ENGLAND S FORESTRY PROBLEM 



By J. Joyce Broderick 

 Commercial Counsellor of the British Embassy at Washington, D. C. 



Mr. J. Joyce Broderick, commercial counsellor of the British Embassy, in accepting the Douglas Fir seed, 

 presented to Great Britain by Mr. Charles Lathrop Pack, President of the American Forestry Association, 

 reviewed the forest policy of his country. 



T N the course of a long and varied history, the people 

 * of Great Britain have given many evidences of a sur- 

 prising faith in Providence and relied, when crises over- 

 took them, upon the provision of pillars of cloud and 

 pillars of fire for their guidance. Or, perhaps it would 

 be nearer the truth to say that they have always har- 

 bored a touching confidence in their own ability to meet 

 sudden emergencies of all kinds. At all events, they 

 have, as a people, tended to reject or disregard the doc- 

 trine of preparedness. Consequently, the process of 

 their education has been an expensive one and the Euro- 

 pean war in particular taught, or ought to have taught, 

 us many a costly lesson. One of the principal and one 

 of the most salutary of those lessons related to our com- 

 plete neglect to make any provision whatever for in- 

 suring a domestic timber supply. There were, of course, 

 many excuses for our failure in that respect. The area 

 of our island is comparatively small. Our population 

 increased very rapidly under the industrial system. Land 

 was required for factory construction, for the extractive 

 industries, for agriculture. There was not very much 

 waste land in the Kingdom. Our maritime communi- 

 cations were efficient, well protected and rarely menaced. 

 With cheap freight rates we were usually in a position to 

 secure adequate supplies of foreign timber from the Bal- 

 tic and from America at prices with which home grown 

 timber could not compete. Therefore, we paid little or 

 no attention to the conservation or extension of our 

 domestic forest resources. When it became necessary 

 for us to supervise and conserve the forest resources 

 of the Indian Empire, our students were obliged to go 

 abroad to learn the science of forestry. To our French 

 friends we are indebted for our earliest training, as it 

 was at the famous French institution at Nancy that our 

 men first learned the science of silviculture. A few 

 schools of forestry were later established at English Uni- 

 versities and we built up in India what is generally rec- 

 ognized as a very efficient forest service which has done 

 an immense amount of good to the material resources 

 of that country. 



"In Great Britain itself, unfortunately, we took things 

 easy until the European war broke upon us. Then, to 

 the surprise of all but a few who had been laboring under 

 the handicap of public indifference, it was discovered 

 that our total domestic timber supply was entirely insuffi- 

 cient for our needs. Something less than four per cent 

 of the total area of the United Kingdom consisted of 

 woodland. Our war recjuirements were enormous and it 

 was estimated that after less than three years of hos- 



tilities we had cut down the timber over more than a 

 million acres. I have never seen the figures of our total 

 war consumption or the total price we paid for our pre- 

 vious lack of a comprehensive forest policy. One esti- 

 mate I have seen stated that we paid during the first 

 two years of the war for imported timber about $200,- 

 000,000 more than we would have paid if home grown 

 timber had been available. 



"It was, as I have said, a very costly lesson, and I 

 doubt whether our people have thoroughly learned it 

 yet. However, it impressed the British Ministry of Re- 

 construction probably as much as any other factor in our 

 post-war situation. The Ministry made strong recom- 

 mendations about it. They recommended, amongst 

 other things, that the Government should spend some 

 $60,000,000 in planting such waste lands as existed, the 

 programme of planting to be carried out over a compara- 

 tively short period of time. In the year 1919 the sub- 

 ject was taken up in Parliament and an Act was passed 

 establishing a Forest Commission composed of eight 

 members to work out a carefully planned forest policy 

 for the whole of the Kingdom. A considerable appro- 

 priation was set aside for the planting of 250,000 acres 

 in ten years and of nearly 2,000,000 acres in 80 years. 



"The interest taken in the matter by Parliament should 

 reflect, and perhaps does to some extent reflect, a wider 

 popular interest in the whole subject of forestry in Great 

 Britain. My impression is that a good deal has yet to be 

 done before the attention of the people as a whole is fully 

 aroused. In the various British Dominions forest re- 

 sources have a more immediate effect on prosperity, and 

 tangible evidence of their growing sense of the vital char- 

 acter of the question of timber supply was given in July, 

 1920, at a British Empire Forestry Conference held in 

 London and attended by representatives and experts 

 from all the Dominions. At that Conference resolutions 

 were passed urging the adoption of a comprehensive 

 forest policy and the establishment of an efficient forest 

 service in each Dominion as well as a careful avoidance 

 of waste in the utilization of forest products. Finally 

 the Conference established a permanent Empire Forest 

 Association to promote and develop public interest in 

 forestry throughout the Empire. The Association, I 

 imagine, will be very similar to the American Forestry 

 Association in its objects and methods. Its headquarters 

 will be in London, but its membership wiil extend all 

 over the Empire. 



"The Forest Commission established in Great Britain 

 under the Act of 1919 is presided over by Lord Lovat, 



