FINANCIAL LOSS TO THE COMMUNITY DUE TO FOREST 

 LANDS BECOMING WASTES ' 



By B. a. Chandler 



Assistant Professor of Forest Utilisation, Cornell University 



When accepting the invitation to speak on this subject, I thought I 

 knew where I could get some actual figures from communities with 

 which I have worked. One man to whom I wrote has died, another 

 has failed in business and moved away, and a town clerk did not 

 answer my request. Therefore, all that I can give you is the result 

 of my own observations in some of the communities from which I 

 intended to get actual data. 



The subject as assigned calls for the "Approximate financial loss to 

 the community." We must bear in mind two truisms which we all 

 recognize while we are thinking about this subject. The first of these 

 is that much of the loss to the community, although very intimately 

 connected with and perhaps caused by the financial loss, does not per- 

 mit of direct expression in dollars and cents. The second is that the 

 loss, financial and otherwise, so varies as any one of several factors 

 change that it cannot be measured except in single concrete cases. 

 For example, in a region like Grand Isle, Vermont, where a large 

 percentage of the land is most valuable for the raising of annual farm 

 crops, the creation of a small area of waste forest soil is a negligible 

 loss. In other communities, an example of which I will describe 

 later, the loss is so great as to result in actual bankruptcy to the com- 

 munity itself and in an unmeasured burden to the larger community 

 outside. Between these two extremes are all graduations of 

 insolvency. 



Furthermore, the actual financial loss does not mean anything unless 

 we have some measure of what that loss means to that particular 

 community. Some of the New York papers, a few years ago. face- 

 tiously referred to the big fire in Bangor. Maine, as "little Bangor's 

 big fire," and failed to appreciate what that fire meant, not only to 

 Bangor, but to all the surrounding country. 



' Delivered before the New York Section of the Society of American Fores- 

 ters, at Wanakena, N. Y., July 29-31, 1919. 



31 



