Misuse of Forest and Soil Resources

Abstract

THE rather wide title “The Use and Misuse of Land” is given to a report by Dr. R. M. Gorrie of the Indian Forest Service, published in the Oxford Forestry Memoirs No. 19 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935). As a Leverhulme research fellow, Dr. Gorrie spent four months in the United States, his subject being “The Correlation of Erosion Damage and Grazing in Forest Lands”. He states that the present report deals, in addition, with the wider implications of the misuse and abuse of forest land. Dr. Gorrie has considerable experience of the overgrazing and other abuses to which the land of the outer hills of the Punjab has for long been subjected. Few will disagree with his assertion that “Much of the land classified as ‘forest’ in the arid tropics and the semi-tropics in British dominions and possessions is incapable of producing crops of commercial timber, but is of considerable social value for grazing, flood control, water conservation, or game management, which would justify some form of working plan being prepared and operated with these values in view”. Thirty years ago this policy was being ardently advocated by far-sighted forest officers, and large areas of land in the British Empire and outside it would have been saved for useful economic purposes had the administrators of the day understood the real value of the forest in tropical and semi-tropical regions. The United States is not the only country which has misused its forest and soil resources; parts of India, East and West Africa and Australia are presenting similar problems to the administrator. Various bodies in the United States, including the Federal Forest Service, are, and have been for some years, giving attention to the position to which land values have been reduced. Dr. Gorrie's report draws some valuable parallels with Indian conditions.