TREES AND CIVILISATION 191 



get the wood out of the forest in the cheapest way 

 possible. The ground is left littered with twigs 

 and small branches, a veritable fire trap for the 

 first locomotive's spark or the first camp fire 

 ashes. The inevitable conflagrations reduce the most 

 luxuriant woods to desolate wastes. Even the soil 

 of vegetable mould is often burned. In some lum- 

 bering regions, there is very little left to be con- 

 sumed. In cutting for the pulp mills, everything, 

 young and old, large and small, down to six inches 

 is taken. .When the fires get through nothing much 

 more than the naked rock is left. There are many 

 such sections in which it will be impossible to re- 

 establish a natural stand of timber in less than 

 one hundred years. When the trees do come, they 

 are liable to be inferior specimens because of the 

 deteriorated condition of the soil. 



Such large scale tree-murder is not only appal- 

 ling to the esthetic sense, but economic suicide as 

 well. If it were a necessary evil, we might be jus- 

 tified in shrugging our shoulders and resigning 

 ourselves to the inevitable. But deforestation for 

 a country like the United States is no more neces- 

 sary than a famine in foodstuffs. The whole rem- 

 edy lies in an idea. People are too prone to look 

 upon the woodlands as a definite fixed amount of 

 natural wealth in exactly the same way as they 



