176 FOREST ALIENATION. 
balanced in a few years by the opening-up of the forest and the marketing 
of its products. Always it is demarcation, forestry, and settlement that 
is contemplated. It is settlement and working that puts the value on 
to the forest. The best forest with a proportion of old timber and much 
smaller timber would yield handsome returns in perpetuity as soon as 
the axe was put into it by foresters. The worst forest, Manuka or scrub, 
interplanted with quick-growing exotics would give some return (less cost 
of interplanting and interest) in thirty or forty years. Forest where 
a sufficient natural regeneration of native trees could be secured 
would give immediate returns and a full crop in from 60 to 120 
years. The maximum value is that of such a Kauri forest as was Puhi- 
puhi, where there was plenty of young timber and which would in a few 
years be making £10 per acre per year net. New Zealand has still 
probably Totara forests that would do nearly that. Ordinarily there is 
a transition period of much lower yield, as worked out in ‘‘ Balance-sheet 
of a Normal Kauri Forest’’ (p. 95). Puhipuhi in present and dis- 
counted value of future crops had an immediate value of £720 per 
acre (p. 68). Thus when I take £30 per acre as the average potential 
value of the present demarcatable forest I am perhaps making too low 
an estimate. In New Zealand, where land is so valuable, it is obviously 
widely incorrect to estimate the value of the forest only from the present 
crop on it, which is largely a matter of accident. Just as an experi- 
enced farmer is wanted to appraise farm-land values, an experienced 
forester 1s required to appraise forestal values. 
After demarcation the treatment best suited to each forest would be 
settled by the ‘“‘ working-plan’’ or aménagement, and that woulf indi- 
cate the financial position of each forest. At present it is happily not 
necessary for New Zealand to concern itself much about the £1,500,000 
loss, the cost of full planting in the open. But it is the sword of 
Damocles hanging over the country, and every year of heedless bush 
alienation brings it nearer. 
This figure of £1,500,000 lost yearly, if the forest had to be made 
good by forest plantations, may be considered with the £1,388 per day 
(Forestry League address, p. 2) that New Zealand was paying for im- 
ported timber before the war; and with the figure, three or four times 
as much, of indirect loss in various trades consequent on the increasing 
dearness of their raw material, timber and bark—house-building, furni- 
ture-making, leather-making, and (with national forestry) papermaking. 
If we add these two items* together, which is the logical sequence, the 
country may be out of pocket by £3,000,000 yearly, as the result of 
reckless forest alienation without expert forest demarcation. 
Less Costly to sacrifice the Forest Plantations than to alienate First- 
class Kauri Forest.—If, owing to political causes or the natural con- 
servatism of a distant and isolated community, it should so happen 
that the present unreflecting forest destruction should proceed to a still 
further extreme, there is no escaping this conclusion: jt would be 
more economical to cut down the forest plantations than any of the 
remaining first-class Kauri forest. For the average yield from first- 
quality cultivated Kauri forest cannot be less than £10 per acre per 
year, and may be more (p. 98). The most Sanguine planter of intro- 
duced trees (and I reckon myself one) would not estimate an average 
vield from the forest plantations of anywhere near £10 net per acre 
per year as a net rental value. 


OE ee ee 
* £2,000,000 cost of plantations to reforest (p. 175) and £1.000.000 the v 
and discounted future timber crops of forest alienated. 000,000 the value of present 
