CHAPTER 7 

 WHAT FORESTRY IS 



Practical forestry means both the use and the preservation of the 

 forest. GIFFORD PINCHOT. 



THAT natural resources are inexhaustible must have been 

 one of the oldest beliefs of man. It is certainly one of the most 

 mistaken. A few a very few of life's gifts come to us without 

 labor, and serve us without diminishing, like sunlight and air. 

 Other of life's gifts were for a long time ours for the mere 

 labor of acquiring as the grass that man's early herds con- 

 sumed and the wood he used for his shelter and fires. So abun- 

 dant were these natural resources men fixed no value upon 

 them. They were nobody's property and they were everybody's 

 property. 



Naturally, so long as trees were plentiful, men gave no 

 thought toward perpetuating them. The earlier peoples had 

 looked on the woods as a free, perpetual gift of nature, like 

 the soil itself. Until very recent times the forests seemed so 

 numerous and covered such wide areas, men thought and 

 spoke of them as inexhaustible. Man used wood lavishly and 

 destroyed great forested areas with axe and fire and no one 

 thought about it. There would always be more. Trees were so 

 numerous often for the farmer and settler they were too 

 numerous. 



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