The Earth as Modified by Human Action

Author:George P. Marsh [Marsh, George P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2004-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

Forests of Italy.

According to the most recent statistics, Italy has 17.64 per cent. of woodland, [Footnote: Siemoni, Manuale d'Arte Forestale, 2 ediz., Firenze, 1872, p. 542.] a proportion which, considering the character of climate and surface, the great amount of soil which is fit for no other purpose than the growth of trees, and the fact that much of the land classed as forest is either very imperfectly wooded, or covered with groves badly administered, and not in a state of progressive improvement, might advantageously be doubled. Taking Italy as a whole, we may say that she is eminently fitted by climate, soil, and superficial formation, to the growth of a varied and luxuriant arboreal vegetation, and that in the interests of self-protection, the promotion of forestal industry is among the first duties of her people. There are in Western Piedmont valleys where the felling of the woods has produced consequences geographically and economically as disastrous as in South-eastern France, and there are many other districts in the Alps and the Apennines where human improvidence has been almost equally destructive. Some of these regions must be abandoned to absolute desolation, and for others the opportunity of physical restoration is rapidly passing away. But there are still millions of square miles which might profitably be planted with forest-trees, and thousands of acres of parched and barren hillside, within sight of almost every Italian provincial capital, which might easily and shortly be reclothed with verdant woods. [Footnote: To one accustomed to the slow vegetation of less favored climes, the rapidity of growth in young plantations in Italy seems almost magical. The trees planted along the new drives and avenues in Florence have attained in three or four years a development which would require at least ten in our Northern States. This, it is true, is a special case, for the trees have been planted and tended with a skill and care which cannot be bestowed upon a forest; but the growth of trees little cared for is still very rapid in Italy. According to Toscanelli, Economia rurale nella Provincia di Pisa, p. 8, note—one of the most complete, curious, and instructive pictures of rural life which exists in any literature—the white poplar, Populus alba, attains in the valley of the Serchio a great height, with a mean diameter of two feet, in twenty years. Solmi states in his Miasma Palustre, p. 115, that the linden reaches a diameter of sixteen inches in the same period. The growth of foreign trees is sometimes extremely luxuriant in Italy. Two Atlas cedars, at the well-known villa of Careggi, near Florence, grown from seed sown in 1850, measure twenty inches in diameter, above the swell of the roots, with an estimated height of sixty feet.]

The denudation of the Central and Southern Apennines and of the Italian declivity of the Western Alps began at a period of unknown antiquity, but it does not seem to have been carried to a very dangerous length until the foreign conquests

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.