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When the Leaves Begin to Turn: September
As is now well known to birds and men, leaves grow on trees. Yet I shouldn't be surprised if there are a good many people who don't know that, more strictly speaking, trees grow on leaves -- develop out of them, I mean. Why even the flowers on trees and other members of the plant world are merely dying leaves, as we shall see in the May chapter.
Another thing: you've often heard the expression "Money doesn't grow on trees" -- meaning that it isn't easy to get; you've got to work for it. But in a way -- and a very important way-money does grow on trees. Without trees the time would soon come when we'd have no money to buy things, and there'd be nothing to buy if we had!
Now, don't think I'm just "supposing" about what might happen. I'm talking about certain very alarming things that are beginning to happen already. Do you know, if things go on the way they have been going for a good while, by the time you're forty years old -- say you're about ten years old now -- all the original stands of timber in this country, the vast, native woods that the early settlers imagined never could give out, will all have been used up for lumber or burned up in forest-fires?
The fires alone are destroying, not hundreds nor thousands, but millions of acres of trees every year. The average area covered by forest-fires is between 10,000,000 and 15,000,000 acres per year. During unusually dry years the figures run still higher; as in 1924, when they reached 29,000,000. And these appalling losses, in spite of the efficiency of the fire-fighters in the National Forest Service, is largely due to the fact that more people, owing to the extended use of the automobile, are enjoying the summer woods! "Of all these forest-fires," says Chief Forester Greeley, "60 per cent are due to carelessness."
Often the fires are so fierce that they burn out the very soil itself, so that it will not be again fit for agriculture in less than a century; frequently destroying human life, and every year, on the average, burning trees, homes, and other property to the value of half a billion dollars. And with our forests all destroyed perfectly dreadful things would happen; things that have happened -- happened repeatedly in the history of the world -- because of the destruction of the forests. Flood and famine and the whole land changed to a stony waste; as you will see plainly enough when we come to the story of "The Black Magician and the Woodman."