind for our increasing population of city dwellers. 

 Areas set aside exclusively for this use are known not 

 as "forests" but as parks, and while the forester as such 

 can perform invaluable services in protecting the forest 

 from fire, insects, diseases, and other enemies, he cannot 

 here bring into play the full exercise of his abilities, for 

 this includes the cutting and utilization of timber which 

 is usually prohibited on such areas. The care and pres- 

 ervation of game, a specialty in which the forester is 

 profoundly interested, will find its fullest development 

 on large park areas. 



The second great benefit from forest areas is the pro- 

 tection they afiford to our soils and water supplies. Per- 

 haps this is the best-known and best-understood function 

 of a forest cover. In maintaining the flow of springs, in 

 preventing the erosion of surface and the silting up of 

 rivers, in reducing floods and prolonging the flow of 

 streams in dry periods, the maintenance of forest cover 

 IS essential. Here, again, the forester's function is the 

 protection of existing forests. But both in parks and 

 protection forests there is the frequent necessity of re- 

 establishing by artificial means the forest cover on slopes 

 denuded by fire or by destructive lumbering. In this 



latter role the forester must be a tree planter and must 

 get his results, not as the ornamental nurseryman does, 

 by pampering the individual plant, but on a large scale, 

 with small stock, at minimum expense, and in competi- 

 tion with such destructive forces of nature as drought, 

 wind, insect pests, rodents, frost, snow, and grazing 

 animals. 



But the real art of the forester lies in the management 

 of the forest for the continuous production of wood in 

 all its forms. Wood must serve us in many capacities, 

 such as for fuel, buildings, furniture, paper, vehicles, 

 and so on in an ever-widening circle. It cannot do so 

 unless trees are cut, logged, transported, manufactured, 

 and laid in a finished form at the door of the consumer. 

 The cutting down of mature forests is necessary to the 

 comfort and well-being of the very individual who de- 

 claims against this destruction because of his sentimental 

 regard for the forest in its natural state. The lumber- 

 man has built up an enormous business whose exclusive 

 concern is to supply the economic demand for wood 

 products by taking from the forest the raw prod- 

 uct of nature, the mature tree, and converting it into 

 lumber from which by other processes finished products 

 are made. It is not the business of the lumberman, as 

 such, to do more than this. And as long as the supply of 

 virgin timber holds out in America, the lumberman will 

 continue to draw upon it as if it were inexhaustible. His 

 business begins with the felling of the tree ; the forester's 

 business, as such, sees its completion in the same process. 

 Forestry precedes and underlies the lumbering of the 

 future. The true business of the forester is to grow 

 the timber which ultimately finds its way into the eco- 

 nomic life of the nation. Just as one agricultural crop 

 must be harvested before another is grown, so a mature 

 crop of trees must be cut before a young, vigorous second 

 growth can appear. The forester's art is so to cut this 

 timber that the forest will reproduce the most valuable 

 species. Only by accident does this result occur naturally, 

 following the operations of modern logging, and it never 

 happens more than once on the same site. The worthless 

 brush and forest weeds which spring up so frequently on 

 old cuttings have about as much resemblance to com- 

 mercial forests as thistles have to wheat. They are 

 both green in season ! Not that the lumberman can not 

 manage his lands as forests should be managed if he sets 

 out to do so, but that he too often has no interest in the 

 land itself except to get rid of it as soon as the mature 

 tmnber is cut. He owns it in order to assure to his 

 business an early supply of raw material, wood. 



The forester, then, is one who manages forest land for 

 the purpose of growing trees and maintaining the pro- 

 ductivity of the soil and of the forest. Do lumbermen 

 employ foresters? They have need of timber cruisers to 

 estimate the volume of their merchantable timber, of 

 logging engineers to lay out their railroads and logging 



