The Price of Our Forests

The patent fact on the surface of this business is that timber is money. The landowner's axe, with rapid sweep, is advancing through the woodlands and leaving emptiness in place of the waving harvest of forests. If it will pay to plant out the treeless plains of California and wait decades for the trees to attain any size and value, what is the value of unappreciated acres on Puget Sound already so luxuriantly set with timber of a growth which centuries would not make? Prof. Hough of New York mentions as an instance of the deleterious effects of cutting down these monarchs—which cause currents of air to hold above them in a sponge-like mass the passing clouds—that merchant ships one hundred years ago sailed east from Bladensburg to the Potomac, whereas, in this Centennial year, there is not sufficient water at high tide, owing to the systematic denudation of the land, to float a canoe. He also cited authorities to prove that streams contained water longer on their wooden sides than on the deforested, the springs yielding or failing as the trees along the banks were allowed to grow or were cut down.