AMERICA’S TIMBER SUPPLIES

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 50, 23 November 1926, Page 8

AMERICA’S TIMBER SUPPLIES

PERMANENT INDUSTRY FOUNDED

Tn view of periodically repeated statements that this . and» the next country’s timber supplies are doomed to exhaustion within a certain limited number of years, some interest may be attached to a letter which the secretary of the New Zealand Sawinillers’ Federation (Mr. A. Seed) has received from a prominent New Zealand sawmiller, in the person of Mr. L. M. Lane, of Totara North, who is at present visiting America. Mr. Lane writes that the opinion has been generally held that a day would come when America would require the whole of New Zealand’s available soft woods, on account of the depredations of their own forests. Instead of that, it is a fact that the lumber men of ’the States have been operating and planning their business and their installations on the basis of having their industry, not for 20 or possibly 40 years, but for all time. Their calculations are based on the maintenance of permanent forest supplies, and, while critics have denounced the timber millers for the past 20 years as ruthless vandals, the latter in reality have minded their own business, by milling their ripe, crops and conserving their young forests. The result is that tb-day there is a greater stand of merchantable timber in the territory west of the Rockies than ever there was in all the great original forests of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and of the Lake States, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The authority for this statement, says the writer, is the report of the United States Forest Service, known as the “Cap; er” report.