Extracts from reports of 43 foresters, coordinated by Juan Jesus Molina Rodriguez, Monograph No. 9 of the Spanish National Institute for the Conservation of Nature, Ministry of Agriculture, Madrid. 209 p. Reforestation in Spain is alive and well. Unfortunately for the curious reader, the framework of organization, the planning and follow-up phases, do not enter the scope of this book. The focus is exclusively upon the execution of large-scale reforestation. But at the same time, that focus brings out the details with such clarity as to take the reader very close to the workings that create forest upon land of otherwise low usefulness.
Foresters are no longer free to be ignorant of such workings.
Their orders of the day are for more parks and plantations as the public looks to them for more natural areas and more wood products. Parks and plantations are spreading by several million hectares a year, an increasingly important factor of land use. That the present book should come out of Spain is in no way remarkable. History and climate have endowed Spain with a high proportion of lands once forested but now under fallow and rough grazing, long the despair of economists and sociologists alike. Since 1940, Spain's foresters have converted three million hectares of such land into forest, about six percent of the national territory.