244 FORESTS AND MANKIND 



if we are to insure the safety of tomorrow's forest. Here the 

 State, with her police powers and facilities for administration 

 and education, must function. 



The State has another responsibility. It must provide a just 

 method of taxing forest crops and forest land. With adequate 

 fire protection and fair taxation accomplished facts, the public 

 will be in a better position to go to the private owner and ask 

 him to clean house. 



House-cleaning will mean various things in various places. 

 It will mean brush disposal and the leaving of seed trees in 

 certain regions, clean cutting and planting in other regions, 

 and other methods of forest perpetuation somewhere else. But, 

 for every timber type it will mean provision for a future crop 

 of trees. There will be purely local problems that must be 

 solved in purely local ways and no one set of rules will apply 

 over very large areas. 



The areas already devastated with fire and axe so disas- 

 trously that nature has been unable to restock them and there 

 must be in all, between fifty and one hundred million acres of 

 these will probably have to be replanted. It is going to be a 

 difficult and expensive project that probably the Government 

 itself will have to undertake over many millions of acres. Other 

 areas that have been cut over, or burned over, or both, are pro- 

 ducing only haphazard, sparse, second growth of limited com- 

 mercial value. These must first of all receive adequate fire 

 protection and then the benefits of as intensive forest measures 

 as we can give them. 



Naturally not all of these areas can be cared for at the same 

 time. Those in danger of rapid deterioration and those nearest 

 the great centers of wood use will be the ones on which to con- 



