Canadian Forestry Journal, November, igi6 



829 



ing but trees? What purpose is 

 served by this splendidly picturesque 

 blanket of green? The answer is im- 

 mediately at hand. Nova Scotia — and 

 we select it only as an illustration — 

 possesses great coal and iron mines. 

 Not a ton of coal could be mined with- 

 out timber to support walls and roof. 

 If all the wooden mine props used in 

 Nova Scotia in a single year were 

 stretched end to end they would reach 

 from Halifax to the coast of Ireland. 

 Nova Scotia's fisheries could exist not 

 a month without wooden boats, wood- 

 en barrels, and boxes, and buildings. 

 The towns and villages look to the 

 nearby forests for lumber, for fuel, for 

 furniture. The farms must have tim- 

 bers for buildings, and fence posts, and 

 what is much more important, they 

 must have neighboring forests to pro- 

 tect and nourish the crops. Exactly 

 as in Nova Scotia, so we find the for- 

 est walking, hand in hand, with the 

 farmers and townspeople of New 

 Brunswick and Quebec and Ontario, 

 upholding them in a thousand needs, 

 catering to their comfort and adding 

 richly to their pocket books. The 

 lumbering and paper making industry 

 of New Brunswick and Quebec and 

 Ontario are of enormous proportions, 

 employing the bulk of the 110,0CX) men 

 who constitute Canada's wood-manu- 

 facturing army, and numbering fully 

 4.000 wood-usipg industries within 

 their boundaries. You may sometimes 

 think of the forest existing only in a 

 northern wilderness, but as a matter of 

 fact it is the foundation of every city 

 and every farm. Though you nave 

 your house in the middle of a treeless 

 plain in Southern Saskatchewan, the 

 commercial forest stands beside you. 

 It provides two hundred million dollars 

 a year to purchase your wheat and live 

 stock. It provides you a residence and 

 barns and fence posts. It furnishes 

 your house and keeps it warm. You 

 could never have set foot on a railway 

 coach for the West were it not for mil- 

 lions of tamarack and cedar and jack 

 pine railway ties, wooden telegraph 

 poles and wooden coaches- You could 

 enjoy not one ton of coal from the Al- 

 berta and British Columbia coal fields 

 were those mines unable to secure train 

 loads of props to keep themselves in 



daily operation. Whatever the pro- 

 vince, whatever the town or city or 

 farming section, throughout Canada, 

 there is no escape from the benevolence 

 of the great forest riches that Nature 

 provided in such abundance. 



A Deforested Land. 



On the other hand, one can scarcely 

 overstate the condition of any pro- 

 vince were it stripped of its forests 

 through wholesale destruction by fire. 

 A fuel situation would develop, the tra- 

 gedy of which, in our wintry climate, 

 we can scarce reckon. The greatest 

 industry we have, that of wood manu- 

 facture, would fall to the ground- Our 

 mines could not continue. Fisheries 

 would be helpless under such a handi- 

 cap. Fruit growing would give up 

 every means of transportation. Many 

 of our best streams, denuded of for- 

 est, would prove worse than useless 

 as developers of light and power. Car- 

 riage factories and implement works de- 

 pend upon wooden parts, and with 

 scores of other industries could not long 

 survive a stoppage of the supply. In- 

 deed, one could enumerate with entire 

 reasonableness and exactness our com- 

 plete dependence upon what our forests 

 do for us day by day, and the disastrous 

 consequences to which the present pace 

 of forest destruction is leading us. To 

 some, such a gloomy picture might 

 seem far-fetched, but we cannot run 

 away from truth by that easy exit. The 

 history of the stripped and ugly regions 

 of north-western China, the once fer- 

 tile and prosperous valleys of Palestine, 

 large areas of Spain and Italy and 

 Greece, point warning, fingers to us as 

 guardians of Canada, and bid us assure 

 ourselves of a different fate while there 

 is vet time. 



An Important Move- 



Hon. W. J. Roche, Minister of the 

 Interior, has issued instructions that 

 hereafter all homestead entries on Do- 

 minion lands of Western Canada will 

 contain a proviso that settlers must 

 take out a "permit" before setting out 

 fires for the purpose of clearings lands. 

 This places in the hands of the Domin- 

 ion Forestry Branch a most necessary 

 device for the prevention of fire losses 

 in timbered country. 



