246 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



THE FOREST PROBLEM IN NEW YORK. 



(A talk.). 



Mr. O. C. Gregg : I am interested in this question from the side 

 the chairman suggested, and that is, growing forests rather than 

 preserving them. Last winter I got an impression that did me a great 

 deal of good. I spent a number of weeks in the state of New York, 

 and I learned that their preservation which I had been reading about 

 for some time was not what I thought it was, and there is a wide 

 difference between what you read about a thing and seeing it for 

 yourself. It had been forty years since I had seen New York. I 

 lived there just before I came west, and oh, the change! I told 

 some of my friends it looked just as though they had tried to make 

 New York baldheaded. From the top of some of those hills I could 

 see the rolling country for miles around, and, I say to you frankly, 

 it did not appear to me as though there were any more groves in 

 New York than we would find in the western states today. I ob- 

 served one thing, that sometimes a generation of people will do very 

 foolish things because they do not know what is coming. I looked 

 at those denuded hills with the rocks cropping out and the land bare. 

 I could understand that they thought they must remove all the trees 

 to get pasture land. Imagine what we would think of a hill pasture 

 like that. But they had done in their day and generation what they 

 thought they ought to do. They were doing the most foolish thing 

 they could do. .They could grow enough on an acre of rich river bot- 

 tom to more than offset what they could grow on thirty acres of hill- 

 side. 



One of the greatest things for the American people to do is to 

 form the thinking habit, the studying habit, the observing habit. You 

 present a fact like that before men, and, like a steer in a pen, they 

 will shake their heads. When I was traveling I generally tried to 

 sit beside the driver because I liked to ask him questions. As we 

 crossed a little stream I said to him, "How about this stream; does 

 the water run down here in the summer?" I knew all about that 

 country, and I knew that little stream flowed freely through the 

 whole year when I was a boy. The driver told me it did not run in 

 the summer, it was as dry as the road. Talk about paper mills. I 

 am glad Mr. Owen found a man who was cutting forests with some 

 little sense. Down in the eastern states they are taking everything 

 for the paper mills. They grind all the wood on the steep slopes up 

 into paper. Nothing is left. I took one man to task about devastat- 

 ing the forests. "Well," he said, "Mr. Gregg, business is business ; 

 we have got to get some money out of this." There was a remark 

 made this afternoon which brings out the matter clearly. It is the 

 battle ground between the greed of one man and the public to live. 



