FOKEST TREES. 291 



PREVENTION AND CONTROL OF FOREST FIRES. 

 Walter J. Morrill, Professor of Forestry of Nebraska University. 



ENORMOUS LOSSES. 



Forest fires during the past fifty years have destroyed, directly and 

 indirectly, probably more timber than has been manufactured. In spite of 

 this drain, our natural supplies of timber have been sufficient up to 

 the present time to provide cheap lumber, a potent factor in the great 

 industrial development of this country. Within a decade or two, how- 

 ever, the rapidly diminishing stands of virgin timber will make cheap 

 lumber only a recollection. If enormous forest fire loss were unadvoid- 

 able, we would be justified in philosophically accepting the inevitable. 

 But they are largely preventable, as the experience of some European 

 countries has demonstrated, and as we ourselves are proving in some 

 portions of the United States. 



Does the public everywhere thoroughly comprehend the magnitude 

 of these losses, not only the direct ones, but also those indirectly 

 attributable to forest fires. It is inconceivable that the American peo- 

 ple, with all their boasted business acumen, with their well-tested pa- 

 triotism, with their keen love for the unspoiled out-of-doors, will 

 apathetically permit this creeping paralysis of forest destruction to con- 

 tinue unchecked. 



Let us take down the ledger of our natural resources and turn to the 

 losses by forest fires. The figures are necessarily inaccurate, but they 

 probably do not exaggerate. We find that the average annual loss of 

 human lives during the past half century has not been less than 70. 

 Below that entry we read that it is estimated that the value of the 

 timber annually destroyed has amounted, as an average, to $25,000,000. 

 Next there is recorded that the value of the young growth which, if 

 spared, would have grown into commercial timber, has averaged 

 possibly $70,000,000. It is stated that not less than 32 billion feet of 

 lumber, valued on the stump conservatively at $64,000,000, might have 

 been produced annually on non-agricultural lands now unproductive be- 

 cause of fires; this amount of timber would supply three-fourths of our 

 present demand. 



Another entry informs us that since, as an average, 10 million acres 

 are burned over annually; the consequent deterioration in soil fertility 

 to our natural resources is a distinct loss for which no figures are 

 available. 



The debit column also contains the strong assertion that especially 

 in the South forest fires, more than any other factor, are responsible 

 for the ever-increasing areas that are being eroded by soil-washing, thus 

 rendering in the aggregate great areas permanently as unproductive as 

 if they were sunk into the bottom of the ocean. The detritus is being 

 washed into the streams, thereby elevating the stream beds. This will 

 surely eventually result, if not already operative to an appreciable extent, 

 in rendering floods more destructive than formerly. Indeed, recent com- 



