The six thousand mines of various kinds within our border use up 5,000,000,000 board feet every year, and so on through the list of wood-consuming industries. As our population doubles, the consumption of lumber quadruples. To-day, five hundred feet of wood is used annually for every man, woman, and child, as compared with the sixty feet used in Europe. Already our many industries are beginning to feel the shortage, and prices constantly go up.
Turpentine, which is made from the Southern yellow pine, requires a new "orchard" of 800,000 acres yearly to keep up the demand; and when we realize that one third of the lumber cut is yellow pine, it is little wonder that the price of turpentine and other naval stores keeps moving upward.
Where and when will it stop? We read a great deal about the transformation of water power into electrical energy, but the flow of streams is dependent on forests, and the spring floods are followed by drought. While the Ohio River rises forty feet in the spring, it is possible to walk over the river bed almost dry shod the following summer.
We hear much about irrigation, but irrigation is dependent largely on mountain forests.
So a burning question has arisen in these United States, called conservation, or the husbanding of the great resources that have made our country what it is.
The forest resources are different from those of the mines. There is a definite end to the supply of coal, iron, gold, and silver, but by proper care the forest may be made to yield a continuous crop of lumber.
Forestry does not mean the fencing in of the woods, but the handling of them in such a way that no more is cut than the annual growth. This has been practised in Germany on scientific principles with such success that the production has been increased 300 per cent., and where seventy-five years ago they obtained twenty cubic feet from each acre a year, they now cut sixty, and the forest continues to grow luxuriantly.
What Germany has done we can do, and millions of acres now useless can be made to yield large quantities of wood while continually clothed with growing forests.
The cutting of lumber is usually done when the sap is dormant, preferably in the winter. The logs are gotten to the mill by the cheapest method, which usually consists in floating them down a stream or river; but now that most of the remaining forest is remote, it is quite common to have portable mills transported into the woods where the trees are cut and sawed into planks or the larger sizes of timber and from there loaded on the cars.
The old-fashioned method was more picturesque, and the "drive" started with the breaking up of the ice in the spring. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of logs were guided down stream, pulled off shore when they became stranded, and the jams were broken up until the smooth water below made sorting possible.