THE DANGER OF DEFORESTATION
A journey through the forests and wastelands of the Côte-d'Or

(From our special correspondent) Selongeay (Côte-d'Or), February 28.

— "Do you see this black mountain under the gray sky? There are 1,000 hectares of conifers planted penny by penny, tree by tree, on poor land bought for perhaps a hundred sous per hectare for hunting by a small tinsmith from Selongeay, Father Lescure. A brave tinsmith from Auvergne, who died last year at over 80 years old, he created a forest all by himself and left a solid fortune to his heirs, 70% for half a century and without taxes for thirty years!

"That's how we loved trees, in the old days, when we had a taste for economy. It was grandfathers like him who bequeathed to the grandsons we know a department that ranks third among the most wooded in France. At Pont-de-Pany, you saw the 350 hectares of beautiful conifers planted in the rock by Mr. Vignon. At Is-sur-Tille, I showed you the 400 hectares wooded by a small oil manufacturer, Mr. Marceau. Here, on the left, admire this magnificent forest of pines and larches; more than 2,000 hectares. An old friend of Canrobert, lieutenant under Marshal Bugeaud and who died a colonel after the Terrible Year, left it to his family. These are trees that are as ripe as fruit and would lose their value as they become old. They must be cut down. The family is not lacking in this, nor are the other heir families in the surrounding area. They make, sell to the wood merchant, who calls the lumberjack. And it is massacre everywhere. Six or seven wagons loaded with mine props leave the station every day, right there before your eyes. But no one replants; that's what deforestation is.

— "It's as if, in Beauce, once the harvest is done, they no longer sow wheat!...

— "Then the stony greyness of the wasteland appears and spreads through the trees. A real bald patch! Look, it's not even pasture; the grass grows too poorly on the pine needles. It's wasted land, unusable! Do you know that in Côte-d'Or, a land of woods, and in the Seine basin alone, 25,000 hectares are irremediably denuded? There are also 60,000 in Haute-Marne, 60,000 in Yonne, 60,000 in Aube!

— 200,000 hectares of wasteland?

— "At the very least! Are we going to make a law? Good! The Work has done a good job. As Deputy Girod said, the Minister of Agriculture probably does not know the damage you are reporting. But this law must not hit the wrong way. Stopping the lumberjack's arm is tempting. That is not enough. Wood is essential to mines, paper mills, carpenters. to joiners, cabinetmakers, wheelwrights and many other people! What is needed is to make softwood: it is that which will be lacking.

— Oak, maple, beech too.

— "Less! The permanent forest, the deciduous forest grows back by itself. I will show you in Saint-Julien. This is how the Côte-d'Or, where the softwood is disappearing, has not lost a hectare of hardwood for fifty years.

We are going. The car stops on the ridge line, in the middle of the forest.

— «There! Admire this six-year-old coppice! There are 1,200 hectares ravaged by the Americans during the war. They didn't hold back! They had put Negroes in there, a standard-gauge railway and, to drive it all, big devils in khaki who couldn't even tell an ash from a birch!
"Clear-cutting! All that was heading to the front via Langres. They cut down as far as the "president", a four-hundred-year-old oak that the foresters venerated. It doesn't matter, it grows back! There will be fewer free-standing trees from an acorn or a beechnut, but the coppice is growing back.
"Conifers are not that: you have to replant. We don't do that. Also, in Montbard, in Riceys, in Auberive, in Haute-Marne, the wasteland is gaining ground. Private woods or communal conifers not subject to the forestry regime melt like snow in the sun. And, as we will not always find Fathers Lescure to sow the desert, it is necessary that the State, Paris, the mines, the paper mills, all the beneficiaries of the tree in a word do like the tinker and reforest the wastelands!