SPARE THAT TREE?
By PETER FLEMING
EVEN before the arrival of the Normans, whose passion for field sports was of great though indirect benefit to forestry in this 'country, the English had started grizzling about the terrible state their woodlands were getting into; and they have gone on grizzling about it ever since. A Statute of Inclosure, passed in 1482, shows, according to that able historian Mr. W. L. Taylor, " the nation's awakening concern " ; but 6o years later the preamble to the Statute of Woods read " The King our Sovereign Lord perceiving and 4 right well knowing the great decay of timber and woods universally within this his realm " and. John Evelyn's Silva, published in 1664, reflects an equally unsatisfactory state of affairs. The fact of the matter is that, with the same irresponsibility as but with less thoroughness than the now almost treeless Chinese, we have con- tinued for hundreds of years to cut down more trees than we planted. Nobody knows what our heritage of timber was r,000 years ago ; all we do know is that it has got steadily less and less. Today there are about 3 million acres of woodland in Great Britain, a good deal of it practically worthless from a timber-producing point of view. The experts calculate that only just over 2 per cent. of the acreage of the whole country is properly stocked forest land. The
' corresponding figures for our neighbours are: Germany, 27 per cent. ; France, 19.1 per cent. ; Belgium, 184 per cent. ; Holland, 7.8 per cent. ; Denmark, 7.5 per cent.
Two long wars, throughout which we were blockaded have, of course, helped to pull us down thus low ; and the light thrown by the first one on the state of our timber reserves did at least make us, for once, stop grizzling, work out a national forestry policy and provide, in the shape of the Forestry Commission, enlightened though quite inadequate machinery for carrying it out. In 1919 the Forestry Act gave us at least a chance of halting the wasteful erosion of our woodlands.
Does that chance still exist? I should like to know, because I own about 700 acres of woodland and I am trying to run it in what the Forestry Commissioners call " the best interests of -silviculture." They gall it this in the literature which they have beep sending nre for the last two years about what is known as the Dedication Scheme. The terms of this scheme have not yet been published but it sounds a sensible one in principle. If you dedicate your woodlands, the Foiestry Commission has the right to vet the plan on which you are 'working them and to inspect the plantations to make sure that you are carrying the plan out efficiently. If you are, you can apply for
various small grants ; the non-dedicator can't get the grant and is liable to have the management of his woods taken over by the State, a somewhat academic threat at the moment because of the administra- tAire difficulties.
The whole thing is pretty academic. The grants, which are the Most tangible part of the scheme, are much too small to serve their purpose, which is to encourage people to replant. You get £ro for every acre you replant and you don't get it until the plantation Is " established," which after a bad season like 'last winter's may not be for 2 or 3 years. Thereafter you may get half a crowli an acre per annum maintenance grant, which is much the same as saying that you get nothing. Even at the best of times, replanting is an expensive business, and for me and I imagine for most private owners these are the worst possible times. The woods I have got to replant or have replanted were requisitioned and clear-felled by the Government early on in the war and as a result are covered with dense undergrowth. This means that to your labour costs on fencing and planting you have got to add an abnormally high charge for what is called clearing but is really reclamation.
Labour costs, of course, are the crux of the matter. • Forestry workers—and quite rightly—rank with agricultural labourers. When the Government raised the minimum basic agricultural wage, last September, from £4 to £4 nos. a week it compensated, or partly compensated, the farmer by raising the controlled prices of his produce ; but there was no corresponding rise in the price of timber. (This price is fixed by the Timber Control, a body manned largely by timber merchants ; if the price of flow was fixed by millers, that would probably be pretty low, too.) I employ 14 woodmen under a head forester, so that my forestry wage-bill increased overnight, in September, from L3,200 to L3,600 a year. This rise in wages did not create, but underlined, the exigencies—it would be prema- ture and defeatist to call them impossibilities, though that is what they are on paper—of the situation confronting the not very numerous or vocal individiials who are responsible for most of what is left of our home-grown timber reserves. We need timber very badly. We shall never produce as much as we need but we ought, because it would pay us—and this is a truism of which our rulers have been plaintively aware since Alfred the Great—to produce more than we do. But who is " we " ? To the historian, the economist and the man who can't understand why he has been refused a permit for a few planks with which to mend his fowl- house, " we ": is this country, Great Britain and its population. But in fact. " we " consist mostly of (I suppose) a few hundred private individuals like myself, for nearly 90 per cent. of the country's woodlands are privately owned. .
As is surprisingly often the case in human affairs, there are only two alternatives before " us ": to do the right thing, or to do the wrong thing. The right thing is to replant, to thin judiciously, to " beat up " (i.e., replace the casualties in) young plantations and to fell what the war has left of our mature standing timber only where and when its removal fits in with our replanting programme. This policy is bound to benefit the nation both economically and aesthetic- ally ; and with any luck it will benefit our sons or, in the case of the slower-growing trees like oak, our grandsons financially, if they are still allowed to own our land. But it cannot benefit us in any material way. 'It is long-term planning and it is extremely, indeed prohibitively, expensive.
The alternative is to do the wrong thing and it is dead easy. The first thing is not to replant. Why should you? The Government, having paid you what its agents the Timber Control reckoned a fair price for your timber, left your woods in a mess and now expects you to clear the mess up and then—in return for a trifling subsidy under a nebulous scheme, and also under the threat of land nationalisation—to replant (if you can get the transplants or seedlings) at enormous expense. You can prove on the back of an envelope that there's no future in it. So what? Firewood is the answer. You can't make firewood without felling and you can't fell without a licence ; but even if you don't care to circumvent the regulations, which is not a difficult or dangerous thing to do, there are always plenty of thinnings, with or without inverted commas. You are, I should have thought, almost bound to make money and you have— in case you feel the need of it—centuries of tradition behind you ; the curiously un-English but curiously consistent tradition of cash- ing in quick, of living on capital, of destroying without creating. You will be doing the wrong thing ; but until the Government translates the sound-forestry policy it has inherited into a scheme which makes it possible for the private owner, under existing con- ditions, to practise good forestry, I don't see how you can be blamed.
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