Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation

by Mary Huston Gregory

Leather is stained by soaking the hides in a solution containing the bark of oak or hemlock. Sometimes an extract is made from chestnut wood. This has caused one of the most criminal wastes of trees, for a great deal of timber was cut down solely for the bark, and the wood left to decay in the forest. But now, as the price of lumber advances, more of it is used each year and less left to waste.

The bark and extract of the quebracho, a South American tree, are being imported for use in tanning, and are still further reducing the drain on our own forests.

Turpentine and rosin do not in themselves destroy the forests any more than does tapping the maple trees for their sap, but in the making of turpentine trees that are too small are often "boxed" and the trees are easily blown down by heavy winds or are attacked by insects and fungi. Many destructive fires also follow turpentining, so that on the whole the turpentine industry is responsible for the destruction each year of large areas of the southern pine forests. The methods of turpentining introduced by the government result in the saving of thirty per cent. more turpentine, and also protect the trees so that they may be used fifteen or twenty years and still be almost as valuable as ever for timber.

Twenty millions of posts are cut each year in the Lake States alone, and the entire number used is probably two or three times as great.

These constitute the greater uses of wood, not a full and detailed list; but it plainly shows that all the uses are not only desirable, but necessary for our comfort and happiness, and that we would not willingly sacrifice one of them, and in order that this shall not become necessary, let us see what abuses we can find in the management of our forests. And here we find the most startling figures of all.

Great and important as is our list of products made from wood, we are surprised to learn that of all wood cut fully two-thirds is wasted in the forests, left to decay or burned. The largest forests are now all located far from the great manufacturing regions, and that means far from the lumber market. The cost of transportation must be added to every car of lumber sold. The freight on a car-load of lumber from the South to Chicago or other points in the middle West is not less than a hundred dollars, and from the Pacific coast it is very much higher.

It does not pay to send low-grade lumber when the cost is so great, and as there is no local market a large part of each tree is burned. All the upper end of the trunk and all branches are thus destroyed, although much valuable timber is contained in them.

At one mill in Alabama a pile of waste wood and branches as high as a two-story house burns night and day throughout the year, and that is probably true of all the larger mills.

If the timber could be conservatively managed as are live-stock products, so that all the waste could be utilized, all the small articles, shingles, lath, posts, tan-bark and extract, pulp-wood, wood for distillation and small manufactured articles would be made by-products of the larger cuts.

Much has been said of the greed of large lumber companies in causing wholesale and reckless destruction of the forests, and much of it is doubtless true, but the lumber companies cite the fact that no farmer will gather a crop of corn which will not pay for the labor cost of gathering, and say that at the present prices of lumber they can not pay the present freight rates to the factories. It seems therefore that a certain amount of waste is unavoidable unless wood-working plants are established near the forest regions.