Hi UTAH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 177 
MAKING THE FORESTS OF UTAH A 
PERMANENT RESOURCE.’ 
BY CLARENCE F. KORSTIAN.? 
We read in the ancient Greek and Latin classics 
that the need for forest conservation was felt in one 
form or another even before the advent of the Christian 
era. By the eleventh century before Christ, in the vicinity 
of the thriving cities of Palestine, Asia Minor and Greece, 
the forest cover had to a large extent disappeard and 
building timber for the temples at Tyre and Sidon had 
to be brought long distances from Mount Lebanon, where 
the wealth of cedar was also freely drawn upon for ship 
and other structural timbers. Artaxerxes I, having recog- 
nized the impending exhaustion of this mountain forest, 
about 465 B. C., attempted to regulate the cutting of 
timber. When the Romans brought Macedonia under 
their sway in 167 B. C., the cutting of ship timbers in 
the extensive forests of that country was prohibited. 
The early ordinances restricting the use of timber 
issued in the United States in the seventeenth century by 
the town governments of Exeter, Kittery, Portsmouth and 
Dover, may be likened to the early European forest ordi- 
nances. However, they were probably not dictated by 
any impending scarcity of this class of material, being 
intended merely to secure a proper and systematic use 
of the town property. In the United States as in ancient 
and medieval times the cutting of ship timbers was one 
of the first forms of regulation because of a threatened 
depletion of timber resources. 
History repeats itself many times, and as was the 
case with the advance of civilization and the conquest of 
central Europe, the British Isles and eastern North Amer- 
ica, so it was in Utah. When the first pioneers arrived in 
the State via the prairie schooner route, they found the 
1Presidential address delivered before the Utah Academy of 
Sciences, April 1, 1921. 
2U. S. Forest Service. 
