Felling big is dangerous work, especially when the tops of the mighty — Richard St. Barbe Baker

"Pause in space and go back in time. Explore the genesis of life on this earth and gain a true perspective. A study of the story of the forests of the past is full of romance. How came they into being?"

"Lydick proved that permanent, well-arranged s and crop shelter belts are as much of an asset as barns or plows. They are as essential to agriculture as modern factories are to industry."

"... New Zealand ... transformation of to and ... The student has an opportunity of studying the various stages of , or witnessing a virgin forest turned into a sheep run. Even a neglected farm will provide valuable data and furnish splendid material for studies of great importance and intense scientific interest. It is possible in a days ride to study the deterioration of land from virgin forest through successive years of farming or grazing to examples of and s."

"The good will place es to attract helpful birds, and farmers will do well to plant and protect to provide nesting places for their feathered friends. Birds are great distributors of tree seeds ..."

"The experience of the nomadic farmer was that he would find fertile land only in the forest and it was natural for him to make clearings, piling smaller bushes around the greater trees to fell them by burning. The provided rich fertilizer for a seasons growth but the land exposed to the elements failed to retain its fertility. So, after reaping a few crops, the nomadic farmer would penetrate ever deeper into the virgin forest ... The next stage in forest degradation is so-called orchard bush, with large trees widely scattered. Then comes a type of fringing forest, which in time will deteriorate into h. After that there is ever sparser vegetation and s, sometimes mobile but more often fixed; then follows the desert floor ..."

"... during this expedition I was to trudge through sand wastes which had been my forest haunts when I had been in Africa thirty years ago. Here one could actually see all the process of degradation, from high forest through the stages of orchard-bush and savannah to drifting sand. When the forest is cleared for farming or other reasons, the debris is sooner or later burned up. Here we were standing on land where the which had been accumulated over thousand of years had been destroyed in a single season."