The War-Zone Forest of the Kern 



157 



forest is one of Nature's children. She has other children, and 

 she lets them struggle with one another with all the strength and 

 skill at their command. There is a firing-line and a wide war 

 zone in all our high altitudes, where wind and frost shout 

 *'Back !" and the stubborn trees cry "Forward !" Through the 

 centuries the battle-line surges back and forth — forward into 

 the waste with discouraging slowness, often backward into the 

 forest with disheartening suddenness. Nature leaves the victory 

 to the stronger forces, and the laurel wreath does not always go 

 to the side which civilized man desires and needs to see win. 



Nature is notoriously wasteful, not only in her treatment of 

 these disputed borderlands of the forest realm, but in all forests, 

 even those in which the results of her marvelous handiwork are 

 most awe-inspiring. Here she places too many trees ; there, too 

 few. She almost invariably allows the most desirable trees to be 

 more or less displaced by others which are poorer from the 

 standpoint of their usefulness to man. Her trees do not grow 

 nearly so fast as when she takes man's skill into partnership. 

 The difference in time required to produce merchantable trees 

 in timber-producing forests, as between Nature alone and Nat- 

 ure plus constructive man, is so great as to be measured in dec- 

 ades rather than years. Nature's forest was well able to meet 

 the slight needs of savage man. Civilized man, with his vastly 

 greater demands on the forest, must help Nature to mend her 

 ways, else the forest fails. 



It is now economically possible for man to assist Nature 

 greatly in the middle-altitude forests of the Sierra — that is, in 

 the great timber-producing zone. Aid of the highest importance 

 is being given in many ways in this belt, thanks to the national 

 forests and the national parks. In the higher zone in which 

 Chagoopa Forest and the Crabtree-Tyndall region are located, 

 we in the United States cannot afTord at present to help directly 

 the timber-line forest in its fight. Such help has been given in 

 the Alps and Pyrenees by tree-planting and engineering works, 

 to the great advantage of the valleys below. But our govern- 

 mental agencies can and are giving powerful indirect help by 

 restricting man as a destructive animal. Chagoopa Forest is in 

 a more precarious condition now than is likely to have been the 

 case before the white man came, because until recently fires 



