Bad Business; Your Business 



479 



quickly a fire line or furrow a barrier 

 strip around the fire. 



The application of systematic plan- 

 ning and scientific methods, described 

 in succeeding articles, is reflected in the 

 records for the national forests. The 

 annual area burned has decreased from 

 more than 5 million acres in 1910 and 

 2/2 million acres in 1919 to a level of 

 a million acres in the equally bad fire 

 years of 1926 and 1929. Then, follow- 

 ing the organization of the Civilian 

 Conservation Corps, the burn resulting 

 from the extreme drought years of 1931 

 and 1934 was held to half that amount. 

 In 1947 the burn on the national forests 

 was recorded at 475,000 acres, only 

 slightly below those years, but with an 

 average since 1935 of less than 300,000 

 acres. Of significance too is size of the 

 area burned by each fire. Before 1930, 

 the average was more than 100 acres; 

 between 1931 and 1940, it dropped to 

 about 40 acres; since 1940, the average 

 has been 31 acres. 



Such results would have been re- 

 garded as highly successful and satis- 

 factory as late as 1930. But needs and 

 values have been changing rapidly ; the 

 commercial value of the national forest 

 properties and the income they pro- 



duce has more than doubled since 1930. 

 The public importance of adequate 

 protection of all forests from fire has 

 increased similarly. No longer can even 

 a destructive 5,000-acre forest fire 

 (which would be far too small to be 

 recalled in the forest history of 20 

 years ago) be regarded as anything 

 short of a disaster. 



In short, no longer have we any 

 place in America where a big forest 

 fire is not immediately destructive of 

 some more of the wealth on which this 

 country has been built. 



A. A. BROWN, a Kansan, was gradu- 

 ated in forestry from the University of 

 Michigan. He entered the Forest Serv- 

 ice in 1922 in Montana as a forest as- 

 sistant. He later served on the Coeur 

 d'Alene National Forest in Idaho, and 

 as assistant forest supervisor on the 

 Helena and Jefferson National Forests 

 in Montana. In 1935 he was placed in 

 charge of a forest fire-control planning 

 project for all the California forests and 

 in 1937 was made chief of fire control 

 in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South 

 Dakota, and Wyoming. He was made 

 chief of the Division of Fire Control in 

 Washington in 1947. 



BAD BUSINESS; YOUR BUSINESS 



R. F. HAMMATT 



On suitable areas and under well- 

 planned use and control programs, 

 fire may be a good tool in sound, long- 

 term management of land and re- 

 sources. H. H. Chapman, professor 

 emeritus of the Yale University School 

 of Forestry, declared that the proper 

 use of fire, and not complete fire pre- 

 vention, is the only solution of the prob- 

 lem of future forestry in the South. 

 R. Merton Love and Burle J. Jones, of 

 the California Agricultural Experi- 

 ment Station, say that if governed 

 burning is followed by revegetation 

 and controlled grazing, some Califor- 

 nia brushlands can be converted into 



grasslands that produce more meat, 

 hides, and wool. 



But those statements do not hold for 

 wildfires. Wildfires are bad, a scourge 

 to man and beast. 



Consider what happened in Maine, 

 for instance: In four fateful days in 

 the fall of 1947 some 50 small wildfires, 

 fanned by strong winds, seared a quar- 

 ter of a million acres and took 16 lives. 



Another instance: In the decade 

 that ended in 1940, more than 2,100,- 

 000 wildfires swept forests and fields 

 in the United States. That was at the 

 rate of 575 each day. Those fires black- 

 ened an area more than seven times 



