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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 2 (May 1, 1935)

The Hills and the Forest

The Hills and the Forest.

The necessity for restricting the felling of the indigenous forest of New Zealand can never be stressed too much or too often. The bush is going, in a thousand parts of the Dominion, and it is not being regenerated. The planting of exotic trees can never be a satisfactory remedy for the deforestation that meets the eye everywhere in travelling the country, a deforestation that does not stop at lands which may be considered suitable for farming but which denudes even the ranges of their necessary clothing of trees.

The scenic aspect is not the greatest consideration. The climatic value of the native forests, and their value as sources and regulators of water supply is not yet sufficiently recognised, much as has been said and written about it.

The hills, the bush, the water—the three are interdependent. Steep ranges, stripped of bush, waste into bare ridges, their stony gullies mere race tracks for land-eroding torrents. Provincial towns and townships throughout New Zealand will suffer greatly for water in the future unless their people make a noise about it and demand that the high country from which the water comes that is their life, is preserved as Nature made it. Not another tree should be destroyed on such mountains. No commercial influence should be permitted to make a destructive breach in the policy of conservation.