Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation

by Mary Huston Gregory

Conditions have changed very slowly, but very surely. In every state, in every county and in every township there has been a steady clearing of the land as it fills with new home-makers. At the same time the demand has grown enormously each year from the dwellers in cities.

The opening up of railroads and telegraph lines in the middle and latter part of the century made a great demand for wood. The building of ships and steamboats, the opening of mines, the establishing of telephone and trolley systems, the building of great cities, all these have called steadily and increasingly for wood.

The time has long passed when wood was a hindrance to progress. For a long time there has been a ready market at high prices and it is rapidly reaching the point where we shall face an actual shortage of timber. This is not true of all parts of the country, of course. Maine, Washington, and parts of Oregon, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, Wisconsin and some other states, still have vast quantities of lumber, but trains and ships carry it to all parts of the world so there is no lack of a market.

The change from plenty, even great excess, to need, has come so gradually that few persons, even those living in the forest regions, have realized until within a very few years how general is their destruction. Those who, riding about a small portion of the country familiar to them, have been struck with the disappearance of the woods and the cultivation of the lands, have looked upon it wholly as a sign of progress, and have not realized that the same thing is going on in every part of the country.

The wholesale destruction of the forests, without replanting, has come mostly from ignorance. We have had all our resources in such great abundance that we have not hitherto needed to learn the lessons that the Old World has learned, sometimes at the cost of whole nations, but the time has come when we do need to learn them.

The first lesson is to study the various uses of the forests, to find how they are being affected by present use, their wastes, and the best means of preserving them. When all the people have learned these lessons, they will, undoubtedly, gladly set about righting the wrongs that have been done in the past.

The original forests of this country covered an area of about 850,000,000 acres, with nearly five and a half trillion board feet of "merchantable," that is, salable, timber according to present standards. (A board foot is one foot long, one foot wide and one inch in thickness.) Considerably more than half the original number of acres are still forested, but most of the land has been cut or burned over, some of it several times, and the amount remaining of salable timber, which includes only the best part of the trunk, is from two to two and a half trillion, that is from 1,400 to 2,000 billion, feet. The yearly cut for all purposes, including waste, is now over two hundred billion board feet;—some authorities place the amount as high as two hundred and seventy-five billion feet. This, however, probably includes firewood, one of the largest uses of wood, but taken very largely from worm-eaten wood that could not be cut into lumber. It also probably includes boughs, and other unsalable parts of the tree.

The timber cut doubled from 1880 to 1905, is still increasing at almost the same rate, and, if we had the timber, it would doubtless double again by 1930. But even at the present rate, the forests now standing, without allowance for growth, would be exhausted in from ten to sixteen years. The yearly growth of timber in our present forests is estimated at from forty-two to sixty billion feet, and the yearly cut at from three to three and a half times the amount added for growth.

That is, we are using in four months at least as much wood as will naturally grow in a year. The other eight months we shall be using our forest reserves, and each year there will be less forest land to produce new growth, as well as less old wood to cut.

Mr. R. A. Long, an expert lumberman who spoke before the first Conservation Congress, estimated then that the forests, making allowance for growth, would not last over thirty-five years. The government figures indicate that they will last about thirty-three years, at the present rate, but as the rate has been doubling every twenty-five years, many persons who have studied the situation believe that the supply will not continue in commercial quantities for manufacturing more than twenty-five years.