cities, of all Michigan, in support of whatever remedial measures may 

 be adopted, are practically the same whether the lands be public or 

 private. 



The forces that operated to make bankrupt the lands the state owns 

 are still operating. They are forcing into bankruptcy millions more 

 of acres which the state, if it doesn't look out, may become the owner 

 of, as Sinbad "owned" the Old Man of the $ea. 



PROBLEMS ARE GIGANTIC. 



The job of putting a stop to or at least mitigating the force of 

 operation of these bankrupting causes is the same on the private lands 

 as the public lands; as also the problem of restoring the lands to use 

 and profit once correction is affected. 



These problems are concrete. They are reality itself, and they are 

 gigantic, some of them. There is one, among the most important, that 

 might not occur to any one considering the reclamation of disused 

 lands as a land and crop problem, merely. Off hand, it might be said: 

 well, there is the land, poor quality, of course, nothing on it much that 

 is marketable the problem is to make things grow on it that will pay. 

 But that is not where the problem begins for the forward-looking 

 men who have the reclamation of the bankrupt acres of Northern 

 Michigan at heart. 



The simile of a location for the re-establishment of a business 

 would line up closer to fact if not vacant land, but a factory building 

 were conceived. If it were a factory building to be re-equipped and 

 set going, but which stood disused, vacant and but little watched, this 

 one necessity would instantly occur to mind: what we have, the vacant 

 building, must first be protected. 



That is the case with the northern lands. About a third of our 

 potential "forest factory" is fire-swept every five to six years. When 

 he gets all the facts an average person would inquire with some impa- 

 tience, what's the use of talking about beginning to re-establish the 

 forest industry on the old-time forest lands when what is left is liable 

 to be burned? The answer would have to be: very little use, indeed. 



DESTROYS LAND'S VIRILITY. 



And the man having knowledge of what a real forest fire really does 

 would wonder what the impatient one would say if he knew, as Mr. 

 Lovejoy in preceding articles has stated, that the fires not only burn 

 the growth on the lands, but burn up the land itself, its virility, making 

 it little by little, a desert more and more incapable of reclamation. 



The forest fire menace is the hurdle on the threshold of the waste 

 land problem. This can be proved by telling what the fires have done 

 to make so much of north Michigan bankrupt, what they are still 

 doing, and what, possibly, can be done about it. 



ARTICLE III. 



There are men now living, men who don't admit that they are ^ld, 

 who still have in their ears the screech of the circular saw that ripped 

 through obese pine logs and yowled through dense forests that cov- 

 ered the lands which today appear in these chronicles as the "bank- 

 rupt lands of noftnerti Mie'hlgiin." For more than 20 years, that .is, 

 from 1870 to beyoild 18%.. Michigan led the world in lumber produc- 

 tion, dropped seeefid td Wiscb'hsin in the hefct ileeil'H *nd by the end 



