The Case for New Brunswick’s Forests 
BY 
ROBSON BLACK 
SECRETARY, THE CANADIAN FORESTRY ASSOCIATION 
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(NotE:—The Canadian Forestry Association has no affiliation with any Government 
or commercial interests. It comprises 5700 Canadian ‘citizens, concerned in forest 
conservation as a public policy of prime importance. A substantial portion of the 
membership is resident in the Maritime Provinces.) 
the manner of a personal estate, we would see five great natural 
endowments set forth in the order of their present day value:— 
Agricultural Land 
The Forests 
The Mines 
The Fisheries 
The Water Powers. 
From lands, forests and fisheries, the industry of man has taken 
toll for more than three hundred years. At first content to realise 
from the land merely the food, clothing and fuel of a family, improved 
facilities for trade and growth of population gradually reared a more 
complex commercial machinery until in most parts of the Dominion 
the raw materials of field and forest, mine and waters, can be sent forth 
today in a completely manufactured state. The natural resources 
themselves, however, remain the foundation of practically all human 
activity. Towns and cities are built upon faith in their inexhausti-. 
bility. Transportation lines have been directed into almost every 
corner of the country to turn these resources to general profit. Export 
trade with lands less generously endowed has grown to great volume. 
In the days when the geographical bulk of the Dominion—so 
much of it unexplored and unassessed as to values—gavé rise to pro- 
phecies of fabulous wealth, it was not surprising that the public should 
be blinded to the possibilities of depletion of mines or timberlands. 
Prognostications of inexhaustible resources in Ungava and about 
Hudson’s Bay, in Labrador, and other sections of which accurate in- 
formation was lacking, created an over-confident state of mind readily 
assenting to incalculable losses from forest fires and to the damaging 
of other public resources regardless of the almost certain protests of 
the generations to follow. ey 
The State and Canada fortunately has progressed beyond the doctrine 
the Natural = of “‘Jook-out-for-yourself.””. At no time has the con- 
Resources, sciousness of a duty owed by the individual to the 
state, of the obligation of a Government to prepare for the future, been 
so deeply impressed as during this period of Canada’s history. Public 
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We the whole of the Dominion of Canada inventoried after 
