WHAT FORESTRY IS 77 



severe, fuel wood is almost as much a necessity as food 

 itself. 



Not so many hundreds of years ago each nation had to de- 

 pend largely on its own timber to satisfy the ordinary needs of 

 its population. Today, modern transportation permits timber 

 to be marketed at great distances from its source. Wood has 

 developed long legs. China obtains large amounts of timber 

 from North America and South Africa gets much of hers 

 from northern Europe. But in the long run it is the best 

 economy for a nation to grow timber on its own soil and to 

 put to use those rough, less fertile sections where for one rea- 

 son or another agriculture is either impossible or unprofitable. 

 That in part is what the practice of forestry is doing. It is 

 making these poorer lands profitable by growing trees. 



And even aside from man's need for wood and from the part 

 that forestry plays in solving the problem of land use it seems 

 inevitable that all civilized countries must come at last to 

 manage their forest land rationally and systematically. For 

 history has taught, in lessons of varied severity, that few coun- 

 tries can afford to reduce their forests much below one-third 

 their total land area. Nations that have done this usually suffer 

 from extremes of climate, from drought and from alternate 

 periods of abnormally high and low water. 



A nation that cuts her forests without a thought to future 

 crops of wood is treating her woodlands as a mine as a source 

 of wealth capable of supplying only so much material and after 

 that to be abandoned as if it were played out and useless. But 

 it is an economic crime to treat forests so. For if forests are 

 cut properly and protected properly they need never play out. 

 On the contrary they will usually increase both in value and 



