WATER POWER MISUSED

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 86, 11 April 1935, Page 8

WATER POWER MISUSED

Enormous boulders occurring; in i\cw Zealand river-valleys have often given rise Id arguments as to the boulder-transporting power of floods. Some light is thrown on the question by a photograph in '"American Forests" of erosion and flood damage in Parish Canyon, Ulnli, where boulders arc shown on farm lands, one of them "weighing 75 Ions" (and, compared with human figures in the photograph, looking all that weight). As the farm lands shown are comparatively level, and the mountains distant, this is evidently not a case of a rolled boulder, such as might be found in the bed of a ravine stream, conveyed there from the mountain-side by gravitation. A flood that carries huge stones across level or gently sloping farm land is striking evidence of the power of undisciplined water to coyer, remove, or otherwise render useless the topsoil on which the farmer relies. Under the Roosevelt scheme thousands of miles of terrace trenches (to collect water and silt, also to grow grasses, and later trees) are being dug-in the deforested and denuded mountains, to control waterfiow. Photographs of these are accompanied by the statement that this salvage work is being done up to 3000 feet, or roughly about the level of bushline on the Tararua range. In short, the Americans are laboriously planting trees at and below levels : where Nature has provided them in New Zealand. Yet in New Zealand occasional fires and ever-present plant-eating animals wage deadly war on the forest, countered only by such deer-killing campaigns as the Department of Internal Affairs has conducted in the South Island and is now carrying on in the Tararuas.