A LITTLE PROBLEM.

Observer, Volume XL, Issue 13, 29 November 1919, Page 3

A LITTLE PROBLEM.

The Man and the Tree

I 1 F a million odd people in New Zealand export three hundred million feet of timber in a year and burn at least seventy times as much, how long would it take if the country were really populated to make New Zealand a howling waterless waste? The probabilities are, of course, that if the country was populated there would be some units in the population who would have sufficient brains to understand the vital need of trees to New Zealand.

The apparent reason why Ncav Zealand deports the largest quantity of her timber is that Australia supplies to New Zealand large quantities of her incomparable hardAvoods; but the real reason is that very astute gentlemen in Australia saAv a point that New. Zealanders have not yet assimilated —that in the timbers of NeAv Zealand there is money without end. The person in Ncav Zealand who pleads for the life of a tree is looked upon as one of the "cranks," but Avhen the shocking antipathy to trees is overcome in this country, the person Avho knows best hoAv to groAv trees, and plenty of them, Avill be regarded Avith cawii greater veneration than the carpetbagger Avho spouts his political nostrums to a people expected to pay six hundred a year for the said nostrums.

In all the Avorld "there is no country whose forests have been so diabolically treated as Ncav Zealand. The NeAV Zealand farmer, because he is among the most ignorant of God's creatures, Avill gleefully condemn a country to drought and devastation by burning a million pounds' worth of trees to grow a hundred pounds' worth of grass. His successors will try without avail to repair damage that is, on the whole, irreparable. The Noav Zealand habit of destruction of its finest assets is neA'er punished by the Government, consisting as it does largely of men pledged to destruction as a means of immediate cash return.

The huge export of NeAV Zealand timber already results in a sparselypopulated country importing timber from a densely-populated country (U.S.A.) for means to build its homes. The timber Avhich the New Zealand settler is alloAved to burn as if it Avere rubbish, Avhen put into a wooden house, costs more than a permanent home in any other part of the world. The problem not only remains unsolved, but alleged statesmen simply refuse to regard it as a problem. The State permits the absolute destruction of forests that have taken Nature a couple of thousand years to groAV, and cures this destruction by planting at great expense saplings Avhich in a hundred years will not compensate in quality or quantity for the hideous waste permitted now.

Men of imagination, skill, and knowledge, foreseeing the future, become disappointed with the stupid people who hail "a good burn" as a national asset, and see vast areas of hills, burnt into absolute worthlessness, representing a national policy.

The curiosity in New Zealand is that on treeless tracts the settler seeks to repair the bareness by afforestation, and on vast tracts where Nature grows trees, to make them absolutely bare. The question is not one of mere sentiment, but of future existence. The vast export by a few people in a sparsely-popu-lated country of the best of its timber is a crime. The yearly crime is about to be re-enacted, and the settlers in any bush area will praise God for "a good burn." The timber millers will be equally thankful to the Creator for his gift of a Melbourne market. • » • If one million odd people can destroy one of the finest assets New Zealand has at so great a rate, how much sooner could a ( normal population of, say, five millions do it? ■ ■ • Men in New Zealand have always fought trees. . In the future treelessness will fight the Men. And the man'who sits on a wooden chair and scratches his .wooden head will say as usual, "What rot!"