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[Illustration]
The Price We Pay
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[Illustration]
A VALLEY AT THE FOOT OF DEFORESTED HILLS IN NORTHERN CHINA.
The land ruined for crops except where stone walls catch some sediment during the floods.
[Illustration]
CHINESE MOUNTAIN RANGE DEFORESTED SINCE 1725. Terracing to save the soil.
9
II.
THE PRICE WE PAY.
FOREMOST among the inevitable effects of deforestation we must, therefore, rank floods and landslips. It must be clearly understood that this description of the effects of bushfelling is by no means simply theoretical. Unfortunately, the theory has been illustrated in only too literal and practical a fashion in all the countries that have ever been endowed with great natural forests. In America this question has already assumed the dimensions of a great national problem, and the disastrous results of erosion are dwelt on impressively in the report of the recently presented to Congress by the National Conservation Commission. "One small neglected streat," we are told, "has been found by actual measurement to wash enough soil from its hills to deposit silt equal to one and a-half tons per acre of its watershed in a yer. The quantity of silt deposited every year by all the streams in the United States would cover a territory nine hundred miles square a foot deep. Our rivers have wahsed 783 million tons of the best soil of the United States from the upland farms and carried it into the rivers, where it has formed bars, impeded navigation and finally lodged in teh great harbours. The Government has already spent 553 millions of dollars for river and harbout improvement," and this outlay has been rendered necessary almost entirely through the indirect effects of deforestation. The Commission estimates that soil erosion reduces farm production from 10 to 20 per cent.; and that the annual loss to the farms alone is 500 million dollars. The direct damage from floods has increased from 45 million dollars in 1900 to 238 million dollars in 1907 - and all this enormous expenditure and loss is attributed by tis responsible Commission of expets to the reckless slaughter of the forests.
LANDSLIPS AND FLOODS.
This conclusion is supported by a host of other witnesses. Mr A. W. Page, in an article on the "Statesmanship of Forestry," points out that the Colorado in floor time carries down 1000 tons of mud a minute, simply because all the tress have been cut away on its watershed. "Rivers whose headwaters have been deforested are beginning to carry mud in this way, building up banks and bars, changing their courses and ruining navigation"; and most of the trouble with the Mississippi which is now to be deepened and straightened at a colossal cost, is due to deforestation. In two months in 1905, the floods on the Catawa River, we are told, di a million and a half dollars' worth of damage. When they subsided some farmers found sandbanks ten feet deep on their fertile acres. Mr Stewart White, the famous novelist of the North, says that 18 million acres of farm land have been lost in the Appalacian district in a few years by erosion alone. Ten years ago Professor Shaler, of Harvard University, estimated that 3000 square miles of soil had been washed from the slopes of the Southern Mountains on account of the destruction of the forests. The upper valleys of the rivers are becoming subject to violent freshets, and the lower valleys to great overflows which have to be controlled by costly levees. And the destruction so far, adds Mr. Page, "has been only enough to give an imaginative man a conception of what floods will come from those mountains if all their forests are