952 JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



he concludes that we shall not need as much lumber in the future 

 as we have used in the past, and even goes so far as to admit that 

 the country would probably be better off if it used substitutes instead 

 of wood. We wonder what Dr. Compton, the Secretary-Manager 

 of the National Lumber Manufacturers' Association, who conducts 

 campaigns against wood substitutes, will say to Dr. Compton, "the 

 economist," who thus provides advertising ammunition for the manu- 

 facturers of these substitutes? We are perfectly willing to agree with 

 Dr. Compton that "the decline in lumber production because of in- 

 creasing scarcity of its raw material, the consequent shifting of de- 

 mand and the increase in prices of lumber, are facts which everyone 

 can observe." But we cannot deduce from this that if the supply of 

 timber had been maintained, and if other conditions had not also 

 contributed to increase prices to abnormal levels, the demand for lum- 

 ber would have decreased at all. It is, of course, obvious that the 

 less lumber is produced, the less there will be consumed. We hardly 

 believe that real economists would agree that just because Great 

 Britain, Germany, and some other countries use less lumber per capita 

 than does the United States, it necessarily follows that they are any 

 better off for it. Few Americans familiar with standards of housing 

 in many of the rural regions of Europe would care to have similar 

 conditions exist in our own country. Moreover, Dr. Compton forgets 

 that even if per capita demand for lumber should decrease to some 

 extent in the course of a few decades, the population of the country 

 may be expected to increase. Even with a reasonable allowance for 

 a decline in the rate of population increase, and allowing a steady 

 decrease in requirements for lumber which will bring us down to 

 but little more than 150 board feet per capita (Germany's present 

 level) within the next 60 or 75 years, our total requirements will then 

 still be as great as they are now. Whether there will be lumber to 

 supply these demands is another matter. 



When Dr. Compton undertakes excursions into the field of tech- 

 nical forestry, he is entirely out of his sphere. We can inform him 

 that the annual increment is nearer 35 billion than 30 billion board feet 

 per year. This, however, is total annual growth, and should be com- 

 pared with the total annual cut of wood, which is approximately 110 

 billion feet. The annual growth of sawlog material, which is what 

 he evidently had in mind, is not over 9 billion feet a year. If we 

 deduct from this the losses from fires, insects, fungi, storms, and 

 o'ther causes amounting to at least 2 billion feet of saw timber per 



