Save the world: Plant trees

Wednesday, 09 December 2009 05:00

December 9, 1901. The Winnipeg Free Press extols the value of trees in conserving soil moisture for farming and warns that thinning forests could bring climatic change, including drought. The great value of trees, especially on the semi-arid prairies, is today more important than ever, because trees are an important means of helping to combat global warming by soaking up carbon dioxide.

The sweeping away of forests, mile on mile, to feed the saw and pulp mills, not only means the destruction of a raw material for which the necessity is constantly growing, but also the gradual production of altered climatic conditions; trees being great gatherers and conservers of moisture, and their disappearance from the face of a country increasing the extent of the summer drought. If five per cent of the area of Western Canada were planted with trees, the resulting benefits would in time repay the cost a hundred fold. One generation would see the cost more than repaid by the wood taken out for fuel; but that would be nothing to the immensely greater advantages resulting from the storing up of moisture in the soil and the more equable distribution of summer rainfall and air moisture.

It cannot be too often repeated that the presence of trees means the storing up of moisture, which, for this vast and fertile prairie country is the thing of greatest importance; the actual value of the standing tree, as an asset to be realized upon, being another matter altogether. Results of the highest value cannot fail to follow upon the introduction of the methods of scientific forestry, the protection of growing timber, and especially the promotion of tree culture in Western Canada, which the Forestry Branch established in connection the Department of the Interior.