A CONVERT.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 143, 26 September 1910, Page 4

A CONVERT.

A northern sawmiller, who is a member of a firm that has been cutting , and sawing timber for at least forty years, has tardily spoken words of wisdom. He has contended that much of the land in New Zealand will never grow so good a crop as nature grew on it in the first place;,, that it is a sin to cut out for inferior work timber that has taken thousands of years to grow. "It was a shame," he said, "to cut down timber for the sak« of the land underneath." This sawmiller advocates the planting of quickly-growing trees, but we have never heard of a sawmiller' who hesitated to out timber or who ever planted a sapling of any kind. Irreparable damage bos been done in New Zealand by the destruction of forests; damage is still being done; millions of pounds', worth of the finest timber in the world have gone up in smoke, and it will cost millions of pounds to repair the damage done to .the land by deforestation, river erosion, silting and floods. In the near future some politicians may be bold enough to demand that where sawmillers deforest land that is not suitable for agriculture they be forced to plant the groundi again with timber trees. In New Zealand there are thousands of holdings carved out of the most valuable bush iri which the settlers have hardly a stick of firewood to-day. The native timber is the only timber that can be grown that will give absolute satisfaction and durability. Imported timbers if planted will not give the value that they would give in their native countries. Sawmillers may weep crocodile tears about the disappearance of timber; but in the northern mills millions of feet of kauri and kohikatea "sap" have been ruthlessly destroyed in the yards. The destruction of timber is not common only to New Zealand. The Australian sheepfarmer wilfully kills millions of acres of hardwood by ring-barking it, and, like his fatuous New Zealand cousin, he plants shelter belts of foreigners, and which have to be irrigated to keep them alive. In a few years' time the noblest tree of the hemisphere, the kauri, will be a curiosity, and even now the average gum-digger is permitted to burn off acres of kauri saplings. It is evident that the situation is worth examining when a sawmiller who has been cutting kauri for forty years talks about the wastefulness of the process.