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Hokitika Guardian, 18 May 1927, Page 2

Sc'ATTKHKI) over wide and far-distant areas of (lie earth’s surface in Asia Minor, in Spain, in Cyprus, in China, and many other lands, are great stretches of empty and barren country, which wore once fertile, papulous and productive. Geographers or historians, asked what the inhabitants did to reduce their lands to this deplorable conditions, make answer with one voice, “They cut down the trees.” That is the answer which Science and History must alike give to anyone who asks for the reason or the cause of the disastrous floods that are now devastating the great valley of the Mississippi. The most significant of all the messages that have reached us from New Orleans, says an Auckland paper, seems to mo to he this simple statement: “The floods are penetrating so far inland that they have reached the forest districts. The valley for the greater part has been deforested.” When the Amreicans first moved westward over the Alleghnnies and into the vast stretch of country drained by the great river, two-thirds of the country east of the Mississippi was forestclad. The trees have gone, destroyed finally and irreparably, partly in the rush for immediate profit, partly through the recklessness and improvidence of cultivators and settlers. And so the enormous rainfall of the.valley and its catchment area, no longer distributed through the earth, hut concentrated into the narrow channel of the great river, at last hursts all bounds. Thousands of lives are lost, millions of pounds’ worth of property are destroyed, great cities are threatened with imminent destruction; and all because “they cut down the trees.” The dwellers in young countries like our own must learn this lesson betimes.