FORESTRY AND THE UTILIZATION OF LAND 



By Filbert Roth 



^^s^BAT newly cleared land is especially fertile is a fact well known to all 

 C ^ farming people in all forested countries. Even the primitive people of 

 ^^^ India and the island regions of the Pacilic have long known this fact and 

 have practiced a simple form of agriculture by clearing (usually by burning) a 

 piece of land, raising a few crops and then abandoning the old and clearing 

 another piece. Even the most wretched sands of the Great Lakes region, of New 

 England, or the South will produce a few crops after the forest has ''built 

 them up" to a reasonable degree of fertility. 



From this great, wholesale experience, the world over, it follows that 

 the forest not only can exist, and produce timber on lands, too poor for perma- 

 nent agriculture, but also that it can improve impoverished lands. That this 

 is a most important fact seems clear enough when we consider that less 

 than one-fourth of the land of the United States is improved, that several 

 hundred millions of acres are acknowledged to be non-agricultural and that 

 many millions of acres more have been cleared and tried for farming and have 

 been entirely abandoned and that today, many millions of acres are farmed 

 at a loss, a loss to the poor farmer, a loss to the commonwealth. But this 

 vast area of poor lands and lands in difficult situations represent an enormous 

 capital, a most important, permanent asset. And surely it should be the 

 earnest concern of the nation and the states to learn what is possible and 

 feasible to keep these lands in some form of useful production to keep them 

 habitable and to prevent their becoming useless, hopeless, and unsightly 

 waste, detrimental to the surrounding country and to the state. 



Barring the arid lands, it is the forest and forestry alone which have 

 thus far proven of permanent value in keeping our poor lands in satisfactory 

 productive conditions. And if we classify the value or importance of the 

 forest to the nation, on the basis of 



supply of timber; 



utilization of non-agricultural lands; and 



protection of watersheds; 



it is perfectly fair to place the utilization of non-agricultural lands second, 

 important as the third item is in our country. 



It is clear that this great importance of the forest through the ability to 

 utilize inferior lands, like its great influence on water distribution, is primarily 

 of public importance; a matter of the state and nation and secondarily only 

 one of the individual. 



And it is all the more surprising that this feature has not been more 

 emphasized even by writers on forestry matters. This is the more deplorable 

 since our state and national legislatures have thus far refused to consider 

 this importance of the forest and also since forestry has been attacked and 

 successfully so, more from the standpoint of the utilization of lands than from 

 all others combined. In Michigan, for example, we have more than one- 

 foni-th of all land in the form of cut and burned-over sandy pinery lands, of 



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