166 FOREST OUTINGS 



spring of 1939, The New York Herald-Tribune dispatched to the scene a 

 correspondent, John O'Reilly, who sent back an appalling estimate of 

 disaster, not in terms of persons killed, but in terms of permanent, or an 

 all-but-permanent, derangement of the natural water system, the soil, the 

 wildlife, and the human resources. The United States could stand more of 

 this sort of journalism, and less of the sort which, when great fires blazed on 

 the mountains above Los Angeles last winter, yielded hardly a headline 

 east of the Rockies. But when an unimportant tongue of the flame flicked 

 toward Hollywood, "film stars' homes menaced," the city papers shouted 

 from coast to coast. 



Really, a great deal more than film stars' homes was menaced. The entire 

 life and civilization of that western dry land depends on water. Denuded 

 slopes do not yield usable water. Burnt-off, denuded watersheds become 

 more menacing there each year. 



Literally, and quite obviously, a curse is laid on soil repeatedly burnt 

 over. Life, along with the soil and cover, becomes each year thinner, less 

 robust, less rewarding, more hazardous. 



There is nothing mysterious or other-worldly about the process. It is 

 simply that you blast and disturb a natural continuity of growth and renewal — 

 a marvelously delicate but enduring interplay of living forces which, undis- 

 turbed, keep a piece of land intact and rich, and the people it supports, secure. 



"In a burned woodland," writes Hugh Bennett, Chief of the United 

 States Soil Conservation Service, contributing to the same symposium, in 

 American Forests, "the very structure of the soil is changed. Following the 

 destruction of organic matter and beneficial bacteria by flames, the soft, 

 crumblike surface that naturally prevails under a leaf mold gradually 

 gives way to a harder, more compact condition. Pelting rains hasten the 

 process along. By dislodging tiny soil particles and taking them into suspen- 

 sion along with charred plant debris, they produce a muddy kind of run-off 

 that tends to seal over the ground surface and make it almost impervious 

 to water. Naturally, this compacting action alone means a tremendous 

 increase in the amount of run-off and the rate of erosion. When it is com- 

 bined with the demolition of all protecting overgrowth, soil and water 

 losses may be multiplied several thousand times over." 



