Some Forest Problems. 261 



has been a perfecily legitimate one. The best interest of agriculture 

 required the clearing of a large part of the forest lands. To illustrate 

 what I mean I may refer to Ohio and Indiana, both once heavily 

 wooded, bearing magnificent hardwood forests. Today these states 

 import S2 per cent of their lumber supplies, yet no one questions 

 the wisdom of clearing these lands; for rich as they were in timber, 

 they are even more valuable for agricultural purposes. But the 

 work of destruction has gone too far. Great stretches of land in 

 different parts of the country that never were agricultural in character 

 have been denuded of their timber till but a beggarly i)ortion remains, 

 with the result that not only these lands jiave become wholly un- 

 productive, but the damage to neighboring lands from snows and 

 floods have greatly increased. In northern Michigan, for example, 

 millions of acres which originally bore valuable timber, are now 

 scarcely more than desolate sand barrens. These Michigan forests 

 have served the purpose of one generation, while they could have 

 been made to yield a continuous harvest and handed down to po.sterity 

 unimpaired. (The situation in Michigan is typical of conditions 

 prevailing throughout the Lake states, as well as in many others.) 

 In Mississippi 10 per cent of the forest areas are now converted 

 into badlands and the sands washing up to the valleys below have 

 turned them into sandy wastes. 



Besides the vast clearings that have been made for agricultural 

 purposes, the demands of trade yearly make vast inroads on the 

 timber supply. Still many of the industries depending on the forests 

 have only begun to develop. Even the lumber trade has sprung \rj 

 in comparatively recent years. The population of the country when 

 the federal government was organized was all in a heavily wooded 

 area, and here the land required for other purposes supplied the 

 demands for lumber. With the building of railroads came the develop- 

 ment of the west. The lumber trade increased. Distributing centers 

 were established, and the lumber industry in the past fifty years has 

 grown into a business of marvelous magnitude. With the develop- 

 ment have come various factories, converting the raw material into 

 the innumerable articles of commerce which are inseparably associ- 

 ated with the comforts and necessities of life. 



Our annual consumption of wood per capita is nine times that of 

 Germany, and twenty-five times that of great Britain. A few sta- 

 tistisc showing the amount of wood used in some of the industries 

 may be of interest. Fifty thousand acres are consumed every year 

 in the manufacture of crates and boxes. The railroads of the country 

 use annually about one hundred and fifty million ties. Seven hundred 



