ARTICLE No. VI. 



WHAT NORWAY IS DOING TO KEEP HER FORESTS 

 IN A STATE OF CONSTANT PRODUCTIVITY 



CHRISTIANIA, NORWAY, JULY 2, 1921. Norway has been 

 in the business of forest cultivation for more than sixty years. 

 In 1907 the golden anniversary of the beginning of Norway's 

 present efficient forestry system was officially celebrated. A 

 volume containing a history of the development and progress 

 of the forests was published. The lapse of sixty years, however, 

 has, according to the leading Norwegian forest authorities, 

 merely enabled them to make a fair start. Norwegian forests, 

 they say, are still in their infancy; cultivation ought to have 

 begun a century before it did. They are hoping to make up 

 for lost time. 



Norwegian forestry owes much of its later development to 

 the work of the -Norwegian Forestry Association founded by 

 Mr. Axel Heiberg in 1898. Mr. Heiberg gave me a succinct 

 statement of its activities. 



The Association, he said, was founded for the purpose of 

 restoring the forests along the whole Norwegian coast from 

 Lindesnace (the Nace of Norway) to the North Cape. Its 

 work, in the first instance, was educational and the enlist- 

 ment of public and private financial support, which met with 

 a generous response. ^ 



Restoration of the depleted forests had to be achieved by 

 planting, and in carrying on the work the Association profited 

 by the example of Denmark where afforestation had been 

 successfully carried on by Dalgas. They were also helped out 

 by the Norwegian Government experimental plantations 

 established in 1860. Their efforts soon bore fruit, and in time 

 surpassed in results those obtained in Denmark, owing, pro- 

 bably, to a soil better adapted to tree-growth. 



The secondary efforts of the Association have been de- 

 voted to improving and preserving the forests already in ex- 

 istence, which has been accomplished by the practice of ra- 

 tional cutting and of drainage. The Association was confronted 

 with the problem of preventing the sand-drifts on the Jaederen 

 and this work promises complete success. Another task was 

 to stop the progressive decline of the timber line on the Nor- 

 wegian mountains, which has been done through the importa- 



