68 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



far as that i- practicable by some form of slash dis- 

 posal. The second is to detect and put out forest fires. 

 In many parts of the United States these two measures 

 in themselves will largely or wholly stop the devasta- 

 tion of forest land. A third, more rarely needed, is to 

 reserve in cutting enough trees to reseed or restock 

 cutover land where otherwise it would become waste. 

 In these steps also the public should co-operate. But 

 the public cannot and should not do it all. 



A measure of responsibility must be accepted by the 

 owner of the land. Whether the owner should be re- 

 sponsible solely for preventing his land from being a 

 menace to his neighbors, through the accumulation of 

 slashings, or from being a menace to the economic wel- 

 fare of the State and country, through idleness, it is not 

 the province of this brief resume to determine. The 



point not to be lost sight of is that the obligation and 

 the burden of perpetuating our forests are mutual. The 

 public will carry its share, but only if the forest owner 

 himself is in step. Public support for fire protection and 

 tax adjustments cannot be obtained unless the men ami 

 the industries primarily interested in the land do their 

 part and the joint effort actually succeeds in growing 

 timber. 



It will not be possible to do everything at once. Slash 

 disposal and fire protection should be the first objectives 

 and may have to be pushed in advance of others. P.ut 

 there should be no half-hearted measures, no obscuring 

 of the ultimate object to be attained. Whatever the line 

 of attack, it will be effective only in so far as forest 

 growth actually replaces forest devastation. 



LIGHT BURNING IS A MISTAKE 



IT is anxiomatic that the protection of forests from 

 fire is the first step in any forestry program. It is 

 equally axiomatic that the only kind of protection 

 which promotes forestry in the long run and which 

 therefore has a place in a national program looking to 

 the future is protection which conserves and promotes 

 tree growth. The owner of merchantable timber may 

 protect his property from fire as the owner of a coal 

 mine would do; but if the timber property is protected 

 simply as a mine and the methods of protection destroy 

 its capacity for growing timber after the virgin stump- 

 age is cut, it is simply a phase of timber mining and not 

 forestry. 



Every one recognizes the utility of fire properly con- 

 trolled, as a means of forest protection. The burning 

 of slashings on cut-over land is often essential not only 

 to eliminate a menace to adjoining areas of uncut tim- 

 ber but also to protect the young growth already exist- 

 ing on the cutting. It may even be wise to burn up 

 a small part of the existing young growth in order to 

 clean up the slashing and give the young trees which 

 remain a reasonable chance to escape future fires. In 

 certain forest types, like the Douglas fir areas of the 

 Cascades, where the new forest must be grown from 

 seed in the ground, the clean burning of whole cuttings 

 under careful control is good forestry. In most of our 

 pine, spruce and balsam forests, on the other hand, and 

 in many of our hardwood forests, part or all of the new 

 timber growth is on the ground at the time of cutting; 

 and forestry demands that that growth be preserved as 

 far as possible and that such firing as is done be very 

 closely controlled, in brush piles or otherwise. 



The public conception of forest protection must be a 

 conception of forests so protected that they will be per- 

 petuated. The protection sentiment which is developed 

 by educational activities must be predicated not upon 

 simply protecting an exhaustible resource like a mine 



but upon protecting forests so that they may continue 

 to grow timber. Any theory or proposal which directly 

 or indirectly undermines this basic conception of forest 

 protection is putting the country back rather than ahead 

 in forestry progress and must be fought without quarter. 



A number of large land-owning interests in the West- 

 ern States, particularly in California, are advocating the 

 so-called light burning of timberlands at frequent inter- 

 vals. It is asserted that by burning pine forests every 

 few years the woods will be kept clean of inflammable 

 debris without injury to the merchantable stumpage. 

 The constant burning out of small growth, underbrush 

 and litter would thus supposedly protect the forest from 

 serious conflagrations. Advocates of light burning even 

 assert that pine forests protected by their system will 

 not burn and that the smaller trees themselves will sur- 

 vive carefully reglated firing in the proper season of 

 the year. Light burning is thus advocated as the solu- 

 tion of the protection of pine forests, as a substitute for 

 the whole protection system of fire detection and sup- 

 pression, of close control of the use of fire, and of a pub- 

 lic sentiment alert at all times to keep fire out of the 

 woods which the Forest Service and many State and . 

 private agencies in the West have expanded so much 

 effort and money to develop. 



This proposal is like the announcement of a nos- 

 trum which will cure tuberculosis and which at one 

 stroke eliminates the necessity for the sanitary regu- 

 lation of cities, for tuberculosis sanitaria, for fresh 

 air, nourishing food, and every other means employ- 

 ed by medical and hygenic science to combat the 

 white plague. It is exactly the repeated fire, begin- 

 ning in the Indian days, which has steadily eaten up 

 the pine forests of California and other Western States. 

 The National Forests of California today contain nearly 

 two million acres of land once heavily timbered but 

 now reduced to brush patches as a result of repeated 



