686 



Canadian Forestry Journal, August, ipi6 



The Commonsense of Silviculture 



An Address by Raphael Zon, U.S. Forest Service, at the 

 Closing Exercises of Yale Forest School 



In a few months from now most 

 of you will be knocking at the door 

 of Opportunity and offering your 

 services as professional foresters to, 

 the Federal Government, or to the 

 States or to private lumber com- 

 panies. Although you will emerge 

 from the forest school in th efuU 

 armament of all-around knowledge, 

 some cynics will tell you that much 

 of this armament will soon be lost 

 from mere disuse, while more of it 

 you will throw overboard yourselves 

 as unnecessary ballast that merely 

 hampers your progress. 



What part then of the mental bag- 

 gage which you wil Itake from 

 school will prove the least useful to 

 you in life? Will it be forest valua- 

 tion with its complicated formulas 

 of soil and forest rent, or forest man- 

 agement with its ideal "normal 

 forest," or lumbering, or silviculture 

 or what? Will life demand service 

 from you as loggers, or silvicultur- 

 ists. administrators, or forest man- 

 agers? Judging by the pessimistic 

 tone of a number of leading men in 

 the lumber industry, and in forestry, 

 who in late years have expressed 

 their views on the subject, it would 

 seem that the sooner the graduates 

 from forest schools forget all their 

 technical forest knowledge and learn 

 the mechanical details of logging, 

 wood utilization, and administration, 

 the greater will be their chances for 

 finding jobs. 



Is the Country Ready? 



This country, we are told, is not 

 yet ready for the practice of silvicul- 

 ture : we have too many purely ad- 

 ministrative problems yet to settle; 

 we have fire protection methods to 

 work out and boundaries to deter- 

 mine ; we have logging problems to 



solve and problems in timber sale 

 procedure ; we must wait for stump- 

 age prices to rise more nearly to the 

 level of the European prices and the 

 country must become more settled 

 before the practice of silviculture 

 can begin ; our virgin mature timber 

 must first be cut and our silvicul- 

 tural practice should begin with the 

 second growth ; there is no particu- 

 lar need, therefore, for the applica- 

 tion of silviculture ; common horse 

 sense, ability to get along with peo- 

 ple, a ready knowledge of lumber 

 and logging problems are all that is 

 needed to equip a man for a success- 

 ful career as a forester. 



The acceptance of such a view 

 would virtually amount to the ad- 

 mission that much of forestry train- 

 ing is needless, that of all schools of 

 applied science the forest schools 

 are the only ones which do not fully 

 prepare men for the actual work 

 which they are called upon to do. 



Is there any justification for such 

 an admission, and is there not some 

 misunderstanding of what silvicul- 

 ture really means? Those who still 

 speak of silviculture as something 

 for which this country is not yet 

 ready, think of European silvicul- 

 ture, or refined and intensive meth- 

 ods of planting, of the minute care 

 in handling each forest stand, as 

 contrasted with the rough and ready 

 methods of cutting practiced in the 

 United States today. While we 

 have been told on many occasions 

 that the science of silviculture 

 knows no countries and is applicable 

 wherever forests grow, yet, as a 

 matter of fact, what we have been 

 actually taught have been methods 

 of silvicultural procedure as de- 

 veloped and adapted to the economic 



