OCR Text |
Show 598 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT private ownership can be depended on for anything approaching the contribution to American forestry that has been expected of it during the past 20 years." The Copeland Report was a blueprint for reorganizing the forestry practices of Federal, state, and private owners, and a rededication of the Forest Service to the principles of conservation and public wel-ware of Gifford Pinchot. That the Forest Service could draft such a forward-looking and yet practical plan 23 years after the dismissal of Pinchot suggests that the spirit he had instilled in the Service was unconquerable. The report analyzed in great detail the condition of forestry in the United States, brought out its successes and failures, and emphasized the necessity for a big new start to make up for the lack of progress in the past two decades. Specifically, it recommended that public ownership of forest land, state and Federal, be increased by 224 million acres, of which 194 million should be commercial forest lands and 30 million acres noncommercial timberland. Acquisition should include 32 million acres of abandoned farms that ought to be reforested. Of the total 224 million acres, state and Federal, 177 million were recommended for acquisition in the East and 47 million in the West. This was a long-range program that was intended to extend over as much as 20 years. For the first 5 years an appropriation of $30 million a year for acquisition of land was recommended. Other additional appropriations were recommended for management, protection from fire and disease, recreation within the forests, and aid to the states in carrying their share of the expanded program. Cooperation between the Federal and state governments was to be encouraged in every part of the plan.93 The National Plan for American Forestry with its proposal for a land purchase 93 A National Plan/or American Forestry, S. Doc, 73d (Dong., 1st sess., No. 12, Vol. 1, pp. 64, 69. program far larger than had been made possible by the Weeks Act, and one that was to include farmland going out of cultivation, and the expanded program for fighting fires and the diseases and insects that were destroying large amounts of timber, struck a responsive chord in Franklin Roosevelt who was a thoroughgoing believer in and practitioner of conservation. Agriculture in the hill areas of the Northeast had been contracting for more than half a century, leaving behind thousands of abandoned farms, which were growing up to sumac, gray dogwood, and pasture pine, badly weeviled. Now, with the market for American farm products contracting and farming becoming more efficient through the use of gasoline powered implements, many additional small farms in the hill country were becoming uneconomic units. The National Plan with its proposal for the inclusion of 32 million acres of abandoned farms into units where modern forestry could be practiced, became the basis of the submarginal land retirement program of Rexford Tugwell, L. C. Gray, and others of Roosevelt's advisers who were seeking solutions for the plight of America's farmers in a depression so bad that many were on bread lines. Equally attractive to the President was the opportunity of using the unemployed in work camps in the forests and parks of the country to fight fires, blister rust, and other diseases and injurious insects, construct trails and fire lanes, reforest cutover areas, build erosion restraining dams on mountain streams, construct fences to aid in controlling grazing in the forests and in the newly established grazing districts of the public lands, eliminate poisonous weeds such as halo-geton that were dangerous to livestock, reseed the overgrazed rangelands, erect and maintain telephone lines, and build public camping facilities. |