Trees

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 268, 11 August 1944, Page 7

Trees

VERYONE who has a receiving set knows Who made the trees; and who in New Zealand destroyed them. We know that what it took God millenniums to create foolish men destroyed in a couple of generations; and that this folly must now be repaired. So we have Arbor Days, tree-planting campaigns, lessons in schools, articles in the newspapers, and talks over the air. Not without difficulty we are getting it into our heads that a tree is more than firewood and an obstacle in the path of the plough. We are learning too that our forests, as we first found them, were unique — something that Nature had adapted in millions of years to our winds and rainfall and soil and temperatures-and that our civilisation might disappear if we left it to Nature unaided to restore them. We have had to replant with trees that grow quickly, and have in fact planted many thousands of acres, but that is only the beginning. Trees are as necessary to the New Zealand scene as roads and bridges are. If they disappear our present way of life disappears, since Nature would need thousands of years to bring stability to our steep mountains and scoured-out hill-sides and plains if there were no forests to arrest erosion and mitigate floods, no birds to protect the forests, and no green growth to control evaporation. We might not return to a waste of shingles and rock, but we could get a combination of Persia and the Aleutian islands, and while life, even civilised life, might still be possible, it would be a civilisation quite unlike anything we have so far experienced — harsh, and bleak, and often brutish. So the South Island run-holder who set up a rock on the roadside inscribed with an appeal to the men of "the misty gorges" to "plant trees for their lives" was a realist and not a romantic. It is a case of life or death if we follow the argument to the end-and life in New Zealand is still worth fighting for.