1406 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



lands — any use except forestry, for of this they are firmly 

 persuaded that it is impractical, impossible, and un- 

 profitable. 



My own belief is that it is going to become increasingly 

 impractical, impossible and unprofitable for owners of 

 forest land which is non-agricultural in character to do 

 anything else with it except to grow timber upon it, and 

 that the process of passing the buck by exchange of 

 ownership does not relieve the purchaser of the problem, 

 nor will it suffice very much longer for such land owners 

 to seek to nullify the efforts of foresters to emphasize 

 these conditions, by applying the damning epithet of 

 "theorist." Those lumbermen who did service in France 

 know that forestry is not a theory. They also know that 

 our economic conditions are rapidly approaching those 

 of France. Foresight on our part is needed as much as 

 it was for the French. They applied it— will we? 



Close study of many areas of timber land in the south 

 and elsewhere has convinced me that the skinning process 

 applied to these operations actually loses money to the 

 operator compared with that of reserving a small per 

 cent of the less matured trees, and that reproduction even 

 of Longleaf pine is easily obtainable by the use of simple 

 and easily applied measures of protection. But the aver- 

 age timber land owner does not wish to believe this and 

 looks only at the difficulties. He is not in the forestry 

 game and refuses to enter it or even consider it. 



If the cure for this deadlock lies in legislation we must 

 secure the following conditions : 



First, the risks of timber production as a business must 

 be reduced. This means better fire protection, better 

 laws for exclusion of tree diseases and insect pests, and 

 better enforcement. 



Second, proper tax legislation. This means a workable 

 tax law removing the annual tax from timber, and im- 

 posing instead a products tax. We have no workable 

 laws at present. 



Third, actual land classification into agricultural and 

 forest lands. If anyone thinks this is easy he is no 

 farmer. 



Fourth, capable, trained, non-political state depart- 

 ments of forestry with both the knowledge of forest 



technique and silviculture which will enable them to ad- 

 vocate intelligent measures of forest regulation, and the 

 power to enforce such measures. 



Finally, we may be in position to secure by regulation 

 the measures needed to preserve the forest land from the 

 destructive processes which now characterize private 

 operations. 



If we begin at the other end of this chain of develop- 

 ment, what do we get? Restrictive measures, of course, 

 designed to force private owners to practice forestry. 

 These measures will be formulated by politicians, or leg- 

 islators, ignorant of the technique of forest production, 

 and will be almost certainly impractical and calculated to 

 defeat their own ends, like much of the "diameter limit" 

 legislation which seems to be the first thought of such 

 statesmen. Having passed such laws, we will have poli- 

 ticians to enforce ( ?) them — and they will be evaded 

 or repealed. We will find it impossible to enforce them 

 on land claimed to be agricultural and there will be no 

 authoritative classification of such lands, hence no possi- 

 bility of actual enforcement. Meanwhile the same legis- 

 latures which seek to regulate the owner of land will con- 

 tinue to sanction increasing burdens of taxation on stand- 

 ing timber, and may fail to provide an adequate system 

 of fire protection to insure the survival of the plantations 

 or young timber which they seek to force the owner to 

 raise. 



The development of forestry by states has been by no 

 means negligible. Progress has been made in securing 

 good and workable fire laws. Experiments have been 

 attempted in reform of state tax legislation as affecting 

 forests, and a determined effort has been made to keep 

 forestry out of the miasma of party politics. But this 

 latter struggle resembles the labors of Sisyphus, who, as 

 soon as he succeeded in rolling the stone to the top of 

 the mountain, witnessed its smashing descent into the 

 depths. The biggest problem we have in this entire 

 forestry movement is how to secure and keep trained 

 men in charge of state forestry organizations, for with- 

 out such men, we will' never get even halfway up the 

 slope of achievement in the program of securing actual 

 forest production on private forest lands. 



LET ALL SIDES BE HEARD 



BY R. D. FORBES 



SUPERINTENDENT OF FORESTRY, LOUISIANA DEPARTMENT OF CONSERVATION 



T~\0 we need a national forest policy, and if so just 

 *-* what form should this policy take? The lumbermen 

 and the foresters of the country seem to be getting to- 

 gether rapidly to solve this problem. Their getting 

 together, however, reminds one of a couple of cats, with 

 their tails tied together, hung over a clothes line. If 

 you don't believe that, read some of the recent discus- 

 sions in the lumber journals, notably the Lumber World 

 Review of Chicago. A great many articles on national 



forest policy from far abler pens than the present writer's 

 will have appeared in the columns of American Fores- 

 try, and instead of addressing himself to an attempt to 

 shed new light on the subject, he would like to make a 

 suggestion- as to one means of remedying the lack of co- 

 operation between the lumberman and the forester in 

 solving this problem. 



No one can read the various articles pro and con 

 which have appeared in the press of the day without 



