What Forests Give

OUR SERVANTS

To look at a forest—banks of solid green branches against the sky, undergrowth of ferns and mosses and shrubs, animals stealing in and out, birds and insects, clear streams is to look at a storehouse full of the things we need to make us happy and prosperous. But it is also to look at a tireless and able servant who gives us the help we could get from nothing else.

That wise farmer who left his south 40 acres in forest knew not only what the wood lot would give him but also what it would do. He realized that the topsoil on the sloping field below it was richer and deeper than on the other hillsides so that the field always bore a good crop. He saw that even when there was a heavy downpour not enough water rushed from the wood-lot across the lower field to carry the soil away with it. He saw, too, that the little brook that stole out from under the trees was always clear because the roots held the soil so firmly in place that it could not wash away; that even in the spring it never rose into a destructive freshet because the snow under the trees melted slowly and held the water back so that there was some water in that brook all summer long. And when he walked along beside the eastern edge of his small forest he did not feel the hard west wind that so often flattened out the crops on his other fields, for the mass of trees, many of them old pines and oaks, a hundred feet high, which stood directly across the path of the hot dry winds, left a quiet space for young grain to grow in.

Without that friendly forest, what would become of his land? Just what has happened to millions of acres of our land which have no protection from water or from wind.