Forestry and the Timber Industry in U.S.A.

Progress, Volume XV, Issue 10, 1 June 1920, Page 819

Forestry and the Timber Industry in U.S.A.

The condition of the Forests and Timber industry of the United States were exhaustively reviewed some months ago by a representative committee of American forest experts presided over by Mr. Gifford Pinchot. ex-Chief Forester of the United States Forest Service. The committee was concerned with the maintenance of timber supplies in the United States. Its principal recommendation, made after full investigation, was that conservative lumbering that is to say, methods under which only ripe timber would be cut and free play would be given to regenerationshould be enforced in privately owned as well as in national forests. Some of the conclusions on which the committee based this drastic recommendation may be summarised briefly as follows: The United States is at present consuming nearly three times more wood than is' simultaneously being grown in its forests. Even at the present rate of consumption, supplies of saw-log timber would be exhausted in about fifty years, and the present rate of consumption is bound to increase. One-fourth of the entire land area of Western Europe is under permanently productive forest; yet the people of the various countries of Western Europe use on an average less than half as much timber per capita as those of the United States, and even so are forced to import increasing supplies. The shortage of high-grade timber is world-wide. The report deals in detail also with the dependence of nearly all primary and secondary industries upon adequate supplies of timber and other forest products, and sums up the position in the statement that “without the products of the forest, civilisation as we know it would stop.” It is observed also that there is not one item in the list of indispensable munitions of war which does not involve the use of forest products. The universal shortage disclosed lends all possible point to General Birdwood’s prediction, that the world will experience a timber boom comparable to the oil and rubber booms of bygone years. It at the same time suggests that in making the most of their remaining forests the people of the Dominion will not only be studying their own domestic requirements, but laying the foundations of an immensely profitable export trade in years to come.