DESERTS DUE TO DEFORESTATION 



605 





The water, so falling and so escaping, is a robber and 

 not a friend. The merest surface is made wet by it 

 and such moisture as it does leave is almost immediately 

 evaporated by the winds that in treeless countries usually 

 follow the atmospheric disturbances incident to rain. 

 The torrential flow, thus carrying off the vital element 

 for which all nature is suffering, seems to the thoughtful 

 mind as the life-blood flowing from a severed human 

 artery must seem to a surgeon. 



The authori- 

 ties on such sub- 

 jects state that 

 one acre of 

 beech trees will 

 absorb and sub- 

 sequently throw 

 out by slow 

 degrees, as the 

 dryness of the 

 air may call for 

 it, as much 

 moisture as 200 

 acres of grain. 



Such exhaled 

 humidity 

 not only miti- 

 gates the heat 

 of summer, 

 but modifies the 

 cold of winter, 

 this latter being 

 on the principle 

 that prompts the 

 florist to place 

 barrels of water in his conservatory to assist in protecting 

 his flowers from freezing in seasons of cold. 



In Sweden, there is a saying that the forest is the 

 peasant's fire. In our own country all must have 

 observed, after traveling over a plain in winter, that if 

 one enters a forest the temperature is much more moder- 

 ate, apart from the protection from the winds which the 

 forest affords as a mechanical barrier to their violence. 

 This greater warmth engendered by tree planting spurs 

 the adjoining vegetable growth, while the maturity of 

 fruits and grain is not so much checked by cold at night 

 and at other times. 



Besides this actual mitigation of the temperature, 

 trees, by checking the force of the winds in this way, also 

 conserve the water in the soil by minimizing evaporation. 

 All know how much more quickly an article will dry in 

 even cold wind than it will hanging quietly in the warmest 

 sunlight. Wet roads will dry much more speedily from 

 wind than from sun action. 



After the rain has fallen, water stands visibly around 

 the grass roots in the pasture long after the bare road is 

 free from moisture. 



The air at rest is soon saturated with moisture and 

 takes up no more until that with which it is laden is 

 absorbed, but the unchecked wind, careering over the 





J&&^ 



THIS IS IN OUR OWN COUNTRY 



Hog backs" in Salt Creek foothills in the neighborhood of the Roosevelt Reclaim Project, Gila County, Arizona 



showing the results of deforestation. 



treeless plain, greedily gathers all moisture and carries 

 it away to precipitate it in sudden torrential showers, 

 on, perhaps, the hot sides of a bleak mountain range 

 hundreds of miles away. 



The Colorado and Mohave deserts are not normally 

 such they are vast plains which would be fertile if they 

 had not been robbed of their normal trees and thereby 

 lost power of spontaneous productiveness. 



Forests exhale oxygen, the absolute essential for 

 human well-be- 

 ing, and absorb 

 and neutralize 

 the noxious 

 effects of car- 

 bonic and other 

 injurious gases. 

 The fever prev- 

 alent in the 

 Roman Cam- 

 pagna was so 

 severe that the 

 approach 

 through it to 

 Rome was, until 

 recent years, an 

 object of terror 

 to Italians and 

 foreigners alike. 

 The monasteries 

 there were aban- 

 doned and even 

 to cross it was 

 deemed suicidal ; 

 but now hun- 

 dreds of thousands of eucalyptus trees having been planted 

 there and having grown up, it is densely populated by 

 farmers and vineyardists. 



One of the secondary, but important, results of the 

 present suicidal European war will be the wholesale 

 destruction of the tree growth in the belligerent countries 

 and the attendant train of ill which follows deforestation. 

 Some fifty years ago, Commodore Matthew Fontaine 

 Maury (well known as the Christopher Columbus of the 

 Gulf Stream) found the national observatory at Washing- 

 ton unwholesome, those living there suffering continually 

 from fever and ague. To remedy this condition he planted 

 large fields of sunflowers, and, though the Potomac malaria 

 made the fever and ague extensively prevalent in the city 

 generally, none of those living at the observatory, or in 

 the vicinity of the sunflowers, were so attacked. 



Dear Mother Nature responds generously to the efforts 

 of her children to repair the mistakes of the past. 



It may be remarked, parenthetically, that trees are the 

 homes of birds, and, to say nothing of the aesthetic charm 

 of their beauty and song, birds free the fields from insects 

 and from bugs to such an extent that they deserve to rank 

 high in the list of the farmer's friends. It is probable that 

 if Texas had normal tree growth clothing prairies and 



