Basic research in forest genetics takes time. Even with faith and patience, the researcher's life might often be discouraging without occasional glimpses along the way of what the end results can be. N. T. Mirov tells of such an experience in a letter he wrote to R. G. Gustavson just before "Dr. Gus's" retirement as head of Resources for the Future. By aid of an RFF grant, Mr. Mirov since 1955 has been studying processes of flowering and seed production in pine trees at the Institute of Forest Genetics of the Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, located at Berkeley, California. This is part of his letter:
"While in Sweden last May I visited a pulp-and-paper region near Sundsvall, and I marvelled at the multimillion dollar industry based on nothing more than annual increment of pine and spruce forests of the Swedish hinterland. They have to cut not more, preferably a little less, than annual growth, lest forest resources be depleted.
"It was a wonderful sight to see thousands of logs floated down swift rivers to the placid sunds, rafted, and towed to the mills and converted into various products.
"Another wonderful thing to watch was the attempts of the big concerns, such as Svenska Cellulosa A.B, to improve genetically their conifer forests. It is a slow process, but it is in actual use. Now the Svenska Cellulosa has over 300 hectares of seed orchards where better trees are nursed to their early maturity—ten years or so—and their seeds are being sent for reforestation of the cutover forest areas.
"When I sat there on the bank of the Indalsãlv River, I thought that we, too, very soon will be able to supply genetically better seeds for reforestation of our land."
As we think and argue about water, land, air, energy, open spaces, and other resources separately, and I hope wisely, we can never forget that man, including urban man, must always move and live and have his being in his total environment, not separately in each of the neat cubbyholes which the experts have laid out to facilitate technical analysis.
—Luther Gulick in Perspectives on Conservation
A version of this article appeared in print in the February 1960 issue of Resources magazine.
