ROLE OF FIRE IN CALIFORNIA PINE FORESTS 73 
where the average stand per acre is 18,000 feet and the railroad and 
arding costs are respectively $1.50 and $0.51 per thousand, the fol- 
owing increases of cost in inverse ratio to reductions in stand per acre 
would be met: 
Reduction of 500 board feet increases cost $0.06 per 1,000, or $1.08 per acre. 
Reduction of 1,000 board feet increases cost $0.12 per 1,000, or $2.16 per acre. 
Reduction of 1,500 board feet increases cost $0.18 per 1,000, or $3.24 per acre. 
Reduction of 2,000 board feet increases cost $0.25 per 1,000, or $4.50 per acre. 
Thus, while quality reduction brings the more valuable stands grad- 
ually down to the level of the poorer ones, quantity reduction is tak- 
ing these poorer stands out of the merchantable class altogether. In 
one of these two ways, even the lightest fire that runs through the 
forest is having its part in destroying timber values for the landowner 
and for the logging operator. 
EFFECT ON SILVICULTURAL PRACTICE 
Not only do fires affect the possibility of exploiting the forests, but 
they also make the problem of securing natural reproduction much 
more difficult. Where no sale of mature timber is possible the only 
silvicultural measure available is fire protection. Many stands of 
excellent timber are so isolated in the vast brush fields of this region— 
virtually waste land from which timber has been driven by fire— 
that the expense of reaching and exploiting the scattered islands of 
valuable growth still found here ee there is not justified. And even 
where the process of repeated fires has not produced the brush-field 
stage of retrogression, it has often so far reduced the density of the 
stand that there are no continuous bodies of merchantable timber 
large enough to justify modern logging operations, with their heavy 
investment in transportation. The resulting inability to encourage 
reproduction through cutting must remain until timber becomes much 
more valuable than it is now, or until, with the help of fire exclusion, 
the stands are enabled to build up sufficiently to warrant exploitation. 
An illustration of this situation is to be found in the Shasta National 
Forest. Out of an area, in round numbers, of 803,000 acres of Govern- 
ment land, approximately 215,000 acres are brush fields, and an 
additional 143,000 are protection forest or naturally treeless or barren 
land, leaving an area of 445,000 acres classed as timberland. Of this, 
some 22,000 acres have already been cut over under silvicultural 
management and an aditional 30,000 acres can be exploited profitably 
under present economic conditions. The balance of this area, 393,000 
acres, consists of open, understocked stands of patches of excellent 
merchantable timber surrounded by brush, or of forests so badly 
decayed that the mature timber is practically worthless. 
The difficulty of silviculture and management on stands where, 
through the influence of fire, defective trees of inferior species are 
abundant, may become very serious. Decay entering through fire 
scars has in many localities rendered white fir and incense cedar in 
articular so defective that it is often extremely difficult, in national 
orest sales, to have them cut as closely as good silvicultural practice 
and sanitation, or the removal of infected trees, demand (1/7). On 
Government timber sales these problems have been measurably 
solved by making the valuable pines carry the losses due to the 
