Items of Interest September 16, 1916 Issue

Items of Interest

To make a successful fight against moving sand-dunes such as those of the Columbia River region and other places along the Pacific coast, the United States must follow the plan adopted by France many years ago and build one great dune in an effort to eliminate many smaller ones. This is the verdict of forest service experts who have made a world-wide study of dunes and of the methods employed to combat them. "In the lower Columbia River Valley, both in Washington and Oregon," according to a contributor to The Popular Science Monthly, "sand-dunes are destroying farms and orchards, and are changing a country of great fertility into waste land. A hundred years ago France was confronted with a problem equally serious. More than three hundred miles of coast line on the Bay of Biscay was being blown inland by the winds of the Atlantic Ocean.

"Eventually some one hit upon a plan of building a great lateral dune along the entire coast as a means of checking the movement of the sand. The entire coast line was fringed by a fence consisting of posts driven into the ground at close intervals, and the spaces between them were interwoven with willow branches and brush," he continues. "Soon the strong winds blowing in from the ocean banked a great wall against this fence and eventually it was entirely covered with sand. Then a second line of fence was erected on the small lateral dune thus created. In time this fence was covered by the sand which banked up against it. This operation was repeated many times, and then other means of increasing the size of the dune were used. Pine trees were planted along the top. These served to check the wind-blown sand as the fences had done in past years, and day by day the dune grew in height and widened out. As it increased in size more pine trees were planted. Today a great forest 2,500,000 acres in extent fringes the coast line as the result of this initial experiment. It represents France's greatest supply house of turpentine and lumber. The country lying inland from it is rich and fertile. The sand menace has disappeared.

The national forest reservation commission has approved the purchase by the Government of fifty-nine tracts of land with a total of 66,880 acres in the Appalachian and White Mountains. Thirty-six thousand acres are in the so-called Kilkenny purchase area in New Hampshire. About seventeen thousand acres of adjoining land on the White Mountain area was approved. With this land a total of 698,086 acres in the White Mountains has been acquired. Smaller tracts were purchased in the southern Appalachian Mountains. Congress recently reappropriated the $3,000,000 of the original fund which was not spent in the beginning of the work and which consequently reverted to the treasury. In making future purchases it is stated that the policy will be to select those tracts which block in with lands already purchased and which are offered at the most reasonable prices. The acquisition of lands was begun in 1911. To date 1,396,367 acres have been approved for purchase.

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