3. The conditions for continued imports from our neighbor, Canada, practically the only country having accessible supplies such as we need, are not reassuring and may not be expected to lengthen natural supplies appreciably.
4. The reproduction of new supplies on the existing forest area could, under proper management, be made to supply the legitimate requirements for a long time; but fires destroy the young growth over large areas, and where production is allowed to develop in the mixed forest, at least, owing to the culling processes, which remove the valuable kinds and leave the weeds, these latter reproduce in preference.
5. The attempts at systematic silviculture, that is, the growing of new crops, are, so far, infinitesimal compared with the needs.
That this is a question of serious importance to the South, as well as to the whole country, is shown by the great increase in the South’s production of lumber, which, owing to the depletion in other sections of the country, has risen from eleven and nine-tenths per cent in 1880 to twenty-five and two-tenths per cent of the total output of the United States in 1900, and it is not hard to predict an even greater production for 1910, when one concern alone has increased the number of its mills in the long leaf pine belt from seven to fifteen, and its daily output from 500,000 to 1,000,000 feet during the period from 1900 to 1904.
Basing their estimates upon the present standards of grading, the hardwood lumber journals are predicting the total exhaustion of the available supplies of this timber in fifteen years, and the hardwood lumbermen are already looking to forestry as a means of relief.
In an address delivered before the third annual meeting of the Hardwood Manufacturers’ Association of the United States, as an introduction to the subject of “The Hardwood Producing Centers of the United States,” Mr. John W. Love, of Nashville, said:
“I hope to be able to briefly call the attention of this body of practical manufacturers to a few pertinent facts that may, in a measure, at least, open our eyes to a painful truth, viz., the rapidly decreasing area of hardwood timber in the United States, and when we consider how very little is being done to conserve our forest growth—how the forests are being cleaned from hoop-poles to giant oaks, and that to supply the one item of cross ties that are used in this country alone, about 4,000,000,000 feet of timber is required (clearing about 200,000 acres of wood lot annually), and a large proportion of these ties are cut from thrifty young trees, we must conclude that a matter so weighty as to give us pause. The one hopeful sign of the future is the hope that practical forestry methods may be enforced by the Government.”
This in an address from a lumberman to an association of lumber manufacturers is indeed an encouraging sign of the times, but I fear he has waked up “to the realization that our efforts to secure a more rational treatment of our forest resources and apply forestry in their management are not too early, but rather too late: that they are by no means sufficient; that serious trouble and inconvenience are in store for us in the not too distant future; that the blind indifference and the dallying or amateurish playing with the problem of legislatures and officials is fatal.”
The railroads and the farmers of the Western plains were among the first to appreciate the importance of making provision for a future supply of construction timber and material for use on the farms.
With the far-sighted policy of manipulators of great corporations, the officials of the Santa Fe Railroad were among the pioneers in forest planting in America on railroads, as about twenty years ago they planted 1,280 acres in hardy catalpa at a total expense of $128,000, and they estimated that at the end of twenty-five years from date of planting this tract will have produced $2,500,000 of poles, ties and posts.