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Assuming alternative (b) to be adopted, the following paragraphs
represent my mental picture of a well-rounded Wiscensin program.
Allocation - The funds in the state would give a balanced program
Of distributed as follows:
1. ftrests                  50 per cent
2. Marshlands               40 per cent
3. Miscellaneous consolidations 10 per cent
Imrovements: The public benefit will not go much beyond farm
shrinkage unless funds are available for improvement as well as purchase.
This is especially true of marshlands. For every dollar for marshland pur-
chase at least P5-50 should be available for improvement. (This ratio is
a rough guess).
Administration: All of class 3, most of class 2, and that part of
class 1 adjacent to state and county forests will have awkward limitations
as to size and dispersion of parchase areas unless state administration Is
contemplated. As already pointed out, the lands should continue in
federal ownership, but should be entrasted to the states subject to satisfactory
stewardship, (except where they be adjacent to some preexisting federal
reservation).
Misellaneous: Class 3 includes farms lying on public streams and
lakeshores already largely in public ownership; farms interfering with
rookeries, refuges, parks, primitive areas for ecological study, and other
locations which are or should be public.
Gamelands: The report of the President's Committee on wild life is
predicated on a sharp segregation of purchase areas into (a) those bought for
the dual purpose of shrinking agriculture and conserving wild life, and (b)
those bought without reference to wild life. I think this sharp distinction
artificial. The utility for wild life will be of all degrees from nearly
zero to nearly 100 per cent. In Wisconsin at least the wild life objective
should enter in some degree into all purchases, and the two classes of purchase
should be made by a single overhead agency on which the wild life interest is
represented.
Federal Agency: It is of utmost importance, from the wild life angle,
that the federal purchase agency should represent the experienced men already
in the Biological Survey, Plus two new ideas not yet firmly rooted in the
Biological Survey, but obtainable by adding some skillfully chosen personnel,
namely (1) wild life management or cropping, and (2) coordination of uses.
Aldo Leopold
In Charge, Game Research