TANGIBLE FOREST VALUES

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 48, 25 August 1931, Page 8

TANGIBLE FOREST VALUES

1' orest. falls into two main divisions—utilisation (limber conversion) forest and "protection" or moisture forest. The former builds houses, etc., the latter regulates walerflow. Because the utilisation forest gives a commercial return, there are always many interests, including timber interests, fighting over it, for its good or ill; at the very least it may be said that the timber forests are kept in the public eye. But the "protection" forests yield little or no direct money return (opossums excepted) and there is no £s. d. "pull" to focus the public gaze upon the fortunes of these remote mountain assets. All the same, they are of equal or greater national importance than the timber forests; and if the public at large took a long view of the country's wider welfare—welfare of farms and all the lower land, as in valleys like the Hutt—public opinion would be keener about the safety of "protection" forests than of any other natural and national properly. These words of Mr. F. E. Hulchinson, Lecturer in Forest Utilisation, Canterbury College, should be framed: The values involved are not tho utilisation values of a few scanty areas of noncommercial timber located in inaccessible regions, but tli - values of all the lower lands subjected to flooding, tho loss caused by the floods, the rates annually paid for river-protective works that may palliate but do not cure, _ the interference with hydroelectric or water supply schemes, and so on—factors which no ono yet has attempted definitely to assess . . . but which are quite definite and tangible in their action. I The above has a meaning for the (Wellington City Council, Harbour' Board, Hutt River Board, Water Board, and every local body concerned in the Hutt Valley. In another column the New Zealand Forestry League, quoting Mr. Hutchinson, sets out to show that "protection" forests, in order to do their work, must be preserved in their entirety: that no single plant is waste; [hat the deer pest.should be fought in its beginnings; and that any argument that the Taiarua forest need not occasion concern, until it reaches the j extreme case of Haurangi, is a fallacy. The reasons need not be duplicated here. The article speaks for itself.