As an example of the rapid rate at which we are consuming our forests, we use nine times as much lumber for every man, woman and child as the people of Germany use, and twenty-five times as much as the people of England use. This is due to several causes, many of which we would not wish changed.
To begin with, this was a new and undeveloped country, a large part of which had never been inhabited, and all the land, as fast as it was occupied, must be built up with entirely new homes; and because wood is the cheapest building material it is the one generally used.
The growth of all European countries is mostly by the increase of their own people, while this is only a small percentage of our growth, which comes largely from immigration from other countries, so the increase of population is much greater here and the proportion of new homes needed is far greater. Improvements of all kinds, public buildings, churches and bridges were built in almost every European community long ago, while in this country these things are being done each year in thousands of places.
Wages are higher in this country, and more people are able to afford the luxuries of life, vehicles, musical instruments, and the large variety of small conveniences to be found in almost every American home but seen in few homes of the poorer class in Europe.
These are a few of the reasons why we use such a large amount of lumber each year. They are all conditions that mean a larger, better nation than we could otherwise have, with a higher standard of living, and while in some particulars, as we shall show, there should be changes that would conserve our forests, the great wastes do not lie in the use, but in the abuse of the forests.
Now let us see what use is made of all the wood that is cut every year. The greatest use of all is for firewood, but this is largely the decaying or faulty trees from farmers' wood-lots, or the waste product of a lumber region, so this does not constitute so heavy a drain on the forests as the fact that 100,000,000 cords a year are used, would indicate.
Twenty times as much of the salable timber is sawed into lumber as is used in any other way. Nearly 40,000,000,000 board feet are thus used, but lumber is used in a variety of ways, while the other cuts are confined to a single use.
The first and greatest use of lumber is for building purposes, for houses, barns, sheds, out-buildings, fences, and for window-sashes, doors and inside finishings of all buildings, even those made of other materials.
Next comes furniture of all kinds,—chairs, tables, beds, and all other house, office, and school furniture; musical instruments, pianos, etc., vehicles of all kinds,—farm wagons, delivery wagons, carriages and other pleasure vehicles, including parts of automobile bodies, agricultural implements, plows, harrows, harvesters, threshing machines and other farm implements. Though these are built largely of iron, yet one-fourth of the implement factories report a use of 215,000,000 feet of lumber a year, so the entire output of these factories calls for a large amount of wood from our forests.
Car building is the other really great use for lumber. Freight cars, passenger cars, and trolley cars use each year an increasingly large proportion of the product of our saw-mills.