14 CANADIAN FORESTRY ASSOCIATION. 



THE EDUCATIONAL ASPECTS OF THE FORESTRY PROBLEM 



CECIL C. JONES, M.A., LL.D., CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF 



NEW BRUNSWICK. 



The forest problem may be approached in one of two ways, either 

 through education or through external regulation. We may seek to bring 

 about proper methods of forest protection and forest conservation through 

 an educational campaign, designed to promote a proper public appreciation 

 of our forests from the community standpoint as they affect public finances, 

 healthful recreation, rainfall, equable climatic conditions and other mat- 

 ters vital to the general public welfare. We may go further and seek to 

 lead the private owner of forest lands to an appreciation of the importance 

 of the forest as a national asset and as an indispensible condition to the 

 industrial development of the future, so that the legitimate desire for 

 present profits may be tempered with a care to eliminate wasteful methods 

 of cutting and such modes of operation as tend to destroy the future pro- 

 ductiveness, if not the future existence, of the forest under his control. On 

 the other hand, we may impose legal restrictions as to the cutting and the 

 shipment of timber, and so seek to accomplish our end by legislative regu- 

 lation. 



My purpose is to emphasize the importance of the educational method, 

 not as opposed necessarily to restrictive legislative enactments, but as the 

 basal feature of the whole forestry agitation, and one which has neces- 

 sarily a large place in the functions of this Association. Restrictive meas- 

 ures can only be effective as they are backed up by sound, intelligent pub- 

 lic opinion. 



A scientific treatment of the subject of forestry is of much more im- 

 portance than is the case in the allied subjects, even agriculture and horti- 

 culture. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again," is a questionable 

 rule in forestry circles. The decades, or even centuries, required to ob- 

 serve final results of operations or methods is not consistent with learning 

 the way to success by repeated failure and experiment. Hence it becomes 

 important to learri the history of the development of the science and the 

 practice in the older countries. We ought, so far as possible, to familiar- 

 ize ourselves with their methods and adopt those which give promise of 

 being at all suited to the improvement of conditions in our own country. 

 Even at the best, the time required to reap material benefits from im- 

 proved methods is very great, but the initiation of movements which will 

 perhaps be of little material advantage to us, but which will doubtless 

 prove of the utmost value to those who come after us, as well as an un- 

 doubted strengthening of our future national life, is, to say the least, moral 

 and intellectual training of a very high order. 



In considering the trend which educational effort in Canada should 

 take, it is wise, therefore, to familiarize ourselves so far as possible with 

 general educational movements elsewhere. In most European countries 

 the training of the forester was at first largely from the point of view of 

 the huntsman and protector of game. When in Germany in the eighteenth 

 century the threatened scarcity of timber made the need for scientific 



