Canadian Forcsliij Journal, Maij, 1U17 



Win 



Impressions from India 





. — ^ 



The first shock to a (Canadian 

 travelHng in India is the wooded state 

 of the coimlry. One expects that 

 hundreds of milhons of people war- 

 ring through thousands of years and 

 finally under a century of peace 

 crowding agriculturally 300 to GOO to 

 the square mile would have produced 

 a denuded land. Such is not the case 

 — except in the arid Indus valley — 

 the whole land, viewed from a railway 

 carriage, appears forested, and even 

 the Ganges plain with its agricultural 

 half thousand to the square mile is so 

 dotted with trees as to appear at a 

 distance of less than a mile an un- 

 broken wall of forest. The tempera- 

 ment which leaves trees to grow, in 

 groves, rows and scattered throughout 

 the most valuable fields without even 

 the protection of the fence row, which 

 saves a few trees in America, must 

 have been an important factor in 

 leaving any forests for the British 

 to administer in India. 



The forest area of British India now 

 stands at about 336,000 square miles, 

 or 31.1 per cent, of the total land area. 

 Though the forest cannot all be con- 

 sidered as productive timber land, or 

 even as wooded land, as will be ex- 

 plained later, the proportion of actual 

 forest must to a Westerner appear 

 very large, especially when the age, 

 history and population of the country 

 are considered. 



The large proportionate area of 

 forest is explained by three or four 

 conditions wherein India differs 

 fundamentally from American con- 

 ditions, which act as brakes on forest 

 destruction in India. 



Recent Canadian experience to the 

 contrary, the Indian is not an emi- 

 grant. The strongest human ten- 

 dency in Canada and the United 

 States has been to move west along 

 the parallels of latitude and destroy 

 forest. The native North American 

 has not waited either for pressure of 

 population upon the land or for a 

 market for the timber in the virgin 

 Western forests to furnish the stimu- 



lus for I he Western movement of 

 poi)ulation. The Indian, the direct 

 antithesis of this man, even when the 

 agricultural population has reached 

 GOO to the square mile; has not felt 

 impelled to leave his ancestral paddy 

 field and move a few hundred miles 

 to another part of his native province 

 or to another province of India, even 

 though bountiful paddy fields have 

 already been proved there, settled 

 government established and railroads 

 laid down for easy transport. 



The Indian will assuredly cut down 

 the forest bordering his^ field and 

 village if allowed, but he wdll not 

 migrate to attack a new forest area. 

 Nearly every province contains a fair 

 proportion of forest, some if it seem- 

 ingly on good agricultural land and 

 only a hundred miles or so from dis- 

 tricts so densely populated that to use 

 Kipling's description of Canton you 

 feel that if you knocked a corner off 

 a house it would bleed. Other pro- 

 vinces, rich beyond dreams, in the 

 capacity for growth of myriad crops, 

 such as Assam and Burma, lying in 

 the direct line between the hordes of 

 China and the swarms of India to this 

 day cry aloud for population and all 

 through the past have suffered little 

 or no forest destruction. 



A large proportion of the forest 

 wealth of India is in these two pro- 

 vinces. If they are omitted the 

 forest in India sinks to 21 per cent of 

 the land area. One should be per- 

 mitted to dream a moment what 

 would be the situation in North 

 America today if we had possessed 

 only a little of the Indian's charac- 

 teristics of pausing to make each acre 

 fertile before passing on to denude 

 another. We should have been still 

 somewhere East of the Appalachians 

 and the beaver would not yet have 

 been driven out of Canadian rivers to 

 take refuge in the folds of the flag, 



H. R. MacMILLAN, 



(Former Chief Forester of British 

 Columbia.) 



