DESTRUCTION OF FORESTS.

Waka Maori, Volume 10, Issue 16, 11 August 1874, Page 196

DESTRUCTION OF FORESTS.

We give below some extracts from reports on the destruction of forests in various parts of the world read by Mr. Vogel, when moving the second reading of the New Zealand Forests Bill, on the 14th of July last:— Dr. Hooker, in a letter respecting Ceylon, on the coast of India, refers as follows to an account he received from the Leeward Islands, "West India : " The contrast between neighbouring islands similarly situated is most striking. The sad change which has befallen the smaller ones is, without any doubt, to be ascribed to human agency alone. It is recorded of these that in former times they were clothed with dense forests, and their oldest inhabitants remembered when the rains were abundant, and the hills and all uncultivated places where shaded by extensive groves. The removal of the trees was certainly the cause of the present evil. The opening of soil to the vertical sun rapidly dries up the moisture, and prevents the rain from sinking to the roots of plants. The rainy seasons in these climates are not continuous cloudy days, but successions of sudden showers, with the sun shining hot in the intervals. Without shade upon the surface the water is rapidly exhaled, and springs and streams diminish." _ Mr. Hough, President of the United States Association for the Advancement of Science, says:— " At the moment of our writing, the public journals are giving most painful accounts of the distress in India from famine, and the British Government is putting forth its utmost efforts to alleviate the miseries which it will be impossible to prevent, and which, from present appearances, must result in the starvation of thousands of the native population, who

live remote from bases of governmental supply, xrorn a careful study of this subject, with such data « are accessible in late reports, we cannot doubt but that this calamity is largely due to the fact that the forests have, within recent years, been swept off much more rapidly than formerly, and that the exposure to winds and sun, thus occasioned, may have largely contributed to these painful results." Professor Macarel, a Trench writer, quoted as a high authority, says,— " The preservation of forests is one of the first interests of society, and consequently one of the first duties of Government. All the wants of life are closely related to their preservation ; agriculture, architecture, and almost all the industries, seek therein their aliment and resources, which nothing could replace. Necessary as are the forests to the individual, they are not less so to the State. It is from tlience that commerce finds the means of transportation and exchange, and that Governments claim the elements of their protection, their safety, and even their glory. It is not alone from the \\ ealth which they offer by their working under wise regulations that we may judge of their utility. Their existence is of itself of incalculable benefit to the countries that possess them, as well in the protection and feeding of the springs and rivers, as in their prevention against the washing away of the soil upon mountains, and in the beneficial and healthy influence which they exert upon the atmosphere. Large forests deaden and break the force of heavy winds that beat out the seeds and injure the growth of plants ; they form reservoirs of moisture ; they shelter the soil of the fields, and upon hill-sides, where the rain-waters, checked in their descent by the thousand obstacles they present by their roots and the trunks of trees, have time to filter into the soil, and only find their way by slow degrees to the rivers. They regulate, in a certain degree, the flow of the waters, and the hygrometrical condition of the atmosphere, and their destruction accordingly increases the duration of droughts, and gives rise to the injuries of inundations, which denude the face of the mountains. The destruction of forests has often become, to the country where this has happened, a real calamity and a speedy cause of approaching decline and ruin.. Their injury and reduction below the degree of present or future wants, is among the misfortunes which we should provide against, and one of those errors which nothing can excuse, and which nothing but centuries of perseverance and privation can repair. Penetrated with these truths, legislators have in all ages made the preservation of forests an object of especial solicitude." Mr. Granger, of Saco, instances the case of Valencia, in South America, which was once situated about one mile and a-half from a beautiful lake that was surrounded by a dense forest. The trees were cut away, and in course of time the waters receded to a distance of four miles and a-half. The trees were afterwards replaced by others, and in about twentytwo years the lake returned to its original boundaries.

Horace Greeley, a late distinguished American, says : ''Were all the rugged crests and rocky acclivities of this county ("Westchester, New York) bounteously wooded once more, and kept so for a generation, our floods would be less injurious, our springs unfailing, and our streams more constant and equable ; our blasts would be less bitter, and our gales less destructive to fruit. "We should have vastly more birds to delight us by their melody, and aid us in our not very successful war against devouring insects; we should grow peaches, cherries, and other delicate fruits, which the violent caprices of our seasons and the remorseless devastations of our visible and invisible insect enemies have all but annihilated ; and we should keep more cows and make more milk on two-thirds of the land now devoted to grass, than we actually do from the whole of it." Mr. Yogel read extracts from various sources, showing the mischiefs resulting from the destruction of forests—such as the failure of crops, the diminution of rain, the drying up of streams, and the deterioration of climate. "We can only give one more. It is from a book on "Forestry," by Dr. Brown. He says:— " Similar effects of the clearing of woods are experienced in North America, wherever the axe of the settlers has been in operation for a considerable length of time. There I have myself seen the beds of former water-courses ploughed, and only observable as such by their hollow lines running through the farms. The settlers told me that when they first came into the forest, these hollow lines ran with a never-failing supply of water, and that they gradually became dry as the woods were cleared, and the land subjected to the plough and the hot rays of the sun. Hundreds of families that I have visited in British North America have told me that they had been obliged to change the sites of their original locations, simply because the streams, on the sides of which they had sat down, expecting to have an unlimited supply of water, had dried up as they cleared the land of its tree crop. But we need not go out of Britain for proof of the drying effects of injudicious clearing of forests on the land. In my own experience in dealing with woodlands I have seen, after a large tract of wood had been cleared from a hill-side, springs which had, while the land was covered with trees, yielded a constant supply of water, completely dried up; and there are many who can attest this from observation in respect to similar cases in their own parts of the country. On the other hand, I, have frequently been surprised to find, on examining woods which had been planted some ten or twelve years, all the land under which had been considered dry at the time the plantation was made, wet spots, spreading wider and wider every year, and some of them even beginning to throw out runs of water ; thus proving, that under the shade of the trees the larger portion of the moisture of the land is retained, and therefore accumulates in spots according to the nature of the subsoil."