118 AMERICAN FORESTRY 



Fortunately we have leaders of capacity, men of scientific knowledge, 

 technical training, enthusiasm, patriotism, and the power of leadership. We 

 have, too, considerable bodies of earnest citizens eager to know and willing to 

 help. We have also dense ignorance in high and low places, self-interested hos- 

 tilitv to the common good, and the characteristic American impatience with 

 constinictive policies that demand for their fruition infinite pains and long 



periods of time. 



The first of these groups is arrayed against the last and popular education 

 holds the key. In his spirited and thoughtful address at the annual dinner, 

 Mr. Graves laid this task of popular education upon the American Forestry 

 Association as the one which it is especially called upon to do to hold up the 

 hands of the able professional body the country is developing. No finer tribute 

 could have been paid to the twenty-nine years' history of the organization. 

 The task should be accepted with some pride and much humility as a great, 

 necessary, and worthy work. 



THE PRESENT SITUATION IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS 



IF ANYTHING is needed to show why those who know the White Moun- 

 tains and have studied their relations and influence upon the eastern 

 United States are almost passionately desirous of the salvation of their 

 forests it is to be found in observation of existing conditions. 



Clean cutting of spruce continues throughout the White Mountains with- 

 out cessation. Five new log railroads have been constructed within the last 

 two years into the upper valleys and are now in operation. One after another 

 these valleys are cleaned out. The work extends from them up the steep 

 mountain sides higher and higher year by year. The method of cutting is the 

 most destructive possible and the waste is excessive. Millions of young trees, 

 too small for use in the pulp mills, are felled and left on the ground to decay, 

 merely that the larger logs may be removed more easily. The Swiss or the 

 Germans would not for one moment permit cutting of this kind on high slopes. 

 They would use a selective method, by which the mature trees would be taken 

 and the young forest left to hold the soil and regulate the run-off of water. 

 Nothing except the forest will hold back the soil from erosion, and nothing 

 except the forest and the porous soil prevents the water from running off the 

 steep, bare rocks in torrents alternating with droughts. 



Fire during the past year has burned over 25,000 acres in the White 

 Mountains, which is far less than in preceding years. In one year, 1903, 

 84,000 acres were burned over, and the number of acres burned in the White 

 Mountains as a whole now amounts to 250,000. After a fire, almost invariably 

 erosion follows. Large areas have been crippled and there are considerable 

 tracts which will never again produce commercial forests. Upon some of these 

 the large charred stumps and dead logs still remain, where fire and erosion 

 have rendered the land beneath them forever barren. Here no forest can ever 

 take the place of that which has been cut off. 



In the last ten years there has been a distinct change in the general aspect 

 of the White Mountains, so that one who has been familiar with them can see 

 the progressive and permanently evil effect of fire and erosion. It is probably 

 not too much to say that at no time in history, and at no place on the globe, 

 has mountain soil ever been injured and rendered unproductive so rapidly as 

 in the White Mountains. In China and in Spain the destruction must have 

 been far more gradual. With the energy characteristic of American enter- 

 prise, a single generation suffices to produce a change not only in the aspect 

 of the White Mountains, but also in many places a profound change in the 



