A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 811 



or by public opinion; the per-acre expenditures in this region are the 

 least anywhere. The Pacific Coast region rates between the Southern 

 and the Central region, in spite of the fact that its average per-acre 

 expenditures is exceeded only by that of the North Rocky Mountain 

 region. This is chiefly due to the fact that in a large part of the 

 Pacific Coast region protection is made difficult by a very protracted 

 dry season, and brush and grass fires are likely to spread fast and run 

 widely. 



Of the seven States comprising the south Rocky Mountain region 

 only three have entered into comparative agreements with the Federal 

 Government for the protection of any State or private lands against 

 forest fires, and of these three, two utilize in whole or in part the 

 organization maintained for protecting the national forests in lieu of 

 independent field organizations of their own. The total area of State 

 and private lands in the South Rocky Mountain region given protec- 

 tion in the years, 1926-30 exceeded 4,500,000 acres, but more than 

 96 percent of this area was protected by the national forest organiza- 

 tion. In New Mexico, which obtains an allotment of Federal cooper- 

 ative funds for protection, the actual doing of the work is made over 

 entirely to the Forest Service under a special arrangement in the 

 nature of a contract. This is because the State and private lands pro- 

 tected are either intermingled with national forest lands or so close 

 to them that a single protective system affords the most practical 

 and economical means of doing what is really aU one job. In Nevada 

 the Federal and State organizations, while mainly separate, partly 

 coalesce. In the rest of the States in this group, except South Dakota 

 (which has a field protective organization primarily to take care of the 

 Custer State Park), such protection of State and private lands as is 

 afforded by a public agency is given by the Forest Service in connec- 

 tion with national forest protection and in consequence of the fact 

 that to protect the national forests it is necessary to protect also inter- 

 mingled or adjacent lands not federally owned. To a small extent 

 the apparent relationships shown in table 5 for other western regions 

 may lack accuracy because of a similar inclusion of results of protec- 

 tion incidentally given by the national forest organization with the 

 results of protection given through State protective organizations. 



The South Rocky Mountain reg-ion affords less of an opening for 

 State forestry than the other regions because the national forests 

 include the great bulk of the productive timberlands. Also, the task 

 of protection is lighter in this region than almost anywhere else. An 

 evidence is the relatively low expenditures of the region shown on 

 page 809; incomplete data indicate an expenditure of only 9 mills 

 annually. On the other hand, New England and the Lake States spend 

 about 2 cents an acre, the Middle Atlantic States about 2.75 cents, the 

 Pacific Coast States about 3.25 cents, and the North Rocky Mountain 

 region nearly 6 cents. 



To obtain a means of setting up suitable standards of performance 

 or objectives in protection, and to provide a criterion for judging the 

 satisfactoriness of the actual performance measured against the ob- 

 jective, the Forest Service and a number of the States employ a 

 method of rating comparative protection requirements in terms of what 

 is known as " allowable burn." This is an arithmetically expressed 

 judgment of the maximum amount of injury by fire that a given type 

 of forest can be subjected to without serious impairment of the forest 



