A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 1469 



(e) Assistance to private owners, such as public cooperation in 

 fire prevention and in the establishment of credit agencies, so that 

 timber growing will be made more attractive to private capital. 



(/) Public regulation of private land-management as to timber 

 cutting, grazing, and control of insects, disease, and fire. 



Public action and leadership along the lines suggested should result 

 in an early and rapid change of attitude on the part of private timber- 

 land owners, which in the long run should result in widespread adop- 

 tion of intensive forestry measures on private lands. The necessity 

 for public regulation, and the stringency of regulation if it is resorted 

 to, will depend largely on the success of the other measures listed 

 above. 



SELECTION OF AREAS FOR INTENSIVE FORESTRY 



It should be a fundamental guiding principle in the formulation of 

 a forestry program for the country that it is better business practice 

 to concentrate effort on a restricted area and get eminently satis- 

 factory results than to diffuse the same effort over a large area and get 

 proportionately less satisfactory results. This is due to the fact that 

 many of the costs of forestry, such as those of administration, protec- 

 tion, and road building, either are largely independent of the pro- 

 ductivity of the land or are higher on the poorer, rougher, and rockier 

 areas than in the more favorable situations. It is more profitable to 

 concentrate activity first where yields per acre will be relatively high 

 and operating costs relatively low. 



The Wisconsin Committee on Land Use and Forestry, for example, 

 recognizes the impracticability of attempting to put all the forest 

 lands of the State under intensive management at once and instead 

 proposes to concentrate first on possibly 2 or 3 million acres and 

 develop them as highly productive forest properties. The remaining 

 area contains a large acreage of poor land, which the committee recom- 

 mends 1 should "be policed; protected from fire; kept free as possible 

 from settlement in order to obviate the building of highways, organized 

 school districts, and other local improvements." 



This committee, in distinguishing between areas that should have 

 intensive forest management now and those that merit only protec- 

 tion from fire for the present, recommends for Wisconsin that public 

 agencies ''coordinate their efforts and concentrate on selected areas, 

 and thus be able to achieve tangible, concrete results in a short time. 

 * * * As time goes on and economic conditions justify, the same 

 intensive practice may be extended to other areas within the State. 

 Six or seven million acres of intensively managed forests are worth 

 more than 16 million acres of poorly protected, wild, cut-over lands." 



Granting that intensive forestry effort should be concentrated rather 

 than diffused, it is desirable to direct such effort toward the regions, 

 forest types, and areas where it will be most effective. The problem 

 is complicated by the fact that there are both national and regional 

 or local viewpoints and that these sometimes conflict. It is impos- 

 sible, of course, to make a specific selection of all areas for intensive 

 forestry now. This will have to be worked out step by step very 



1 "Forest Land Use in Wisconsin." Report of the Comm. on Land Use and Forestry, Madison, 

 Wis., April 1932. 



