74 



Canadian Forestry Journal, February, 1919 



THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW 



B^ Robson Black in "The Moneiar]) Times", Toronto. 



A Plea for Constructive Public Action in 



Establishing Wise Methods of 



Handling Forests. 



Of all the family of natural resources, the 

 forest is the shyest advertiser. This has been 

 damaging enough in a land where public policies 

 go to the pushful. We cannot realise the national 

 seriousness of it however, until we thoroughly 

 grasp the fact that the perpetuation of forests in 

 Ontario, for example, is primarily state business 

 and that timber conservation is more the con- 

 cern of the Niagara school teacher and the 

 Cobourg grocer than of the 'lumber baron.' 



Canada's forests owe perhaps their greatest 

 grudge to those who posed as their special 

 pleaders. "Exhaustless forest," "forest re- 

 sources scarcely scratched," have passed current 

 even in this day as intelligent patriotism and 

 what the sales-manager calls 'ginger talk.' 

 Moonbeams make insecure bracing for any Re- 

 construction platform and the moonbeams of 

 reckless estimates of Canada's tree farm have 

 been not only intrinsically foolish but have acted 

 as a standing invitation to nation-wide vandal- 

 ism. 



Happily the orater has been supplanted by 

 the bookkeeper and his adding (or rather sub- 

 tracting) machine. We know now that two- 

 thirds of the forest inheritance of Canada has 

 been swept away by fire, that in the province of 

 British Columbia, holding half the timber of all 

 Canada, more than twenty-two times as much 

 timber has been given into the maw of forest 

 conflagrations than has been used in all the 

 British Columbia mills. Through fairly precise 

 surveys we know now that when the prairie 

 provinces ask for the return of their forest re- 

 sources from Dominion control they are really 

 asking for a property which, while thickly laden 

 with excellent timber in earlier years, is now so 

 badly wrecked by fire as to cost any government 

 more than $700,000 outlay annually for fire 

 protection, with only about $500,000 coming 

 back in revenues. For long years to come, the 

 prairie province forests, growing mostly on non- 

 agricultural soils, cannot turn in a dollar of net 



revenue, but must patiently 'be nursed back to 

 productive condition. 



What of the Workmen? 



Only when a detailed survey is made of On- 

 tario forest lands will we know approximately 

 the enormous robberies of timber from the pub- 

 lic domain through the agency of forest fires. 

 White pine, our most precious Eastern wood, is 

 far along the road to exhaustion, showing a 

 progressively smaller cut from year to year. 

 This is one of the dividends of our amazing dis- 

 regard for the foundations of national wealth. 

 Here are hundreds of mills with dependent towns 

 and populations, cut off from future sustenance 

 by the suicidal thrust that severs a province from 

 its vast legacy of white pine. The destructive 

 fires continue. The old-fashioned methods of 

 cutting with no effort to secure new growth — 

 butchering without breeding — have shortened 

 the span of life of some of the largest Ont^irio 

 mills, as far as white pine is concerned, to W21 

 or at most 1925. In face of these alarming 

 facts, the first step has yet to be taken to ascer- 

 tain methods of rehabilitating the white pine on 

 areas cut over. Fortunately the carnival of 

 forest fires in Ontario has likely seen its wildest 

 days. A strongly organized Forest Service with 

 over 1000 rangers and inspectors, generous ex- 

 penditures on equipment and modern ideas of 

 management, has been brought into being during 

 the past four years. No action more creditable 

 has been done by any Canadian government in 

 such short time, and while it may cost half a 

 million dollars a year it is cheap insurance. Fire 

 protection, however, is but the first step in state 

 supervision of public-owned forests. The in- 

 terests of the province and of the lumber in- 

 dustry now call for a re-examination of present 

 "regulations" in the light of modern experience, 

 and the employment of technically trained woods 

 managers in all cutting operations on the public 

 domain. This may sound new; it is five hundred 

 years old. It may sound like a fresh dose of 



