FOREST DEVASTATION 931 



schools and roads fall into disrepair ; commerce and industry die. This 

 is the regular order ; this is the inevitable result of forest devastation. 

 Hundreds of communities have gone this road and hundreds more 

 must follow if forest devastation is not stopped. Such communities 

 recover slowly if at all. Even where soil and climate allow profitable 

 farming, the development of new taxable resources is inevitably slow, 

 costly, and difficult. Where the conditions are unfavorable, such 

 recovery is often impossible. 



Long periods of tax deficit normally follow forest devastation. Tax 

 delinquency, involving millions of acres of land, sets up new and 

 burdensome charges which still further increase the cost of State and 

 county administration. Because of it hundreds of townships, and 

 even whole counties, are today in a state of virtual bankruptcy, re- 

 duced to the condition of paupers dependent upon outside assistance 

 for the very existence of their schools, their roads, and their police 

 protection. 



INDUSTRIAL EFFECTS OF FOREST DEVASTATION ARE GENERAL AS WELL AS LOCAL 



The exhaustion of local forests creates losses which are felt far 

 beyond the neighborhoods actually devastated. As lumbering comes 

 to an end, leaving in its wake enormous areas of idle land, a great 

 shifting in population, commerce, and industry takes place. As the 

 camps supported the forest communities, so the forest communities in 

 large measure support the neighboring towns and cities. Decay of 

 industry at these local points of consumption and supply soon shows 

 as business restraint in the more distant centers of production and 

 distribution, and in the transportation facilities of the whole region. 



With the exhaustion of its own forest supplies. State after State 

 has become an importer rather than an exporter of timber. This 

 change would not be lamented if the cut-over areas of such States 

 were profitably at v/ork. But these lands, devastated and non-pro- 

 ductive, grow nothing profitable, while the balance of the State, by its 

 import of timber, lends temporary prosperity to distant forest regions. 

 These are devastated in their turn, and thereupon lapse into economic 

 decay. It would be as reasonable that Iowa should import corn or 

 that California should depend upon Florida for oranges, as that Mich- 

 igan, with one-third of its area in idle lands, should depend upon 

 Mississippi and Arkansas for its pine and its oak. Pennsylvania has 

 five million acres of devastated forest which is costing the people of 

 the State, in loss of wages and taxes and forest growth, and in freight 

 charges on imported timber, twice as much each year as the entire 



