FIRE 163 



of the forest fires are started, more or less deliberately, by human beings. 

 The ignorance, the superstition, the voodoo notions which bring on this 

 deliberate annual destruction of the South's remaining forest resources are 

 hard to fight, or even to contemplate, calmly. 



Anyone who has ever driven in March down through the piney woods, 

 which make a straggling start on the eastern shore of Maryland, rim the 

 coastal plain to Florida, and then turn and march west to Texas, will have 

 seen the thing happening, all along the way. That is when the woods burners, 

 white and black, go out and set fires. It is a regular part of their spring work. 



Firing "greens up" the grass, the people there say. They say it kills 

 rattlers, destroys the "germs" of pellagra and of tuberculosis and of infantile 

 paralysis, rids the woods of chiggers and malaria. Probably, it does none of 

 these things but the feeling that it does runs deep. What indiscriminate 

 burning of the forest floor, or open range land, does is to cremate such living 

 organic matter as remains in the upper topsoil. It burns out part of the 

 land's richness. It makes the piece of soil less fertile and all the more likely to 

 wash or blow away. The grass may look green and fresh at first, but its meat- 

 producing values are not improved. It looks like a nice, clean job, maybe, 

 for the first week or so, but the resulting growth is sparser, coarser, ranker. 



To burn land off, time after time and right and left, is to hurt and per- 

 haps destroy it. Yet every March as you travel southward in the piney 

 woods, you see people setting grass fires and woods fires on hundreds and 

 thousands of acres. Drive at night, and for miles you will see lands ablaze, 

 untended. Smoke and carbon particles fill the air; the ground flames are as 

 crawling snakes of fire; and here and there you will see them licking their 

 way up tree trunks and flaming explosively in the canopy. 



All along the way are educational signs placed there by State and 

 national foresters, patiently reiterating established facts; everyone loses 



WHEN THE WOODS BURN . . . PREVENT FOREST FIRES IT PAYS. . . . 



But still the people go out and set the woods and fields afire. 



Partly, it is superstition; and there is a strand of racial memory inter- 

 twined which makes the thing hard to get at and change, for thus, by fire, 

 our pioneer forebears cleared their farms from the wilderness, in the main. 

 There is probably an even further throw-back: Man's instinctive hostility 



