A PRODIGAL'S EDUCATION

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 49, 26 August 1921, Page 6

A PRODIGAL'S EDUCATION

It is estimated that, as a result of ill-controlled land-clearing operations, New Zealand has about two and a-half million acres of useless barren waste, which was clothed originally with enough timber to provide for New Zealand's national needs for fifty years. This land was deforested not even with the miserable result of < making one blade of grass grow where two trees grew before. It was robbed of its trees in order that useless ■herbage, such as fern, and dangerous herbage, such as blackberry and other noxious weeds, should extend their kingdom. Even if the trees on the land had been unmarketable, and liad possessed no potentiality of use; it would have been better to leave them there, lest worse replace >theni. But to-day it is estimated that these trees, had they been allowed to live, would have met the national timber need for half a century. Deforestation of land not suitable to profitable pasturage is one crime. But where the land is suitable to pasturage, another common crime is the destroying of the forest without first milling and using the marketable timber. Burning of timber has arisen partly from failure to road; and even to-day, on the plea of lack of access, landowners are firing their bush >; while a few miles distant settled communities suffer from a timber and firewood famine. Whatever New Zealand at last possesses in the way of forest economy has been taught by process of prodigality and dearth. And even now the lesson has hardly been learned, and will be lost again unless the Government stancTs to its guns.