932 jouRNAi, OF fore;stry 



cost of maintaining the State government. These are but typical cases. 



When lumbering shifts from exhausted to new and unexploited 

 regions, only a small part of the commerce and industry it developed 

 can shift with it. Most of it fades out and dies. New industry and 

 commerce develop with the opening of new regions, but the quicken- 

 ing of the new does not revive the old, nor does it make good the 

 losses of the region just devastated. As region after region is lum- 

 bered and cut over, prosperity is not merely shifted, but much of it is 

 permanently lost. 



The total of commerce and industry dependent upon the forest must 

 shrink in proportion as the forests are exhausted. Excluding land and 

 timber values and including only manufacturing plants where the 

 raw material is chiefly wood, $3,000,000,000 are now invested in the 

 forest industries of the United States, together with the industries 

 directly dependent upon the products of the forest for their raw 

 material. The annual value of the products of these industries is 

 $3,500,000,000. If our forests disappear, these enormous values will 

 be lost. 



The lumber industry has moved from the Northeast to Pennsyl- 

 vania, to the Lake States, and to the South within the period of a 

 single lifetime. Within 10 years it will have moved from the South 

 to the far West, and this will be its last removal, for no other un- 

 exploited forest regions remain. The mere transfer of the forest 

 industries is no longer the issue ; their very existence is at stake. The 

 losses and damages which go with forest devastation have always 

 reached far beyond forest or State boundaries ; today they are so wide- 

 spread and so great as to involve the commerce and industry of the 

 entire Nation. 



FOREST DEVASTATION AND L.A.BOR 



Wage earners and their families dependent upon the forest and 

 allied industries make up one-tenth of our total population. At least 

 2,000,000 people depend directly on the primary forest industries — 

 logging, saw-milling, naval stores. Their condition presents one of 

 the greatest of our internal problems, because labor conditions in the 

 lumber industry have been notoriously bad. Housing, sanitary ar- 

 ragements, and hours of labor too often have been outrageous, and 

 living conditions intolerable, and this because the lumber camp and 

 the lumber town exist only long enough to skin the timber from the 

 land. There is little or no permanent employment for the lumberjack 

 in America. 



