360,000,000 feet for railroad construction;
250,000,000 feet for charcoal;
500,000,000 feet for fence material, etc.;
17,500,000,000 feet for fuel.
To this it will be safe to add, for wasteful practices and for the destruction by yearly conflagrations, at the least, twenty‐five per cent.
The average yearly growth of wood per acre in the well stocked and well cared for forests of Germany has been computed at fifty cubic feet. Applying this figure to our present requirements, we should have an area of not less than five hundred million acres in well stocked forest to give us a continual supply of all kinds for our present needs. Now, a careful canvass made four years ago developed the result that the existing forest area in the United States, excluding Alaska and Indian Territory, comprised almost five hundred million acres (489,280,000); but it is well known to everybody who is acquainted with our forests that they cannot compare in yield with the average European Continental forests under systematic management. Much of what is reported as forest is useless brush land or open woods, and depreciated in its capacity for wood production by annual fires, by which the physical structure of the leaf mould is destroyed, and thus, too, its capacity for storing the needful moisture, reducing wood production, and killing all young growth.
Without care, without management, and left to the kind but uneconomical work of nature, interfered with, in addition, by rude and ignorant action of man, it is doubtful whether, on the existing area, one half the amount of wood is produced yearly which we now require. We have, therefore; beyond doubt, reached—if not passed—the time when increased drain means squandering of capital, and when regard to husbanding, to careful management, to recuperation of our forests, and planting of new forests is required for the purpose of merely furnishing raw material; and it should not be forgotten that to reproduce the quick growing white pine of an acceptable quality and sufficient size requires not less than eighty to one hundred years, and for the long leaved pine two hundred years; that, altogether, wood crops are slow crops; that nothing of size can be grown under a quarter of a century at the best.
That this is a business requiring intelligent national consideration is apparent. Not less so if we appreciate the magnitude of the values resulting from it. The total value of forest products in the census year was placed at $700,000,000, or ten times the value of the gold and silver production, five times the value of all coal and mineral production, and exceeding every one of the agricultural crops, corn and wheat not excepted; and representing in value about thirty per cent. of the total agricultural production.
Of injuries wrought locally by the reckless clearing of hill sides and of deterioration of the soil due to inconsiderate action of man, I could entertain you by the hour. The country is full of examples. Any one who wishes to study the effect of such denuding of hill sides upon the soil, the water flow, and agricultural conditions, need not go to France, Spain, Italy, Greece, or Palestine. The Adirondack Mountains are within easier reach, where the thin cover of earth exposed to the washing rains is carried into the rivers, leaving behind a bare, forbidding rock and desolation, while at Albany the Hudson River is being made unnavigable by the debris and soil carried down the river. The government has spent more than ten million dollars, I believe, and spends every year a goodly sum, to open out a passage over the sand bar thus formed.
Go to the eastern Rocky Mountains, or to Southern California, and you can gain an insight into the significance of regulated water supply for the agriculture below, and also learn how imprudently we have acted and are acting upon the knowledge of this significance by allowing the destruction of mountain forests in the most reckless and unprofitable manner. Along the shores of Lake Michigan, and along the sea coast, we are creating shifting sands by the removal of the forest cover, to make work for the ingenuity of our children in devising methods for fixing these sands again. The vegetable mould with which the kind forest had covered the alluvial sands of the southern coast plain we are taking pains to burn off in order to replace it with expensive artificial fertilizers.