A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 803 



AID THROUGH FOREST PROTECTION 

 PROTECTION AGAINST FIRE 



Organized and successful protection of forests against fire is a sine 

 qua non of timber growing and forest perpetuation. It is often essen- 

 tial for maintaining a timber cover of any kind; it is always and doubly 

 essential to planned forest management. So long as the danger that 

 forest fires will sweep unchecked across wide stretches of country 

 looms large, permanent investments in timber production are almost 

 sure to come to grief, at least for large landowners. Lack of protec- 

 tion, rather than lumbering, has created out of former timber lands 

 most of our near hopelessly bankrupt no-man's land. 



Lumbering may work havoc with the forest. It may leave the 

 cut-over area in a condition from which its restoration to satisfactory 

 productiveness will be too slow and costly a process to interest the 

 private owner. By and large, however, the logging operations them- 

 selves do not so impair or destroy the fertility of the soil that the 

 capacity to produce further crops of valuable timber is lost for many 

 years. Nor do logging operations of themselves ordinarily lay the 

 land bare of all forest growth. 



Protection a means oj lessening land abandonment. Even where land 

 seems to have been denuded, with protection some kind of a forest 

 cover will as a rule gradually creep back. The return may be very 

 slow, and the new stand may be of very inferior composition and qual- 

 ity, but from one source or another nature finds means to begin a 

 regenerating process. Conversely, where repeated fires are allowed 

 to run uncontrolled, a process of forest degeneration is at work even 

 though the forest itself is left in place. The soil is impoverished, the 

 vigor, rate of growth, and density of the stand are decreased, usually 

 its composition is changed for the worse, and the quality of the 

 timber is impaired. Adequate protection not only arrests the 

 enlargement of the denuded area and permits the establishment 

 on cutover lands of a new crop of timber but also gives many of 

 the old burns a chance to regenerate gradually and stops the decline 

 in quality and value of already established forests. This tends to 

 keep the land in private ownership. 



Very few States wish to enter on policies of extensive forest owner- 

 ship and administration, if it can be avoided. Relatively few are 

 prepared to meet the immediate costs. Whether or not State-operated 

 enterprises of forest management will eventually become sources of net 

 income, most States are not easily able to make the outlay necessary 

 to acquire, block up, put under administration, and develop to an 

 income-producing stage large tracts of lands now in private owner- 

 ship ; nor are they desirous of going into the business of timber growing 

 unnecessarily. Outside of a small number of States in the Northeast, 

 and another small number of western States which are holding large 

 areas of granted forest lands, most policies of retention or acquisition 

 have had in view primarily what may be called park uses that is, 

 provision of outdoor recreational opportunities, protection of wild 

 life, and the safeguarding of scenic resources rather than enterprises 

 in growing and harvesting timber crops, except where the breakdown 

 of private ownership is forcing forest land upon the public on a large 

 scale. 



