FOREST DEPLETION IN AMERICA

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 36, 6 November 1920, Page 7

FOREST DEPLETION IN AMERICA

I « ' WARNINGS OP A TIMBER FAMINE. 1 Tho forestry Experts are getting- very ; uneasy- over the rapid depletion that is ! taking place in the forests ol' tlie United , States. Of course, they recognise that the States are only suffering in the sanio manner as Canada, where the shortage ' is also having the serious attention of experts in arboriculture. | _ A movement is on foot throughout tim States to perpetuate all existing forests, and in issuing an appeal for support of tills most imperative project, the. American Forestry Association says lumber is being consumed three times as fast us it is being procured, and that experts predict that saw log lumber wilt he gone in fifty years. The bulk of the original supplies of yellow- pine in the south will be gone in ten venrs. and within seven years 3000 ni'imifncturing plants- will be compelled to close. White pine in the lake States is Hearing exhaustion, and these Stales are paying 8,000,000 dollars a year in freight bills to import timber. New England, self-supporting in lumbor twenty years ago, now has lo import one-third- of the amount used. It has 300.000,000 dollars invested in wood and forest industries, employing over 90.000 workpeople. Ten years ago Hie United States produced its entire supply of pulp-wood, but now two-thirds of it is imported. Indications are that supplies of pulpwood timber in New England and New York will be exhausted ill twenty years. In New York alone supplies will be gone in ten years. Half a score of years ago the United States produced its entire newsprint supply—now two-thirds of it is imported. Only one-third of_ the newspapers issued in 1019 were printed on the product of the American forests. Tn 1918 nearly 1.400,000 tons of pulpwood was imported from Canada. The Forestry Association points out that within fifty years the' present timber shortage will have become a blighting timber famine unless forest devastation is stopped, the lands now in forest kept continuously productive, and the forest lands now. devastated by fire and lying idle put to work again.