2 BULLETIN 1496, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
timber under American conditions. Our forestry practice will 
become more successful and profitable as new facts are applied, 
just as American agriculture and nearly every manufacturing process 
have been perfected through experience and research. But we know 
enough now to go right ahead. Believing that forest-land owners 
_ in the United States are ready now to engage in timber growing on 
a large scale, the Forest Service has endeavored to place before 
them in concise terms the best guides which the experience of this 
country to date affords. 
The measures advocated in the forest region of the northern Lake 
States fall into two general groups. Mr. Zon starts off with the 
first steps—the least that must be done—to prevent timberland from 
becoming barren. These will seldom satisfy the landowner who goes 
in for real timber culture, but they may prevent his property from 
becoming a lability on his own hands and on the community. 
The first steps in forestry proposed by Zon for the various sorts 
of woodland are extremely simple. They boil down very largely (1) 
to fireproofing the woods, within reason, by slash burning or other 
ways of controlling the slash hazard; and (2) to keeping fire out of 
the woods thereafter by a protective organization. There are some 
additional suggestions as to leaving seed trees or following simple 
cutting rules in certain types of forest. 
These minimum requirements will bring back some sort of reason- 
ably valuable forest growth on all of the land where timber remains . 
to be cut. They can readily be carried out by the landowner. They 
are being followed now in a considerable number of cases. Their 
low cost and their soundness as a matter of business can scarcely be 
questioned. 
On the other hand, considering the land problems of the Lake 
States and the common interest in keeping their wooded areas pro- 
ductive, these first steps in forestry represent about the least that 
the public can reasonably require of the landowner. If the owner is 
not prepared to do this much for the future of the land whose valua- 
ble products he is harvesting he may find more drastic measures im- 
posed upon him by the public exercise of police power. The Forest 
Service believes that as a matter both of public welfare and of com- 
mercial returns from reforestation, these minimum requirements 
should be followed from now on in cutting the forests of northern 
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. 
The importance of protecting from fire the timberland and 
the cutover lands of the Lake States stands out very prominently 
in Zon’s report. For this indispensable of forestry the public must 
assume a large measure of responsibility. The cooperative plan of 
forest protection embodied in the Clarke-McNary Act, under which 
costs are shared by the Federal Government, the State, and the land- 
owner, is under way in this region but needs material strengthening 
and extension. This is primarily the task of the public agencies, 
State and Federal. However, as Zon points out, the individual owner 
can effectively supplement the protection system of the region by a 
small outlay on his own land; and there is little reason for him to 
wait until the general protection organization is 100 per cent com- 
plete before beginning to practice forestry. Numbers of landowners 
in the Lake States are striking out for themselves in forest protection 
