What Forests Give

FORESTS AS SCHOOLS

The list of things which we get from our forests grows longer all the time. There are all those gifts which we can see and touch—board feet, and movie films, plastics and rayon, turpentine, cattle feed, and paper. There are also the things that these servants are doing for us—guarding our land, arresting water and wind, protecting our water supply, helping us to grow better crops.

But our forests have something more to give us than all this—they are laboratories, experiment stations, museums, out-of-door classrooms for scientific study.

Ten million acres are still about as they were when the white man came to America. They are samples of what a forest community makes of itself, in places as widely apart as Florida and Oregon. In the tropical forests of the Everglades we can see the beautiful and terrible strangler fig letting down its roots from the branches of a live oak, wrapping it around closer and closer till the tree dies. We see the parent of the papaya and the remote ancestors of the rubber tree—we see tree snails that would die with the first frost and alligators which are the nearest things we have on this continent to the strange reptiles which once ruled the earth. In the dry, hot, cactus country of the Southwest are the sparse forests which have learned to store up water for use in times of drought, much as a camel does, the giant sahauro cactus that swells and shrinks with the water, the pines growing so wide apart that their roots do not steal each others scant water supply. In the valleys of California are those oldest of living things, the great sequoias. In southern Indiana and Illinois are guarded areas where we can still see the sort of great tulip trees and sycamores which began to grow there when the glaciers, after at least six advances, finally withdrew to the Arctic Circle.

Not goods, nor service, but knowledge for its own sake do these untouched forests give us.

The Desert Forests of the Southwest—Giant Cactus—Arizona