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Canadian Forestry Journal, November, 1919 



timber for the market and must do so at a profit. 

 But the axe of the forest engineer is a dis- 

 criminating axe. While it cuts for to-day's 

 market, it also establishes the pattern of the 

 future forest. It looks out for the forest while 

 looking out for logs. A cutting system that re- 

 cognizes 1919 as the end of all Time is one 

 thing; a system that takes 1919 as one mile- 

 stone in a couple of centuries is quite another. 

 The latter is, theoretically at least, the lode star 

 of Forestry, and in all the older and efficient 

 nations of Europe it is the very essence of public 

 policy and practice. The forester and the lum- 

 berman in Canada are natural and inevitable 

 partners. All lumbermen sooner or later, the 

 world over, couple up their business to scien- 

 tific forestry, and for good commercial reasons 

 they do so only through the infiuence of com- 

 pulsory state ordinances. It is so in France, 

 Switzerland, Germany, Sweden and Norway. 

 It is so on the 188,000,000 of the United States 

 National Forests. In every country or case 

 mentioned, commercial lumbering is held in 

 leash by scientific forestry standards. In 

 Sweden, no private woodland owner can cut a 

 tree without permission of a district advisory 

 board, dominated by state foresters. 



THEORIES AND THEIR PROOF. 



Necessarily, the idea of any modification of 

 Canadian customs and forest exploiting jolts and 

 irritates the "practical lumberman" of an ultra- 

 conservative type. Himself often a mighty 

 theorist, he takes his bitterest objection to the 

 "theoretical training" of the forest engineer. 

 Yet the forest engineer's "theory" of spruce re- 

 production, or lack of reproduction, in Quebec, 

 has been so convincingly verified that within 

 the past two or three years fourteen Canadian 

 pulp and paper companies have engaged pro- 

 fessional foresters. The ideal amalgam is, of 

 course, the woods knowledge of the practical 

 lumberman and the training of the foreter, and 

 as a matter of fact no graduated forester is 

 recognized as a forest engineer until he has sup- 

 plemented his college training with years of 

 actual woods experience. The lumberman may 

 bear in mind, however, that the so-called 

 "theory" of the forester is the concentration of 

 centuries of lumbering experience and biological 

 lore, dominated by the idea that a forest should 

 be treated as a reproductive crop. Moreover, 

 the truly taught and qualified forester regards 

 the practise of forestry in Canada as of neces- 

 sity a compromise between his ideal and the 

 actual economic conditions with which he must 

 work. 



COMMON OBJECTS. 



Lumbermen, as far as the experience of the 

 writer goes, scout the scheme of forestry man- 

 agement only as concerns the possibilities of 

 private and patchy forestry on individual limits, 

 with its likelihood of increased production costs. 

 They go a long way with the forester, however. 

 They desire, except in special cases, accurate 

 inventories of their standing timber, close util- 

 ization, a knowledge of the rate of reproduction 

 and influences affecting it. They are willing to 

 pay for fire protection and are keen for ef- 

 ficiency at the saw mill end. This is the for- 

 sster's programme, too. When the forester goes 

 further and asks for modifications of present 

 methods of cutting timber or suggests the burn- 

 ing of dangerous accumulations of slash follow- 

 ing logging, lumbermen usually admit the de- 

 sirability of such practice but with perfectly 

 good reasoning declare it out of order except 

 as a province-wide or nation-wide enactment. 

 With no more justice may old-age pensions be 

 forced upon a single firm of soap-makers than 

 a scheme to save the national resources, by de- 

 ferring part of the log harvest, be visited upon 

 one or a dozen limit-holders. Indeed, even a 

 province-wide application of practical forest 

 conservation is a good deal complicated by the 

 fact that the market for Canadian lumber and 

 pulp and paper is not always domestically con- 

 trolled. The greater percentage of all Cana- 

 dian lumber and newsprint paper taken from 

 our woods is sent abroad under conditions of 

 extremely brisk competition from the United 

 States, Scandinavia and as regards part of the 

 timber trade in normal times, Russia as well. 



LOGS AND THE PAPER MILL. 



With the pulp and paper companies, having 

 millions of dollars of capital buried in the huge 

 unportable factories that cannot follow up the 

 retreating border of the forest as can the mul- 

 titude of saw-mills, the forest storehouse must 

 be kept accessible to the plant. Such a vital 

 consideration compels the introduction of con- 

 servative logging, compels a programme of re- 

 forestation. Most of the pulp and paper com- 

 panies in Eastern Canada recognize fully the 

 alliance between regulated logging and the 

 security of their industrial investments. In 

 fact, they, not primarily the governments, are 

 taking the initiative to revise out-of-date and 

 destructive public regulations — witness the re- 

 cent request of the Canadian Pulp and Paper 

 Association that new timber regulations should 

 be established for Quebec. 



