WHAT THE BIG TREES MAY DO FOR CALIFORNIA. 101 



But after all this has been said, we can not point to any well-settled 

 policy, even in our national councils, in regard to our forests; much 

 less can we indicate any in the legislation of the state. It is not 

 enough to reserve our forests. If we stop there, this policy becomes 

 one of stagnation, even of danger, in many portions of our country. 

 The United States, and not the states, should lead in this matter; and 

 if the nation is to lay claim to a truly enlightened policy in regard to 

 all of its natural resources, as it can in regard to some of them, it must 

 make an examination of all its vast forest domain, and devise means of 

 utilizing t properly the forest resources of every section. 



Agriculture, mining, forestry, and the fisheries cover about all the 

 fields of activity relating to the exploitation of our natural resources. 

 The United States Department of Agriculture, with its cabinet port- 

 folio, its economic and scientific bureaus, its small army of trained 

 employees, fosters one field of these activities; the United States Geo- 

 logical Survey, liberally supported by the government for years, has 

 laid a thorough scientific foundation for all our modern mining opera- 

 tions; the fisheries have long been under the care of a Government Fish 

 Commission; but the great forests, with a potential wealth far greater 

 than that involved in the fisheries interests, have strangely been allowed 

 to lie unused, or drift, in private hands, toward absolute ruin. 



Forestry does not mean preservation or care alone; it is not even 

 restricted to judicious lumbering; it means utilization of forests with- 

 out injuring them. In some regions forestry may mean lumbering, 

 but burning the soil and floor of the lumbered tract must be avoided, 

 and the denuded spaces be replanted. In other sections it may mean 

 preservation of the trees as fully as possible to protect all the available 

 water supply. In still other places naval stores, such as turpentine, 

 tar, resin, etc., may be the most profitable product. In all cases, under 

 scientific and rational treatment, the forest is made a source of that 

 wealth for which its particular situation adapts it. but as a forest it 

 never dies. 



The private lumberman in America habitually destroys the original 

 growth, and wastes or burns the forest soil and mold. Nothing but 

 desolation follows his footsteps. His harvest may have been growing 

 for a thousand years, but as it has cost him nothing, he cares for 

 nothing except the profit of the one crop. He may be a law-abiding 

 citizen, an excellent father, and a professed Christian, but his conduct 

 toward the forest is often worse than ruthless; it is that which belongs 

 to the criminal classes, to the ravisher and the destroyer. This very 

 paradox shows that the individual is scarcely blameworthy, that the 

 statutes, on the contrary, are at fault. With ruinous competition and 

 no legal restriction on his treatment of the forest, with Imsiness 



