THE EFFECT OF ADVANCING VALUES OF LUM- 

 BER AND STUMPAGE ON THE CONSERVATION 

 OF OUR FOREST RESOURCES 



By Robert Fullerton 



^^-/HE value and importance we at- 

 ^^)tach to natural resources is based 

 ^^'^on their abundance and not on the 

 time or labor cost required in their 

 production or reproduction. The one 

 time supposed limitless area of virgin 

 forest lands in the United States seeded 

 by Mother Nature with no human aid 

 and maturing for centuries on the un- 

 explored, untaxed public domain, was 

 considered of little or no value ; a sort 

 of elemental inheritance like water and 

 sunshine, often looked upon as an ob- 

 structing, expensive embargo in the 

 civilizing progress of the pioneer home- 

 steader when clearing his land for the 

 cultivation and production of necessary 

 food crops. Some modern industrial 

 critics with little knowledge of early 

 pioneer times, or lacking capacity to 

 rightly understand conditions confront- 

 ing the homesteader and the lumber- 

 man in their strenuous efforts to make 

 a living in the wilderness outposts of 

 civilization, accuse these hard working 

 nation builders of thoughtless predatory 

 vandalism and wanton wastefulness of 

 an indespensable natural resource. Go- 

 ing back to colonial times, the abund- 

 ance of growing timber in New Eng- 

 land was often considered a nuisance ; 

 a troublesome hardship to be cut down 

 and burned up to clear the land for 

 farming purposes. 



A forest of giant oaks or towering 

 pines is a beautiful sight and fills the 

 eye with delight. But our forefathers, 

 while appreciating the beauty and value 

 of their forest resources, could not 

 subsist on a diet of acorns and pine 

 cones, and the obstructing forest trees 

 had to surrender their first lien to the 

 soil and the sunshine to make room for 

 some food producing crop. The Amer- 

 ican oak had to make way for the Irish 



potato and the pine and the spruce were 

 deadened and destroyed that corn and 

 wheat might grow. Our forefathers 

 slaughtered their forest trees that man- 

 kind might live ; a survival of the fittest, 

 that calls for no apology from the gen- 

 erations that preceded us. 



The first settlers in this country were 

 poor and proverbial for economy ; they 

 wasted nothing that seemed to them of 

 value ; they came from countries where 

 timber was scarce and highly prized ; to 

 cut magnificent groves of pine and oak 

 trees that had been maturing for cen- 

 turies, and consign their splendid lum- 

 ber-making trunks to the flames, must 

 have occasioned a feeling akin to 

 sacrilege in the minds of Puritan 

 pioneer homesteaders. No settler at 

 any time ever cut down valuable tim- 

 ber from a spirit of pure rapacity, and 

 no lumberman ever permitted a single 

 log to rot in the woods, if there was 

 any visible or prospective profit in haul- 

 ing such logs to his mill and converting 

 them into lumber. 



This statement does not imply that 

 farmers have not destroyed and wasted 

 much valuable timber, and that lumber- 

 men have not left millions of logs in 

 the woods to rot and burn up, but in 

 every instance where a farmer de- 

 stroyed obstructing timber, it was done 

 from absolute necessity, and the lum- 

 berman left low grade logs to waste in 

 the woods rather than involve himself 

 and his associates in bankruptcy, as the 

 market price obtainable for lumber 

 made from such logs, was less than the 

 labor cost of its production. Lumber- 

 men who own and operate saw mills 

 are more interested in saving and utiliz- 

 ing their forest resources than any 

 altrustic politicians demanding legisla- 

 tion to compel the American people to 



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