FOREWORD xxvii 
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A Forest Policy For Maine. 
If the State of Maine will protect the forests within her bor- 
ders from fire, will carry on a progressive plan for State ownership 
of lands suitable for reforestation and improvement, will encourage 
the planting of trees by private owners and improve and reforest 
such tracts as may be secured in the future for public ownership, 
it would seem that in these three fundamental principles—protec- 
tion, public ownership and reforestation—we have a forest policy 
for Maine that is adequate for the present. For a beginning I 
would rather see these three basic principles diligently applied, 
than to undertake a forestry program with more complicated, and, 
WASTE IN LUMBERING. 
Brow log on yard, a fine stick of spruce with owner’s mark and scaler’s 
check mark, left to rot in the woods. Photo by Maine Forestry Dept. 
in a way, experimental details which might serve perhaps to dis- 
tract from the main issue, namely: to stop wasting what we have 
and to add what we can to-our forest resources. 
There are many other valuable measures of forest protection 
which we may hope to grow up to and develop in time. We have 
to admit that our present system of taxation invites the stripping 
of our land, that; the accumulation.of, slash,.from, lumbering makes 
fire-pretection «more euneut and that indiscriminate cutting of all 
