226 



GARDENERS' CHROMCLE 



On Forest Conservation and Its Relation to 



Plant Production 



GEORGE H. WIRT 



M'.' 



L Il.M l\M AX, Ladies and ( ientlemen : 1 note 

 the pni;jram that you have very graciously 

 j^iven me the honor of rci)resenting- the great 

 (lovernor of a great Conimonweahh. I need not tell you 

 that Mr. Pinchot is interested in your organization, be- 

 cause I see by the list of sustaining members that his 

 nanie is in the F'ennsylvania list. Anyone who has been 

 in touch with work of your kind and any other kind of 

 work that has to do with the conservation of natural re- 

 sources knows where Mr. Pinchot stands on the jiropo- 

 sition. He is with )0U not only in Penns3lvania but in 

 the \ation, and I feel it a great honor to be able to come 

 here to Pittsburgh to be with you people, not merely 

 because it has been placed upon the program that I 

 represent Mr. Pinchot, but from a personal standpoint. 

 to be able to talk to you a few minutes about niv own 

 cho.sen work. 



So I tell you, as representing the Comnmnweallh of 

 Pennsylvania, that we welcome you who come from other 

 states into a Commonwealth where we have been proud 

 to say we have the garden spot of the world. But also, 

 as one of the previous speakers has said, we have in 

 Pennsylvania places that are equal to the Sahara Desert 

 for barrenness. It may or may not be of interest to 

 you to know that Pennsylvania has probably close to 

 three million acres of waste land that at one time was 

 cleared for farms and gardens and today is abandoned. 



1 find in the educational work over the -State — and it 

 is a mighty difficult proposition — that in order to create 

 any enthusiasm in forest ])rotection we have got to find 

 some point of contact between the forest and the people 

 with whom you are talking and dealing. Now where do 

 you touch the forest and where does the forest touch you 

 and vour interests? 



Well, Iriini m\- knowledge — I will say limited knowl- 

 edge of pl.ant life, 1 know that one of the most essential 

 factors in the success of plant production is moisture, 

 that moisture must be available either in the soil or in 

 the atmosphere and usually it must be in both in sufficient 

 (|uantities, else you are stumped, that is all there is to 

 it, and your efforts have been in vain. 



The water table, we are told, in Pennsylvania has 

 dropped on an average of twenty-seven feet from what it 

 was fifty years ago. Do you realize, men, what that 

 means to the agricultural interests of this Commonwealth? 

 St<!p to think about it. Has that anything to do with ex- 

 plaining why we have three million acres of waste farm 

 land in Pennsylvania? 



Tie up with that fact the fact that the deforesting of 

 this state has been accomplished practically within the last 

 fifty years, and there isn't any question to the fact that 

 the forests on the hillsides of Pennsylvania and the forests 

 on the hillsides of your state, wherever you are from, are 

 nothing more nor less than God's reservoir for the main- 

 tenance and constant supply of the general water table 

 of the Commonwealth. 



Now the matter of moisture in the atmosphere. You 

 ])eople know that all plants transpire moisture. They give 

 moisture off through their leaves and foliage and stems 

 and so on. The whole plant body to a large extent is 

 giving off moisture. The forest gives off tremendous 

 quantities of moisture, but when there is no forest that 

 moisture is not taken from the soil and given back into 

 the atmosphere to come down over your gardens and 

 over your farms supplying your crops with moisture, but 

 instead of that the winds that come across our denuded 

 mountains and hilltops come with moisture taken out of 

 them and when thiw strike vour gardens and strike vour 



J?'W-J ,W]7T«l»»TW«i 



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