112 



THE FORESTER 



May, 



Notes on Some Forest Problems. 



The public standing of forestry has 

 made notable progress in the last few 

 years. Still the forester and the lum- 

 berman are often not fully agreed. Yet 

 "the forester, without the special 

 knowledge of the lumberman, can never 

 do effective work in preserving the for- 

 ests by using them nor succeed in a 

 money way ; while without the methods 

 of the forester the lumberman will speed- 

 ily exhaust his supplies of timber and 

 disappear with the forests he has de- 

 stroyed." 



Forestry in the treeless West deals 

 with the supply of water as well as wood, 

 and consists largely in tree-planting. 

 -"At first blush such work might seem 

 to fall outside the province of the fores- 

 ter, on the ground that it has to do with 

 trees and not with forests. But when it 

 is remembered that protection and wood 

 supply are the two objects of the work, 

 and how important a public service may 

 be rendered by the introduction of bet- 

 ter trees and better ways of planting 

 them, it appears at once that this also is 

 one of the tasks of true forestry." 



After referring to the deplorable dis- 

 persion of the Government's forest work 

 -among three agencies, heavy taxes on 

 timber land are characterized as "a 

 premium on forest destruction, a pre- 

 mium that is doing more than any other 

 -single factor to hinder the spread of con- 

 servative lumbering among the owners 

 of large bodies of timber land," for the 

 reason that these owners cannot afford to 

 hold their lands for a second crop. 



Another powerful factor in preventing 

 lumbermen from adopting improved 

 methods lies in their inability to answer 

 this question : " How can the lumber- 

 man get out his logs without destroying 

 the capital value of his lartfl ? " 



Here the Division of Forestry steps in 

 -with the offer of practical assistance on 

 the ground, under the conditions set 

 forth in its Circular 21, the fundamental 

 idea of which is "to provide successful 

 -examples of conservative lumbering, and 

 4>y giving them wide publicity to ac- 



quaint fresh owners with better ways of 

 handling their timber lands." Applica- 

 tions for such assistance had, at the time 

 the paper in question was prepared, 

 reached more than 1,000,000 acres. At 

 present, we are informed, they surpass 

 1,500,000. 



"The question of forest grazing has 

 aroused more opposition to the forest 

 reserves than any other single issue. At 

 present the advocates of forest protec- 

 tion are successful at many points, 

 though not everywhere. A careful and 

 trustworthy study by Mr. Frederick V. 

 Coville of the effect of sheep grazing, 

 leads to the conclusion that "to regu- 

 late pasturage, if it is rightly done, is 

 better than to prohibit it altogether," 

 although "many forest regions should 

 be entirely protected against sheep." 



Forest fires are enormously harmful 

 even when, as in the majority of cases, 

 they do not kill the older trees. Light 

 surface fires are often the direct cause of 

 unsoundness and disease. Great fires, 

 while they may destroy the forest tempo- 

 rarily over great areas, are very seldom 

 able to prevent its return in the end. 

 " The devastating fires which have swept 

 over this country for centuries have not 

 succeeded in leaving it barren of trees." 



A Bold Stroke for Irrigation. 



The Pacific Improvement Company, 

 which is only a convenient name for one 

 of the departments of the Southern 

 Pacific Company, is about to inaugurate 

 a novel and extensive irrigating scheme 

 near Santa Barbara in connection with 

 its seaside Hope Rancho of 2,000 acres, 

 a few miles westward of the city. A 

 3,000-foot tunnel is to be driven into the 

 neighboring mountain range to draw off 

 storage water at an elevation of 1,100 

 feet, and with the force generated by 

 piping this water down two miles and a 

 half larger volumes piped from lower 

 levels are to be raised by suction to a 

 height of fifty feet and allowed to pour 

 into Felton Lake, which is on Hope 

 Rancho, and has a storage capacity of 

 380,000,000 gallons, an area of about 



