170 



Canadian Forestry Journal, April, ip20. 



overlooked by those who talk boast- 

 ingly of inexhaustible forest supplies. 



Subtracting the treeless areas from 

 the total land area, we get 1.900,000 

 sqiiare miles of forested country. So 

 you see we have an enormous area of 

 tree covered land. Let us now ex- 

 amine these areas to find what they 

 will yield in terms of saw log and 

 pulpwood material. They may be 

 covered with trees, but are they cov- 

 ered with commercially valuable 

 trees? I shall answer that question 

 by saying that from one half to two 

 thirds of our forests have been des- 

 troyed by fire in the past 75 years. 

 It takes twice that length of time in 

 the average forest conditions to make 

 a spruce saw log, that is a tre:' twelve 

 inches in diameter. In other words 

 forest fires have destroyed the saw 

 logs on over 1,000.000 square miles of 

 good Canadian territory. Ninety per 

 cent, of those fires were caused by 

 sheer carelessness. We are already 

 beginning to feel the pinch of the 

 diminishing supply of accessible tim- 

 ber. You will more readily compre- 

 hend what the destruction by past 

 fires means when I say that the loss 

 is equivalent to about 450 years' 

 supply at our present rate of con- 

 sumption of four billion board feet a 

 year. Let me emphasize the point 

 in another way. All the destroyed 

 timber was on Crown land, land that 

 belongs to the people and from which 

 the people collect a tax when the tim- 

 ber is cut. The smallest tax collected 

 by any government. Dominion or 

 Provincial, is 50 cents per thousand 

 board feet. It runs from that up to 

 $2.50 per thousand feet. If we apply 

 the lowest rate to the amount of tim- 

 ber destroyed by fire, we find that 

 the public treasury has lost around 

 one thousand million dollars in po- 

 tential royalties alone. 



I am bearing down hard on the 

 significance of forest devastation by 

 fire because, although I have spoken 

 of it in the past tense, it is not in the 

 past ; it still continues ; it not only 

 continues, but in the past ten years 

 the rate of destruction has probably 

 increased. Every acre of accessible 



timber burned on Crown lands makes 

 it harder for you and me to live. It 

 means a loss of public revenue from 

 a source nature gave us free of 

 charge. This loss has to be replaced 

 by taxation, either direct or indirect, 

 and you and I eventually have to pay 

 it. 



Trained Fire Fighters. 



It is not my ])urpose to discuss the 

 forest fire problem at this time, but 

 I wish to say this. Our forests now 

 in charge of governmental bureaus 

 will never be made reasonably safe 

 from destruction until more time and 

 thought, more money and energy ar:: 

 I)ut into the development of the tech- 

 nique of fire fig-thing. Fighting fires 

 in the bush requires specially trained 

 men and special machinery, just as 

 does the fighting of fires in the city 

 of Toronto. Merely sending a large 

 number of men into the woods each 

 summer as patrolmen, will never be 

 an entirely efficient method. Such 

 men can fight only the one-man or 

 two-man fire, and it is only a few 

 minutes that a fire remains such. 

 Means must be provided to get a 

 crew of fire fighters quickly on the 

 spot. This involves the making of 

 roads, trails, the cleaning out of canoe 

 routes and the building of telephone 

 lines. Hard, expensive, non-spectacu- 

 lar work, but fundamental in any ef- 

 ficient system of forest fire fighting. 

 Already the methods of detecting 

 fires are developed far ahead of 

 methods of fighting. The lookout 

 tower on a mountain top fails to be 

 efficient if there are no means of 

 sending men to the fire which it has 

 reported. The aeroplane may detect 

 many fires in a few hours, but the 

 knowledge of their existence is of 

 little value unless there are means of 

 quick transportation of men to the 

 fire. The lookout towers, the aero- 

 planes, are of spectacular interest and 

 . excite the public fancy — but they do 

 not extinguish forest fires. They are 

 only auxiliaries in a fire-fighting sys- 

 tem, and they can be efficient auxili- 

 aries only when the groundwork is 

 completed. It will cost money to 

 develop transportation systems for 



