What Forests Give

FOREST CITIES

Still another gift our 615,000,000 acres have for us, something that we have worked toward ever since we became human—security for those who find a new way of living within the forests. There have been temporary settlements of men as part of forest industries, but usually the result has been to destroy the other living things they found there. If a village was built as part of some commercial enterprise like mining or lumbering, it was abandoned when the mines were exhausted or the trees were cut, because there was no way left for the people in it to get a living. The remains of many such villages are in the mining country and the cut-over forest lands.

But with our increasing need for the things that forests can give us, we are learning to cultivate and preserve the forests instead of destroying them, learning to grow crops of trees as a farmer grows crops of corn. To do this we must treat tree growing as a branch of agriculture with a harvest each year. This means that a group of people will live in the forest as a farmer lives on his farm. And just as in the homes of our early farmers the things the land provided them with were manufactured before they were sold—wool was spun; wheat was ground—so in these forest cities that raw material, wood, will be transformed into the things which people use directly—lumber and paper and the rest. Since only as many trees will be cut each year as will leave an adequate harvest for the next year, and as only as many people will live in the forest cities as can find work there, these towns, founded on the certainty of a perpetual harvest, need never die, nor the people beg their bread. But like all the other gifts of the forests this security will not come of itself; it must be worked for.

Some of these forest cities are to be set up in the midst of virgin timber. The people living in them will have the chance to harvest trees already grown. They will also have land on which to grow grain and vegetables and raise animals, so that they will combine that form of agriculture which is farming with that form which is forestry.

In other forest cities like Drummond which has been established on the cut-over lands in northwestern Wisconsin, a new forest must be planted and have time to grow before there will be a crop of trees to be cut. It takes a long time to grow trees years and years so that the forest work in Drummond is not now what it will be when the trees are ready to harvest. Forty homes have been built there, each with 20 acres of good land about it, and the 200 people living in them are provided with a community building also. These 200 people have come from places where the land is too poor to raise good crops, so that they have not been able to make a comfortable living. Here on good land, and with a harvest of farm produce as well as trees, they may be secure and prosperous again.