What Forests Give

FORESTS

Nearly one-third of the United States is forest land. What does this mean to the 127,000,000 people who live in our country?

Forest Regions.(click on image for a PDF version)

WHAT IS A FOREST?

A forest is more than land covered with trees. It is a community of plants, animals, and bacteria, of which trees are the most important members. Each living thing in a forest gives something to the common store of food. The plants, from the smallest mosses to the tallest trees, take material from the soil and the air and with the aid of sunlight create living protoplasm on which animals and other plants can feed. When plants and animals die, the bacteria and other living things change them into substances which enrich the soil, so that the forest grows more prosperous century by century.

But a forest is not a community at peace. Each group of living things within it is struggling with every other group for food and light and space. Sometimes one group will entirely destroy another. Within a forest there is always merciless civil war.

Neither are forests at peace with their neighbors. They invade bogs and prairies and deserts, and they continually try to retake the fields which men have cleared for farms. Trees throw their seeds out upon the currents of air and water; they force their roots into the meadows and send up shoots. Forest animals make raids outside their own territory. There are marshes and seacoasts which forests have taken over; there are deserts from which they have had to retreat; snow and ice drive them back from the mountain tops; water comes to flood them out. They expand or contract as other communities of living beings give way before them or push them back.

What can we human beings get from these restless, struggling forests, from our 615,000,000 acres of forest land?