AFFORESTATION ERRORS

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 30, 3 August 1940, Page 10

AFFORESTATION ERRORS

The man in the street has difficulty in reading the annual reports of some Government Departments that deal with matters technological, because officials versed in technique find it not easy to . divorce themselves from technical terms. But the State Forest Service is making notable efforts, in its annual reports, to explain its problems in language that may be "understancled of the multitude." Forestry is not an easy subject to extricate from the technical smoke screens that are too

often regarded as being necessary to its health; therefore the clarity that marks the 1940 annual report of the State Forest Service is the more to be commended. Consider, for instance, the mystery of "age classes." The author of the report explains by a simple illustration; he assumes that insignis pine, marketable in 35 years, is planted on a land block of 7000 acres.. If a Government, in a depression panic, rushes to the block a huge army of unemployed who plant the whole block in one year, then the whole of ! this exotic plantation is of one age. But a quite different result is secured if the acreage of 7000 is divided by the growth period (35 years), giving an annual planting area of 200 acres or thereabouts. By the annual planting of 200 acres, "in the thirty-sixth year the 200 acres planted in the first year might be harvested and regenerated; in.the thirty-seventh year the next 200 acres planted in the second year might be similarly treated, and so on ad infinitum."

Planting the whole block of land in a year might suit.a depression Government that wishes to employ a large number of relief workers in a hurry, but it is deemed bad afforestation. Yet mass-planting of blocks of land, ignoring or insufficiently recognising the industrial need for "age classes," has marked both public and private afforestation:

Three State exotic forests totalling 41,000 acres were 91 per cent, planted during the five years period 1927-31. During the same period over 80 per cent, of the total State insignis pine stands were planted, and over 50 per cent, of the privately-owned stands. To manage this resource of ill-distri-buted age classes is one of the most difficult problems with which any forest authority has ever been faced. The report proceeds to show that, owing to such cardinal errors, "in the older age classes significant losses of usable wood, by the death of? large suppressed trees, have already occurred." Special efforts are being made by the Department^ by newly-created special staffs, to deal with the situation. Selfcriticism is a wholesome thing, and clear explanations of the unavoidable or avoidable problems that have arisen certainly help the public at large to understand and to sympathise. Afforestation can afford some relief to an overstocked labour market consistently with afforestation interests; but afforestation would become merely tree-planting, of doubtful economic value, if it were run purely as relief work. In this way the report lets some public light into the dark thicket of unplanned exotic plantations-. That light is welcome.