TARARUA RANGES

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 219, 16 August 1937, Page 10

TARARUA RANGES

OBJECTION TO ROAD. “WOULD RUIN BUSH.” • “The principal objection to a road through areas of high country forest such as the bush on the Tararua Ranges,” writes “Rakau” in the New Zealand Forest and Bird Protection Society’s “is that it will come to he used as a. timber carting road by saw--milling interests. - It does not seem to matter whether a forest area is a Crown property or not, even if it is a natural, protection forest and a water-supply reserve. The hush is ou the way to ruin once a road for wheels is put through it. The sawmiller wangles cutting rights, he cuts at his own sweet will, he pays a small royalty, and leaves the bush a scene of devastation and ruin. For every mature tree felled and hauled out, scores, hundreds of small trees are broken and destroyed and thousands of seedlings. The hush floor is littered with broken brandies, which, when dry, are most inflammable, an invitation to fire. “This .is what lias occurred in milled forests all over the country, and the wasteful old methods begun more than a century ago continue to-day. The marvel is that any forests survive at all. There is no adequate supervision, and there is no attempt at all to regenerate the miiled-over areas. Either they are set fire to and cleared to make way for the settler and his grass, regardless of the obvious unsuitability of high country for agriculture, or exotics are planted with the object of killing the native undergrowth. This under-bush contains the makings of another timber crop when the forest grows, hut the foresters do not want that. So the area of our native forests dwindles year by year. Conservation is not merely neglected hut is strongly disapproved. “Go to the Akatarawa hills and other parts of the Tararua Ranges and you will see the lamentable process today. The present Akatarawa-Waikanac road, which was made as a highway for passenger traffic, is largely a tim-ber-hauling road, and the scenes near the road, even at the summit, 1400 feet above sea-level, are a melancholy memento mori to a ruined forest. Fire may sweep the ranges, at anv time beginning in the chorniod and sawnover parts on the roadside.”