THE FOREST 185 



Today in that region there is little more than a bristle of aspen, 

 and scrub jack pine trees with a very limited commercial value. 



There is another side to this forest depletion which might 

 be called the human depletion. The lumber companies brought 

 workers into the forests to cut and saw the trees. Towns were 

 built. Roads were cut through the forests. Schools and county 

 governments were set up. The tradesmen in the towns depended 

 on the lumber workers for their money. The cost of the schools 

 and the roads and the government were paid by taxes on the 

 lumber operations. 



Now the lumber operations have ceased. The tradesmen 

 have little business. The counties have little tax revenues. In 

 many cases some of the people who had come in to work in 

 the forests stayed on when the forests had been cut off. Either 

 they could find no jobs elsewhere, or they were unable to move 

 their families to a new area, or they thought they would try 

 to farm on the cut-over land. Today, many of these people have 

 to depend on some kind of government relief. 



Trees are plants just as much as wheat and corn and cucum 

 bers are plants. However, a forest has laws of growth, decay, and 

 reproduction that are quite different from those governing farm 

 crops. These laws, like the laws of agriculture, can be studied 

 and mastered and used to make the forest a permanently living, 

 growing, economically productive unit. Reduced to very simple 

 terms, the basic law of good silviculture is to cut only the older 

 bigger trees and leave the younger to grow. Thus you always 

 have a forest producing timber, providing income, and furnish 

 ing work. 



The lumbermen, however, partly out of tradition, partly be- 

 cause they do not understand the laws of forest growth, usually 

 cut or destroy all the trees, big and little. The forest ceases to 

 exist, it yields no income, it pays no wages, it provides no taxes. 

 It becomes a desert, and leaves behind it a trail of poverty, 



