Show WE MUST BECOME TIMBER GROWERS NATIONS CHIEF FORESTER FOR ESTEIl HOLDS OUT A HOPE AND bounds A WARNING ONCE MORE SAYS MILLIONS OP ACRES OP WOOD LANDS ARE alle OUT OP OF WORK WORIC AND AM CAN UR BE GIVEN JOBS BY W B GREELEY chief U S forest service editors note W B greeley Is cl lt L t ulal service ile he is making a life work of saying saving to the nation the wood atiat Is elt and to creating a nev supply 0 of timber to till fill the demand that N il ili erlat lor for untold deuis deais to come lie la amu falts and twit ate are surprising ins the lumber industry of the united states stales is dropping behind the rocky mountains this is the outstanding t net fact III hi the 1920 canvass ut of aidem an sawmills ji st completed by the forest seavole tie Se ivice AvILe the cut of 0 lumber in practically every western state has increased in neatly neaily every eastern state it has declined washington heads the list ot of lumber producing prod states stales ind and manufactures a sixth of the entire lumler lumber ot of the country louisiana long held second place but now yields it to oregon CaL california fornia the fifth in rank replacing another of her southern sisters the american sawmill has steadily eaten its way westward and now is cropping tuo the 1 fist I rich virgin pastures ies over 60 per cent of the timber left in the united states lies between the docyk mountains aad the pacific ocean from that region the country must draw a steadily increasing part of the thirty five odd billion feet of lumber which it needs every year for its dwellings and its industries last summer I 1 rode over a 60 G 0 mile stub railroad in the mountains of west avest virginia on which thirty five sawmills laige and small have been been disman dismantled tied and abandoned within the last fifteen years its stations are mostly sawdust plies piles each with its cluster of vacant rotting buildings another stub a few distant once marketed the product ot of twelve large sawmills san mills now one ona of then them is left and its humming saws will become silent in tour four or five years the forest industries of this region are practically at an end its mill tow towns ris are one with nineveh and tyre here and there through once vast forests forest S of hemlock spruce and oak there is a little group of bottomland bott farms or a little pach of pasture land nine tenths of it Is a burned and idle waste waite an old story the story of these west virginia mountains tells the history of manyi timi ered ed regions and once thriving industrial districts in the united stales it is retold in the allegheny alleghany Alleg hany forest ot of pennsylvania in the old saw mill towns and lumber camps of the geat lakes in the pin eries bordering the south atlantic and the gult gulf it Is not only a story of forest wreckage but of economic and social retrogression the sawmill pursuing the course dictated by its own financial fortunes has left enormous areas ot of l it and with the passing ot of the sawmill passed parsed the principal industry and source ot of employment where tle tie denuded land was fertile and tillable and fuere a 8 genuine demand for or its cultivation followed loll owed the lumberjack as in toe the ohio valley the destruction of a large part ot of the forest was necessary to economic progress but enormous areas stripped of their timber and burned ot of their young grow th will bever to le converted nto into farms and other vast stretches of low or uncertain agricultural value will not be cultivated for another generation or more in fact the farm economists tell us that the extension of plow land in if the united states is due tor for a slowing up tip and that the necessary trend ct american agriculture is toward the more intensive fertilization and tillage of land now under the plow and we have also learned that a productive I 1 woodlot is a valuable it if not a necessary part of ery many of out oui farms fi L Ms many idle land the ailanti atlantic and the great plains have been cut for or such cutting was necessary arid and inevitable it is rather because much ot of our good mother earth Is out of work there kor arc somo some ag million acres of logged ott off land which hao haio not been converted into farms one million of 0 it are wholly idle as aa far as the product on loa ot of uny any other useful crop is con dined many other million acres aio aie growing but a small traction fraction of 0 the wood they might produce A large part ot of every old forest legion is wie idie today there are twenty million unemployed forest in tho the lake states and another twenty million in the south idle logged oft off land lies the real reason tor for the westward rek irek of the sawmill is not because most of the virgin forests between within a stones throw of great lumber consuming centers in new york and pennsylvania there are over five million acres of it in little new england As the sawmills move across the great plains into virgin fields tho the average bome homebuilder builder or manufacturer pays the piper with every fresh mo move the freight bill on lumber product goes up consider what this means to a great market like chicago or new york nearly two and a half billi billion orm feet of lumber pass through chicago yearly it is the greatest lum ber market of the world thirty years ago it was supplied by the abundant forest of the central and lake states and the freight charge on the average thousand feet of lumber coming into the city was well under 3 00 today with the bulk of the lumber shipments coming from the tar far south or the tar far west the average freight bill is not less than 13 per thousand toot feet the lumber users and distributors of chicago are paying from twenty to twenty five million dollars a year in added traffic charges because the sawmills in nearby states stales have cut and moved on and tor for every dollar of this excess freight there is an acre of idle forest land within airee hundred miles of Chi cagos lu lumber in yards warning given i I 1 because of unemployed forest land we are draining our timber resources six times as fast as they are being to re placed because of this we today feel the slowly tightening grip of a caiti Pait onal ional timber shortage the idle ness of forest land Is s making it more difficult and costly to house our people to supply our newspapers and magazines with paper to maintain our manufacturing industries that de pend upon wood it were well to heed the writing on the wall we should ua auw buo Q OL 01 ab ej UA acely as we view the unemployment a of t human labor the answer is not far to seek for estry is no longer a fanciful theory it has become the concern of the ev ery day business man we ate aie pree eminent as a nation of timber we must lecome become a nation of timber gr a once the business man grasps that tact fact and puts his support behind nation nationwide wide the problem of timber supply will be in a fair way toward solution there is forest land plenty aplenty a in the united states to build her houses s li her r factories and print her newspapers t f it is kept at wor work k growing trees |