Proceedings of the Second National Conservation Congress at Saint Paul Part 54

I trust that the Congress will strengthen and perfect plans adequate for the protection of the people's interests and the development of these resources with an eye to their future greatness.

Respectfully submitted, [Signed] CHAS. R. CASE _President_

REPORT OF THE WESTERN FORESTRY AND CONSERVATION a.s.sOCIATION

Let us concede that Conservation means that we, as a people, should manage all our resources with the intelligence and prudence that an individual should devote to managing his own property. Let us use them profitably, as he would; neither destroying or wasting them unnecessarily, nor giving them heedlessly to anyone who needs them less and will use them less to our advantage. But let us not, during excursions into Const.i.tutional problems, State rights, and other bewildering issues, forget that first of all comes protection from destruction and waste! The great danger now is that our resources will disappear while we are deciding to whom they shall belong.

It is of this kind of Conservation alone, the Conservation that conserves, that I bring you a message from the Pacific Northwest. The Western Forestry and Conservation a.s.sociation does not decry the necessity for wise action by State and Nation in the safeguarding of water-power, minerals, and lands; but the settlement of such affairs is not our function. I come only to tell you of the work of the most perfectly organized and successful Conservation movement ever undertaken by private individuals in this country--the forest-protective a.s.sociations of the Pacific slope. We talk little, but we work, spend money, and accomplish.

In our five States from Montana to California stands half the merchantable timber in the United States, the majority in private hands.

The control of this stupendous community resource entails grave responsibilities. To preserve it for the fullest use, to replace it when used, if possible--this is the timber-owner's duty. His ownership is largely a public trust. Nowhere else has he realized this so promptly and acted so adequately as in the Pacific Northwest. I have come to report his stewardship, and to show you that you need not wonder whether he will follow the Conservation banner.

The Western Forestry and Conservation a.s.sociation has no individual membership. It is the central medium or clearing house for a dozen subsidiary a.s.sociations of timber-land owners, representing millions of acres, who cooperate in order to apply to the best advantage the most modern and efficient systems of forest protection. Through this means they employ a trained forester to a.s.sist them in solving problems of reforestation, forest legislation, education, and like matters demanding expert knowledge or central facilities. Its meetings are attended not only by delegates from these timber-owners' organizations, but also by the leading State and Forest Service officials and representatives of the public Conservation a.s.sociations. All work in the closest harmony to devise and execute practical and effective policies. There are no dissensions at these meetings; no question as to who is most competent by right of law or geography. Every man there, be he a humble officer of the Forest Service, State Forester, or timber owner, is there because he wants to do his own part, with his own hands or money, in preserving the magnificent forests of the West. He knows what he is talking about, and the rest are mighty glad to hear him.

But we do not stop with meetings, and herein is perhaps our chief difference from a great many advocates of Conservation. You have all read of the recent fires in our northwestern country. They have been greatly exaggerated, the area injured really being very limited.

Nevertheless, while we talk here of generalities, bands of weary, half-blind men are still battling to prevent fresh outbreaks; the smoke still curls over the blackened forms of those who met a fearful death to save the lives of others; scores who fought till they could fight no more still lie bandaged and sightless in the extremity of mortal agony.

No honor is too great to do these heroes. We of the West owe a sacred debt to them, one and all, and not least to the men of the Forest Service whose training made them as efficient as they were brave. We want more, not fewer, of them. But side by side with the bravest, equally efficient, equally trained and disciplined, worked the patrolmen of our fire a.s.sociations. Conservationists employed by private effort.

We have had no time to prepare nice statistics, for our fire fighters have something else to do; but I venture to say that our a.s.sociations'

expenditures for forest protection this year will be over $300,000. In the Coeur d' Alene fires alone, a single one of our a.s.sociations put 850 men in the field.

And yet this is not much to boast of. There should have been no fires to fight. The way to prevent fire is to prevent it, not fight it when almost or quite beyond control. The only solution of the fire question is better enforcement of better laws, better public sentiment, and better patrol. There must be an organized force of trained and vigilant men, ample in numbers during the dry season to reach all fires in their incipiency. It is in this that our a.s.sociations now lead all other agencies. They handle the fire situation in a much better and more comprehensive manner than even the Government has ever done, because they spend three times as much money per acre for patrol. Thoroughly excellent as are the methods in the National Forests--they are identical with those of the most progressive practical timberman--Congress does not sustain them adequately.

Our own system is by no means perfect yet. Although in the territory covered by our a.s.sociation in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon we have perhaps 500 organized and equipped patrolmen, each authorized to hire help when needed, there is still much unorganized area, and not all timbermen within our territory contribute as they should. We need more men and more money from our own brethren, and heartier cooperation from public, State, and Government. But we confidently expect to get all this, just as we have in greater measure each year in the past. And when, as already in Washington last year, one a.s.sociation protects 8,000,000 acres with a loss of but 1,000 acres; when this small loss was caused by less than 6 fires out of 1,200 extinguished; when in this historic year of 1910 we have controlled our countless fires so that actual disasters can be counted on the fingers, and our loss as a whole is insignificant--we feel that no one has done more to prove his willingness and competence to practice Conservation that counts than the northwestern forest owner.

The northwestern timberman approves all measures that will give the greatest number of people the greatest permanent opportunity to profit by the fullest use and least waste of all our resources. Thus they will be most prosperous and use most lumber. He is doing more than anyone else, Government or State, to protect both old and growing forests from wasteful destruction, so there may be most lumber to use. I take it this is Conservation.

[Signed] E. T. ALLEN _Forester_

REPORT OF THE UNITED MINE WORKERS

I regret very much that serious complications in the mining industry of our country, together with an enormous amount of important matters requiring my immediate attention, makes it impossible for me to keep my engagement to address the Conservation Congress on the subject, "Are we mining intelligently?" I am intensely interested in the subject of conserving our natural resources, but I am still more interested in protecting the lives and health of our people. We are not mining intelligently, as I will explain by letter.

Success to the work of the Conservation Congress! It means much for the future generations of this greatest industrial country on earth.

[Signed] T. L. LEWIS _President_

TIMBER CONSERVATION

GEORGE H. EMERSON

_Hoquiam, Washington_

To save our Nation's resources is the wish of all; to save our timber is the special wish of all timber owners--no one is so much interested as he who has his private gain or loss joined to his interest in the public good.

The American people are a prodigal folk. They have looked upon their resources as inexhaustible, their lands as unlimited. They have called upon all nations to come, and to all comers they have given lands, mines, timber, water-power. Has this course been right? Up to a point in our development, yes; of late, no--most emphatically NO! These resources are entrusted to us as a heritage for our children and generations yet to come. "America for Americans" should have been sounded 25 years ago; had it been, there would today be no cry of approaching timber shortage.

What more absurd disposition of our timber land could have been made than the laws under which it has pa.s.sed to private hands? The Homestead and Preemption acts, framed for prairies, requiring the settler to live on and cultivate the soil, have been extended to our forests, and to comply with their terms, thousands of men have withdrawn from vocations by which they were increasing the wealth of the Nation, and with blankets and provisions strapped on their backs and axe and compa.s.s in hand have worked their weary way through the pathless forests to vacant Government lands, on which they filed. Then with axe and fire they spent months destroying the property they proposed to acquire t.i.tle to--destroying the resources of the Nation instead of increasing its wealth; and in doing so, fires reached beyond their control and destroyed still other timber. The law and the ruling of the Land Office have made this destruction one of the considerations of acquiring t.i.tle.

Settlers must prove they "have cleared and planted and maintained a residence on the land;" that is, they must prove they have cut and burned a certain amount of the Nation's timber, and have wasted or--worse--employed in destruction certain of the Nation's time, and this to acquire t.i.tle to land upon which they could no more live than in the middle of a desert! Lands whose only value was in timber they were compelled, in part, to destroy; and this where they never intended to settle, other than to comply with the letter of the law, and never expected to return after acquiring t.i.tle. The months or years wasted in complying with these foolish laws they might better by far have been spent in jail at the public expense. It would have cost the Nation far less, and would have been less dangerous to life than the lonely existence remote from other human beings, where any accident to limb costs a life.

Sometimes there was an actual settler who wanted a farm or a pasture. He considered the timber only in the light of its cost to remove, and with axe, saw, and fire, he proceeded to its destruction. And why not? That which cost nothing looked to be of no value! Timber appeared as free as air and sunshine.

Later the lumberman came, and up to 1885 our Government offered him in Washington hundreds of thousands of acres of the best-timbered land for $1.25 per acre. Michigan and Wisconsin had been so offered, and mostly sold. The lands of the Northern Pacific could then be had at $2.50 per acre and paid for in the bonds of the Company, then worth half their face. The lumbermen looked upon the timber as inexhaustible. Only that near water could be harvested by known methods; only the best of the trees could be sawed and sold at a profit; only western markets appeared possible. What wonder fires were set to burn the choppings and make pastures? No people save that which cost nothing, and for which they have no use and cannot sell. When things become of value they are conserved, and when of enough value they are manufactured or grown; and the ratio between cost and selling price regulates the supply of things manufactured or grown.

Up to within a few years there has been plenty of timber land that could be taken under the Homestead, Preemption, or Timber and Stone Acts, or scripted or bought of the railroads. The blame, then, for the waste of our timber has been with the laws that made it valueless. The men we have sent to Washington to make our laws have given this timber to all comers of all nations. They are the men our people should hold responsible for the waste of our resources. These same men now tell us, "We are on the verge of a timber famine," and that the lumbermen are wantonly wasting the Nation's timber. Is it not the old cry of "Stop thief!" sounded by the culprit? By their acts they have made this timber valueless. Had the Government estimated the cost of growing a timber crop and sold its timber at about that price, timber would have been protected, conserved, and replanted, and its use would be as in Europe, about 60 feet per capita per annum, instead of 600 feet as in America.

Since our timber has taken on a value, its destruction by fire has greatly decreased. Timber owners now use precautions, and employ fire patrols. So, too, with harvesting; it is cut cleaner, sawed with thinner saws, manufactured with better appliances, and great saving has been effected in every branch of the industry--all because of greater values.

Now, if just tax laws were pa.s.sed, taxing no crop until harvested, and taxing reforested land as stump land; if rates of interest were lower, and if stringent fire laws and careful patrol were enforced; if stumpage was a little higher or labor a little lower, or the railroads were to make a reduced rate on low-grade products, the law of supply and demand (or the ratio of cost to selling price) would reforest old choppings.

Toward these things we are rapidly advancing, and before our timber is exhausted we shall have reached this point.

If our Government would hold her reserved timber at cost of reproduction, and protect the timber of the Nation by import duty, the question of timber shortage in America would soon be settled. Instead, they threaten reduction of its present value and increase of its waste by the removal of duty on imports. There is no way to conserve any commodity but to give it value, and no way to make people manufacture goods or grow crops except to offer a price that covers cost and a profit.

If the public would buy lumber of strength and durability suited to the purposes required, instead of ordering grades better than needed, they would help the Conservation of our timber far more than by essays and speeches. The most unreasonable of all buyers are our Government officials; with them there seems to be no purpose for which ordinary lumber is suited. So, too, if our State legislators would pa.s.s just tax laws, they would make a grand move toward timber Conservation. Instead, counties are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars--which the timber owners must pay--estimating the number of feet of standing timber, so as to be sure they find it all and tax it out of existence. This generation owes posterity laws that will save some of our present timber and leave to them growing timber crops instead of charred and desolate stump lands telling only of their fathers' greed and lack of foresight.

Wonderful tables have been prepared showing the upward tendency in prices of timber lands. Far better prepare a table showing the cost of growing a timber crop, and causes that have deprived it of its legitimate value. Water always rises to its level when the pressure is removed. Timber-value level is costly to produce. The greatest pressure to hold timber values down in the past have been our land laws; first the Federal laws for the sale of timber, second the State laws for taxes--and lack of all laws for protection and planting.

Our Nation is still a prodigal. She taps the fuel supply of future generations and allows the gas to burn and the oil to run to waste. More of the timber of the Nation has been burned for clearing and pasture than has been sawed by the mills; but when the lumbermen are accused of destroying their property, or not utilizing all that will return cost for their labor, they are accused of lack of good intelligence--and that we resent. New England and New York have a greater area in timber than they had 50 years ago. Nearly every town site has a saw mill that supplies local demand and makes shipments to nearby cities. The few days I spent in New Hampshire last spring, and the auto trips I took through the places I knew in my youth, impressed these facts with force. Rail trips through Connecticut, Rhode Island, Ma.s.sachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland revealed the fact that thousands of acres once under cultivation are now in timber, and that old forest lands are reproducing. Pine groves, cut when I was a boy, are being harvested, and fields where I picked rocks every spring are growing beautiful pine forests; the present owner of the old homestead in New Hampshire has put in a little saw and shingle mill to cut trees that were not sprouted when I left the old farm. The small saw-mills that are supplying the local demand are cutting the largest of the new growth, and the supply of that portion of the States where the timber was once exhausted will hereafter be adequate to local demands. As it is in New England and the Middle States, so it is in the South, in the West, in California and Oregon and Washington; if we keep out the fires in the old choppings, the new growth will be ready before the old is gone--and the waste of today kept always damp by the young growth, brush, ferns, and vines, will rival in value the portion of the tree we are now able to market.

Again consumption in all things is in proportion to price. Advance the price of lumber, and you reduce the consumption. Stone, brick, concrete, and steel are ready subst.i.tutes, as the price of lumber advances. In Europe, lumber is no longer a necessity, only a luxury, and not one much cared for at that; this has been forced home to me in countries I have visited during the past six months. Six days from New York we touch the Azores, a land where no lumber is used except for floor-joists and rafters in the cheaper buildings; next we touched Madeira, and found a city of stone. So with Gibraltar, southern Spain, Egypt, Syria, Greece, Italy, France; not a lumber yard in all these countries that we could find. A cargo a year would supply the demand for all purposes. The wonder was not how these people get along without lumber, but how they use the 60 feet per annum they are reported to require. I do not think there is one shingle roof in all those countries, and I expect a very good knowledge of Arabic would be needed to explain to those people what a shingle is and its use. In Constantinople we found a few miserable board shacks. Lumber comes to that market at a low price from the Black Sea, and it appears to be a detriment rather than a good. In Switzerland and southern Germany, some houses are built of wood above the lower story; but I think there are no shingle roofs. These countries are well timbered, with trees in rows showing they are planted. The price of common lumber is only a little higher than with us, but labor is cheap, and growing timber exempt from taxes. Trees there can find a profitable market, trunks, limbs, stump, and roots. It is then, little wonder mountain sides, impossible for agriculture, should be planted to timber.

Those timber areas do not use much of their lumber. In Switzerland and Germany we found saw mills, some of them of fair capacity, and shipping by rail, but their towns were built of stone. The mills select the largest trees, and replace with new plants. In time we shall reach some of these same conditions, and plant our timber instead of allowing it to grow at will. All this will come about when proper laws are enacted.

American people will some time awaken to the fact, long since known in Europe, that timber is no necessity; only a makeshift. Bridges of rock, houses of brick and stone and steel, with roofs of tile, are for the centuries; buildings of wood are only for the years and the flames.

Lumber is cheap in the new countries, and convenient for quick shelter; and it is there forests are found. Big timbers may become scarce, but their demand is also decreasing. Already our cities have fire limits.

Bridges and spars are of steel; and if our farmers could obtain money at city rates, it is doubtful if it would not be cheaper for them to build fire-proof houses than to pay higher insurance on wooden buildings.

Already roofs of shingles are in balance with roofs of other and safer material, and the price of shingles is fixed by this compet.i.tion. As it is with shingles it will be with lumber, and is for many purposes; in many countries for nearly all purposes.

Do not think I underestimate the value of our timber, or fail to advocate its protection and reproduction; but he who says we are approaching the time when timber values are to be much greater than now, and he who predicts a timber famine, have both overlooked facts that will come to the front with the years. The cry of "Fire!" never stopped a conflagration. The cry of Conservation will never stop the waste of valueless commodities. Action is needed in both instances, if results are to be attained. To conserve our timber we must give it value. Let the Government refuse to sell from its reserves except for cost of reproduction; also protect us from foreign compet.i.tion. Educate our loggers to the enormity of the crime of burning choppings fit only for the timber crop. Let States impose rigid fire laws and make liberal appropriation for forest protection. Let our legislators see the folly and injustice of taxing the same crop year after year; a crop that can contribute nothing toward paying those taxes until marketed, a crop that is of far less value per acre than the yield of fruit gathered each year. Do not be afraid the few remaining timber owners are going to be benefited at the expense of the many; rather the benefit will be for our children and our children's children. Above all, remember the timber owner is not to blame, only fortunate that he bought timber that our Government was willing to part with for a song; and hold our laws and their makers responsible for results for which they, only, are to blame.

The forest fires of the West today are more often set by the railroads than by all others. Their locomotives are torches of demons, tearing through our forests, streaming fire from their stacks and leaving all behind in flames. From the rear platforms of trains I have seen hundreds of little fires spring up as we pa.s.sed--this, when the woods were dry and conditions right. The timber they burn is their resources for freight. The destruction they create is a loss of millions to their own business. It would seem prosecution for damage done should follow their wanton torches, and that laws should be made for the protection of their own interests they so recklessly ignore. It is no longer the logger or the settler that causes our forest fires. Our laws and public opinion, and vast sums expended by timber owners prevent the setting of careless fires; but the railroad locomotives still scatter fire along their pathway through the woods. Let the railroads learn a lesson from the recent Montana fires that stretched along their lines on either side and crossed the rivers where they cross--fires that have destroyed millions of young pines that a few years hence would have yielded a freight of from $10 to $30 each tree for their transportation to market.

Let the loggers awaken to the fatal folly of allowing the first fire in their cuttings, and our legislators to the necessity of forest protection. Stop the first fire where land is only adopted to the timber crop.

Out in the West where our mountains are the highest; where our streams spring from the eternal glaciers and are fullest when the weather is warmest; where water falls the farthest; where our soils are most productive when moistened; where our fruit is the finest; where trees grow the largest; where our hills contain coal, iron, silver, copper, and gold; where our ocean is the greatest and our fisheries are most prolific, our people are all Conservationists. They are for Conservation that is practical and adapted to their peculiar conditions; Conservation that shall develop and utilize their resources, and that shall yield the greatest good to the greatest number, and to the future as well as the present.

Where all things are on so grand a scale, the people cannot be small and narrow. They are as are their woods, their mountains, and their torrents, grand and active; and they are to be trusted. They will solve the problem of conserving their timber. They will keep out fires. They will enact just tax laws. They will guard their holdings. They will encourage new growth. They will be first to awaken to the best methods of forest Conservation adapted to their needs. They will solve the problem of conserving our western forests.

FORESTS AND STREAM-FLOW

WILLIAM S. HARVEY

_Philadelphia_

Professor Willis L. Moore, Chief of the United States Weather Bureau, in his address before the Atlantic Deeper Waterways Convention in Providence, September 1, 1910, made the statement that the waterways were in no way affected by the forests; that he had records made for many years that clearly prove that the waterways have in no way been affected by the acts of man; that he was aware that he would destroy a popular impression by making this statement, and that he based his statement upon the facts as he knew them. The following eminent men in articles published in _American Forestry Magazine_ for April, 1910, take exception to and refute the statements and claims made by Professor Moore (and which he had previously expressed): Professor Filibert Roth, University of Michigan, Forester; Professor L. C. Glenn, Vanderbilt University, Geologist; and Professor George F. Swain, Harvard University, Engineer. These gentlemen represent geology, forestry, and engineering, and their training, knowledge, and experience qualify them to speak intelligently and with authority on this question of the influence and effect forests have upon streams.

Mill owners and operators on various rivers in New England have practical demonstration that denuding or partial denuding of the forests on the head-waters of the stream on which they are dependent for power has seriously impaired the uniformity of flow and lessened the amount of power which they are able to secure for the same number of days in a year: that denuding also allows the rainfall to run off rapidly, causing erosion, which erosion is filling and choking the streams and rivers and in seasons of flood depositing silt in valleys which have heretofore been of agricultural value, thus largely impairing or destroying their fertility. This condition equally applies to various streams and rivers in other sections of the United States. It is moreover denied and refuted by the greatest financial and manufacturing interests, who have spent and are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the development of electric power on the waterways of the United States.

They have in their employ the most competent engineers known, who have investigated the entire situation, studied the maximum and minimum rainfall for a long period of years, and conditions influencing the territory embraced on the streams and rivers upon which they propose to make and are making and have made developments. These great interests, vital to commerce and trade, emphatically state that the flow of streams is affected by the forest cover, and that they are most anxious and are earnest in efforts to have the forest cover protected in all territory in which they operate, claiming that if the hillsides or mountains on the headwaters of water-sheds are denuded the volume of power will be so diminished, impaired, or destroyed that the value of the bonds issued for the development of these powers, and heretofore considered one of the safest and most desirable investments, will be seriously imperilled.