44 



CONSERVATION 



State Forest Commissioner Whipple, his address, the Conference unani- 



of New York, followed with a stirring mously agreed to an extension of time, 



address. Running past his time limit to permit Mr. Whipple to finish his re- 



of ten minutes before the conclusion of marks. 



ADDRESS OF COMMISSIONER WHIPPLE 



I AM very much in doubt whether a plain, 

 practical man ought to take much of the 

 time of a convention like this, where 

 there seem to be so many scientific men; but 

 to me it has always seemed that what we call 

 in Western New York common horse sense 

 is so much better in working out a difficult 

 problem than, sometimes, technical knowledge 

 alone is, that perhaps you can stand a little 

 just now. 



Forestry in this country is very young — 

 practical forestry, that is. I have listened 

 here for two days, and I listened last spring 

 at the other conference, to splendid things 

 said and great thoughts pronounced; but very 

 few men have suggested remedies that it 

 seemed to me we could apply our hands to 

 and do something. 



The paper on forestry this morning was a 

 splendid paper; but I have to say. Senator, 

 that you left out the one great, important 

 thing, after all, and I hope you will pardon 

 me for saying it — you have not said a word 

 about how to reproduce forests, practicallv. 



Now, it is all nonsense to talk about our 

 having forests enough by natural reproduc- 

 tion, and you all admit it. You say that we 

 are cutting ofif our forests three and a half 

 times faster than nature reproduces them. If 

 that is true, that is the whole proposition, is 

 it not? How long is it going to be before 

 you have no forests, however carefully you 

 handle them? 



The gentleman from Alabama thinks that 

 they have forests enough, if practicallv han- 

 dled, to take care of the interests down there 

 for some time ; but do you not know that you 

 are cutting forty billion feet a year out of the 

 United States forests, and a billion five hun- 

 dred million feet out of my own vState's for- 

 ests, and if you will look at the charts, you 

 will see that that is a small part of it, and 

 still it is more than three and one-half times 

 the growth. If you admit that fire is sweep- 

 ing away more than you cut ; that one-third 

 of what you cut is loss ; that your population 

 is increasing so fast that in fifty years you 

 will have two hundred million people in 

 America; that the demand for timber is in- 

 creasing faster than your population, and that 

 the supply is decreasing much faster than 

 either, what are you coming to in America? 

 That is the question I am asking. 



You are using yearly two billion feet board 

 measure for newspapers alone. 



In the State of New York there is standing 

 today only about forty-one billion feet of saw 

 timber. We are cutting it five times as fast 

 as it is produced. The State owns a million 



six hundred thousand acres of that timber 

 land that must be deducted. What is our 

 situation? In twenty years, at the rate we 

 are going, not one sawing stick will stand in 

 the State of New York; and we are even 

 now getting eighty-eight per cent of our pulp 

 wood from Canada, even if our good friend 

 does insist that some lumber goes back to 

 Canada. 



What is the remedy? That is the question. 

 We cannot take it out in resolutions and talk ; 

 we have to do something. 



We have to get out, every mother's son of 

 us that has an acre of land that is not good 

 for agricultural purposes, and plant trees. It 

 will not do to set land aside to the National 

 Government and the States as forest reserves 

 alone ; we must economize in every way pos- 

 sible; but above all we must plant trees. 



Germany has planted trees for a thousand 

 years, and all of its forest is a planted forest 

 park. The German people produce one hun- 

 dred thousand feet board measure upon a 

 single acre. The best timber in this country, 

 East and South and West, until you get to 

 the great trees of the far West, will not run 

 over twenty thousand feet to the acre. We 

 have got to be practical. We have got to use 

 common horse sense. 



What ought you Governors to do? Allow 

 me to speak just as plainly as I can, in the 

 Western New York way. Go home and es- 

 tablish a Commission, if you have not done it 

 already and put a Pinchot at the head of it. 

 Then furnish it money, and don't get down 

 on your knees, or anywhere else, and implore 

 the National Government to set aside some 

 State land as a National forest ; do it your- 

 selves. 



You may kneel at the shrine for years and 

 you won't get it done. The way to do it is to 

 do it yourselves. It is in your own hands. 

 Get a little State forest preserve. And then 

 handle it freely. Don't do it as we are 

 obliged to do under the Constitution of the 

 State of New York; that is, let it stand here 

 and rot and burn up, and not be able to take 

 out a single stick. Be practical about it ! 

 Build some tree gardens and put the last dol- 

 lar into it that you can raise. Plant every 

 year some millions of pine trees. Hard woods 

 reseed themselves ; they come up from the 

 sprout; but the coniferse in this countrvmust 

 be planted, as every practical man knows. 

 You sweep away a pine or a spruce or a hem- 

 lock forest and it will never grow again ; 

 those trees must be planted. In Canada and 

 some other places it does reforest pretty well, 

 but not in our country. Be practical. Don't 



