RED AND WHITE PINE

Forest and Bird, Issue 44, 1 May 1937, Page 11

RED AND WHITE PINE

THE CALL FOR BUTTER BOXES. IT has become apparent even to the farmers who seldom have given a thought to forestconservation that New Zealand cannot afford to send rimu and kahikatea out of the country any longer. A Hawke’s Bay farming association recently passed a resolution requesting the Government to prohibit the further exportation of those timbers. We need every bit of those timbers ourselves, so far as the North Island is concerned. The farmers and the dairy industry are becoming concerned about material for making butter boxes. Very large quantities of these two valuable timbers have been sent to Australia for that very purpose. Now, however, the Government has very wisely stopped the excessive export of white pine. Rimu, it must be stated emphatically, is too good a timber to devote to butter-boxes in lieu of the vanishing kahikatea. It should be reserved for house-building and furniture. Reference is made elsewhere to the need for regenerating kahikatea. The same remark applies to rimu. At this moment those trees are disappearing like smoke, before the desperate onslaught of timber-millers who have practically a free hand in our forests. The country is being scoured for every available standing stick. We have recently seen rimu hauled out of gorges and gullies and felled on hillsides in steep country that will fall to ruin if the destruction continues, yet the cutaway and haul-away gaily continues without a thought for the future. A timber-man on the Akatarewa-Waikanae mountain road, a bushman of great experience and skill, was asked by a Wellington man making an unofficial inspection of the ravaged bush: “What is going to be done with this high country when you strip the big trees off it?” “Oh,” he replied, “the usual thing, I suppose. Burn off the small stuff and grass the land for sheep. Anyhow, all we want is the bis fellows.” And this was rugged country from a thousand to fifteen hundred feet above sea level, where the “small stuff”—the forest of the future, if cared for scientifically—is the soil-

covering that holds the precipitous ranges and gully walls together. Young rimu and kahikatea trees are there in their thousands, with many other species of coming-on timber. But what is this to the timber miller, or the sheepfarmer?