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Show Americans Learning Value of Trees? COL. WILLIAM B. GREELEY, chief forester, is an optimist. He thinks the American people are learning something about the value of trees. Trees have occupied occu-pied the major portion of Colonel Greeley's waking thoughts since as a child he was taken out of the walk-around walk-around chair and given an ax to play with. He was born in Oswego, N. Y., in 1879, when New York was in touch, at least, with the great northern forests. for-ests. Then he went to California and lived among the big trees as a boy of ten. Yale forest school put a finishing finish-ing touch to his education and then he headed for the big woods again. So he came to be chief forester of the forestry bureau in good time. He thinks in time we may be as smart as the Swedes about trees. "Our eyes are being opened to the cash value of a tree," says he. The Swedish forests will be an asset as-set to that small land forever, because they are carefully managed. Tree cutting cut-ting is conducted under direction of the government foresters and so is tree planting. There is no reason why Sweden's Swe-den's most profitable crop should not continue to bear in perpetuity. During the war Chief Forester Greeley Gree-ley was lieutenant colonel of that expansible ex-pansible unit known as the forestry section in France, when he directed the operations of some light and portable port-able sawmills. "But we had to fell trees in the government gov-ernment and city owned forests in obedience obe-dience to the rules of the French foresters," for-esters," said he. "We Americans were only in France for the day just to win the war. The French proposed to go on living there and so they preserved pre-served their forests as carefully as though war had never been heard of. We were allowed to cut a five-years' growth of trees, where in peace time we could cut only one year's growth. Well, there's a reason. A French forest ranks with a bank as a gilt-edged gilt-edged investment. One year with another an-other they pay from 4 to 6 per cent and will go on paying that dividend forever because they are cared for. |