20 BULLETIN 1496, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
cost of maintaining and operating the organization and suppressing 
fires. It is believed that the maintenance of the fire-protective or- 
ganization should be borne jointly by the State (aided under specific 
rants by the Federal Government) and by the timberland owners— 
the State dividing the cost of suppression with the local communities 
on a 50-50 or some other basis. ‘The person responsible for starting 
a fire, however, should be liable for the entire cost of extinction. 
Such a fire organization in the Lake States region, together with 
measures for reducing the danger from slashings, should provide 
effective fire protection for the forests of the region. 
FIRE PROTECTION ON STATE LANDS 
Although as a general rule fire protection is a prerequisite to 
forest management on private lands, in actual woods practice the 
two go best handin hand. Whereas the proportion of the total forest 
land burned over annually in Michigan is nearly 2 per cent, and in 
the more adequately protected State forests about 1.2 per cent, in 
State forests where fire protection is coupled with forest manage- 
ment, as in the Higgins Lake Forest, the loss from fire is practically 
negligible. 
The most important step toward bringing about more effective fire 
protection in this region will be to place the large areas of the State- 
owned forest lands under forest management; in other words, to 
organize them as State forests. The State of Michigan has close 
to 350,000 acres of State-owned land classed as forest reserve, but 
only 113,800 acres are under actual administration as State forests. 
In Wisconsin out of 338,000 acres of State-owned forest land, only 
159,000 acres are forest reserves. In Minnesota, of 1,700,000 acres of 
State-owned land, 900,000 acres are in old timber. Of this, 380,000 
acres are organized as State forests, but with little better provision 
for fire protection and management than is made for the rest of the 
State’s forest lands. , ! 
If the large tracts of State-owned forest land were organized as 
permanent State forests with a permanent personnel for such work 
as planting, thinnings, and general upbuilding of the forest, good 
protection would be to a large extent assured. This would also be a 
cheaper and more effective way of securing efficient fire protection 
than to maintain an organization for fire protection only. Such 
forests would furnish concrete examples of forest management and 
also serve as a nucleus for a general fire-protection organization 
operating outside of the State forests. 
PRIVATE EFFORTS IN FOREST-FIRE PROTECTION 
Although State forest-fire protection is improving in the three 
Lake States, the more progressive timberland owners will hardly be 
willing to depend wholly on the State for fire protection and will 
want to insure additional protection for their own properties, just 
as the owners of large manufacturing plants, in addition to the fire 
and police protection afforded by the city, install fire-protective de- 
vices and maintain watchmen of their own. Thus the fact that the 
present State forest-fire organizations are not yet fully effective need 
