Слике страница
PDF
ePub

JANUARY

NEW YORK STATE FORESTRY ASSOCIATION

1918

Published Quarterly at Syracuse by the New York State Forestry Association

Entered as second-class matter February 29, 1916, at the post office at Syracuse, New York, under the act of March 3, 1879.

[blocks in formation]

HE Fifth Annual Meeting of the New York State Forestry
Association will be held at the State Education Building in
Albany on Tuesday, January 22, 1918. The Committee

in charge has been working hard and among the prominent people who are expected to take part in the program are Dr. John H. Finley, Mayor-elect James R. Watt of Albany, Dr. E. P. Felt, State Entomologist, Mrs. W. W. Steele, Chairman of the Conservation Committee of the New York State Federation of Women's Clubs, Mr. A. B. Recknagel of the Empire State Forest Products Association, and E. A. Quarles of the American Game Protection and Propagation Association. Reports will be submitted by committees who have been working on the questions of Forest Taxation and the white pine blister rust work with a view to suggesting necessary legislation and a full attendance of members is requested. Plan NOW to be there.

[blocks in formation]

Contributed articles of any length up to 2000 words, and communications to “Viewpoints" are always welcomed. The editors and the Association, however, are not responsible for any of the views expressed by contributors.

[graphic]

"After all is said and done, one of the most important uses of the Adirondack mountains is its use as a great vacation ground for the people. Vacationists and health seekers are flocking into the woods as never before and any financial statement of the business of the Adirondacks would show that the business of caring for them so far exceeds every other industry in the amount of capital invested and in the annual operating expense, that the others sink into comparative unimportance. A statement in financial terms of the value of the Adirondacks as a vacation and health resort would, however, be an entirely inadequate statement. The full measure of the value of such a vacation country can never be stated in terms of money, but rather in terms of the health and happiness of the entire people.— Commissioner George D. Pratt.

VOL. IV

JANUARY, 1918

CONSERVATION IN THE ADIRONDACKS

No. 4

An Address Given at Lake Placid by Commissioner George D. Pratt

JONSERVATION in the Adirondacks is a broad subject to be assigned to a single speaker. It touches directly the individual and personal interest of every single resident in ten thousand square miles of country as well as those who come into it for recreation, health or business. It concerns indirectly every inhabitant of the State of New York, and even those without our border. It is quite impossible for me to touch, even briefly, upon all of the details of conservation as it affects the Adirondacks. Fortunately, however, you are getting many different lights upon it from the other speakers of the week. Accordingly, I conceive that it devolves upon me to explain some of the more specific features of the work of the Commission, and particularly to indicate the point of view and outline the policy of the Conservation Commission regarding the more fundamental Adirondack problems. In practical conservation, as in other lines of endeavor, there are often divergent views regarding the same subject.

I feel that in addressing you I am speaking to no primer class in conservation. You know well enough the general scope of the Conservation movement in the United States, and I can accordingly content myself with pointing out that the work of the Conservation Commission in the Adirondacks is threefold. First, and most important, is its duty to conserve the forests. The State has purchased large areas of land which constitute part of the Forest Preserve and are required, under the constitution, to be maintained forever inviolate. Under the provisions of a bill approved by the voters at the last general election, $7,500,000, are now available for increasing this Forest Preserve, and purchases of additional land are now being made with this money.

The policy of the State of New York regarding the maintenance of this Forest Preserve is the policy of the Conservation Commission. This is not a trite statement. Every State Department is of course. obliged to enforce the laws coming under its jurisdiction and to give them full force and effect as long as they are upon the statute books. The policy of the Conservation Commission regarding the Forest Preserve goes much deeper than this. I thoroughly believe that the State of New York has been absolutely right in establishing its Forest Preserve and in prohibiting every form of lumbering therein by the organic law of the State itself. Article 7, Section 7, of the Constitution has been the salvation of the Adirondacks, and in this day of tremendous business enterprise in the lumbering industry, as in every other industry, and in this time of intensive cutting of timber land for both hard and soft wood, Article 7, Section 7 of the Constitution continues to be the safeguard of our forest land as nothing else could.

On the program for this week appears a notice that field trips are being taken each afternoon under the direction of well-known botanists, foresters and geologists, to points of interest in the vicinity of the Lake Placid Club. Unfortunately these field trips are limited to a few afternoons. I wish, however, that I might take those of you who are genuinely interested in the preservation of the Adirondack forests to a number of places that I could readily name. They would surely interest you. When I saw them first I was appalled at the destruction which they held. I could show you mile upon mile, and tens of miles, of what was, until recently, wild forest land. Today it is a waste of slash, brown and dry, miles of tinder for forest fires that have been mercifully withheld. The owners of these various properties have been among the most active proponents of a revision of the constitution, in order to permit the practice of "scientific forestry" on the state owned land in the Adirondacks. As I have listened to their advocacy of "scientific forestry" in the Committee rooms in Albany and at meetings throughout the State, and as I have personally travelled over their own lands in the Adirondacks and have photographed the so-called "scientific forestry" that I have found practiced upon those lands, I have become more than ever convinced that the best interest of the

people of the entire state-not of any small class of citizens-demand that we should adhere to the constitution without abating one jot of its restrictions.

The best interest of the people of the State demands further that the State's forest holdings in the Adirondack and Catskill mountains be immediately and very largely increased, as a further protection to the watersheds, and also as a real protection to the $40,000,000 property that the state already has in its timber land. I need only ask you to run over the road between Lake Placid and Saranac Lake, and to note on the lower slopes of that area, fire swept only nine years ago, how the state has already brought back a forest growth by planting, and then to note the bare, rain washed rocks on the ridge to the north, where reforesting is absolutely impossible. There are large areas throughout the mountains that are now being put into prime condition for a similar catastrophe, and that must be protected before it is too late.

In expending the seven and one-half million dollars, the Conservation Commission is proceeding upon the theory that the land of first importance for state acquisition is the land of the high mountain tops and steep slopes. Much of it is covered with a dense stand of virgin spruce, so that when cutting is done upon it, practically a clean sweep is necessarily made. It is the firm conviction of the Commission that lumbering of any sort upon these steep slopes, where reforesting cannot be done, is fraught with too many possibilities for disaster and that it should be forever prohibited.

In the purchase of land of other types, the policy of the Commission is to protect first of all the watersheds, and to consolidate as far as possible, the State's holdings. Much of the state land now exists in small parcels, intermixed with privately owned land, so that the State property lines aggregate more than nine thousand miles. Wherever possible we are endeavoring to fill in the gaps, that the state land may be administered in solid blocks.

It may interest you to know some of the details in arriving at a valuation of this land. Only a few miles away, on the other side of the long range of peaks that make up Lake Placid's southern skyline,

« ПретходнаНастави »