“Take what we can get as soon as we can get it”

“Take what we can get as soon as we can get it” is Edward Duke’s blunt formulation of a business ethic that privileges immediate extraction over long-term forest health. Across the novel, the phrase’s outlook recurs in successive timber ventures, while conservationists and foresters challenge its premise that another forest will always be waiting.

The maxim and its immediate context

At a discussion of possible timber sources, Cyrus Hempstead points to white pine along the Susquehanna and Allegheny Rivers and urges the company to buy with an eye to fifty years ahead. Freegrace Duke similarly argues that timber should be acquired for the future. Edward rejects their time horizon: there is no need for concern about fifty years from now, he says, because forests are “infinite and permanent.” His declaration joins a demand for immediate gain to a confident denial of ecological limits.

The maxim is more than a preference for one purchasing strategy. It reduces the forest to a supply available for present use and treats future scarcity as someone else’s problem. The debate makes the opposing outlook explicit: planning ahead is possible, but Edward dismisses it as unnecessary because he assumes the resource cannot run out.

An extractive outlook repeated

The logic behind Edward’s words has earlier roots in Charles Duquet’s commercial ambitions. After observing how the fur trade could swing between surplus and scarcity—beaver pelts filling warehouses one season, while animals could disappear through overtrapping or disease—Duquet searches for a resource he believes will be permanent. He settles on the forest, imagining that it can provide timber for ships, houses, and fuel indefinitely. His confidence is not identical to Edward’s insistence on taking whatever is immediately available: Duquet plans first to profit from fur trading and then to build a timber business. But both views depend on treating forests as a durable store of wealth.

That assumption becomes brutal practice in New Zealand. Logging and trading stations dealing in flax, spars, and lumber move from one profitable shore to another, taking the best of the forest and leaving waste behind. After extensive felling, timber and forest growth are burned to clear the land. The account describes not just the removal of trees but the destruction of the wider forest world, including its plants and animals. The newcomers’ belief that the forest exists for their use gives the maxim an imperial and ecological reach: extraction advances, while its damage remains in the places from which profit has been taken.

The cost of believing forests are endless

When James Duke celebrates the vast Michigan pine stands and imagines thousands of men cutting them, Armenius Breitsprecher recognizes the scale of the danger. He sees that Duke & Sons’ appetite may extend to clearing the continent, and that the discovery could turn the company’s longstanding rapacity into its governing purpose. His objections are specific: wasteful clear-cutting destroys sound timber, damages soil, and causes erosion, with no thought for what comes after. The assumption that another forest will always be available does not prevent harm; it helps make harm the engine of expansion.

The novel places the delayed consequences of extraction beside the immediate rewards. Timber moves through logging camps, trading posts, warehouses, sawmills, and shipyards toward distant markets, while the exhausted sites bear the waste. Against that commercial movement stands the question of what happens when a forest is depleted and whether it can recover. The contrast makes the maxim’s central evasion visible: present profit is counted, but the future costs imposed on land and later generations are not.

A longer measure of responsibility

Dieter Breitsprecher offers a direct alternative to Edward’s short horizon. He asks Duke & Breitsprecher to set aside cutover land in a separate division, Maintenance Timberland, so it can be replanted and managed rather than sold to speculators. He argues that timber will become scarce and more valuable, and that continuing to maintain forestland can support future lumber and paper businesses. His proposal changes the scale on which the company is asked to think—from months and years to decades.

Dieter’s conservation argument also reaches beyond the prospect of future company earnings. In New Zealand, he speaks in favor of planting young kauri trees, while Ahorangi explains that the largest trees are thousands of years old and that a seedling cannot replace a fallen mature tree within a hundred human generations. Dieter’s answer is to plant for the health of the world and for people not yet born. That commitment reverses the maxim’s governing measure: the point is not to take what can be obtained now, but to accept responsibility for growth that the planter will never live to see.

From forestry knowledge to restoration

The novel’s later forestry work makes that alternative practical without presenting it as easy. Conrad Breitsprecher concludes that seedlings are essential to keeping forests alive, but studies why bare-root plants often fail on rough logged-over sites. He identifies a larger obstacle than simply producing seedlings: timber companies and lumbermen must understand that their own futures depend on regeneration, and they must pay for site preparation rather than trust a few remaining wild trees to reseed barren cuts. Breitsprecher therefore decides to offer site preparation as a service.

This effort replaces the assumption of limitless supply with attention to conditions, time, and cost. Conrad considers species, diseases, planting sites, and preparation; he also investigates seedlings grown in soil-filled paper cylinders and the labor and nursery space required to produce them. Restoration does not erase the damage represented by the maxim, but it sets a different standard of action: forests require knowledge and sustained work, and their future cannot be secured by treating what remains as something to consume as quickly as possible.