New York State Forests Must be Conserved.

New York State Forests Must be Conserved.

在最近的地址在纽约发表之前,the American Scenic and Preservation Society and the New York Association for the Preservation of the Adirondacks. James Whipple, New York State Forest, Fish and Game commissioner enlarged at some length upon the vital necessity of conserving the forest? of the State, and added that, if their destruction continued for ten years longer, there would not be a forest tree left in the country— a condition which would seriously impair its prosperity from an industrial, commercial, agricultural and sanitary standpoint. He took the ground that the preservation of the forests is at this time far. and away of more importance to the American people than the Panama canal. A reservoir is to built to supply water to New York city from the Catskills and will cost an enormous sum. Yet, if the slaughter of trees is to continue, this money will be wasted, for within a few years the city of New York will be compelled to draw its supply from the Adirondack district direct. Commissioner Whipple stated that the activity of the lumbermen in New York State alone had caused lake Champlain and lake George to lower over a foot each in the past year. The water power of the State alone (he added) is worth more in actual money than the coal mines of Pennsylvania, and he advised a movement to force the legislature to pass at once stringent laws to protect the forests.

In an editorial article on “Commonsense and Thrift” the New York Tribune points out that while mines, gas and oil wells and similar natural resources must be exhausted some day, waste or no waste, there are other equally important natural resources, “which, under proper management, will be perpetual, which even the fullest use will not exhaust, though reckless misuse of them would destroy them as surely as those first named. These are the elementary resources of field, forest and stream—the soil, the trees and the supply of water for drinking, for power and for navigation. It is an interesting circumstance that all three are inseparably united, the conservation of all three depending primarily upon the preservation and cultivation of one. The equable flow of our rivers, so essential for navigation and so valuable and of such increasing value for power as the supplies of coal, oil and gas diminish, depends absolutely upon the preservation of the forests as natural storage reservoirs. Upon the same conditions depends the protection of vast areas of fertile soil from becoming sandy and arid deserts. The meetings of the Rivers and Plarbors Congress, the Conservation Commission and similar organisations are, therefore, most encouraging. They indicate an awakening of the national mind to the urgency of prompt and radical reform in our methods of dealing with natural resources, if we are to avoid incurring, perhaps, for ourselves and certainly for not remote posterity, the irretrievable ruin which has overtaken other lands. Especially urgent is the need of preserving our Eastern mountain forests, in New England and throughout the Appalachian system. For, while forests on the plains may he replanted, it is humanly and physically impossible to replace forests which have once been stripped from mountain sides. For, with the disappearance of the trees, the soil is swept away, and nothing remains but steep wastes of naked rock, the parents of alternate drought and flood. And, since the streams which proceed from these mountains are the most valuable of all, it is no exaggeration to say that the most urgent and the most important work of conservation of resources now before this nation is the preservation and cultivation of what remain* of the forest areas of the White and Appalachian mountains.”