FOREST TAXATION^ 



Bv W. G. Hastings 

 Forester, State of Vermont 



A recent report by the United States Forest Service " shows the 

 following timber situation : Only one-third of the original stand and 

 two-thirds of the original acreage of timber in the United States still 

 remain ; in 60 years the lumber industry has moved into and exhausted 

 successively four of the five largest timber regions of the nation; 

 most of the virgin timber left standing is situated 2,000 miles west 

 of the center of population, and a six-to-one relationship exists be- 

 tween consumption and production of saw timber. The facts about 

 timberland exhaustion enumerated in the above referenced report are 

 more startling and point more clearly to a downward trend in timber 

 supplies in the nation than any other reported facts that have been 

 assembled. Although it has been known for half a century that 

 timber' exhaustion was inevitable and although efforts to postpone the 

 resultant famine have been sustained and serious, destruction has 

 actually gained apace — it matters not from what angle the subject 

 may be viewed. 



For an average period of 20 years the Nation and half of the States 

 have appropriated money for the maintenance of forestry depart- 

 ments, hoping thereby to create static conditions in timber consump- 

 tion and production, but the task has proved greater than their powers 

 to achieve, and will remain insurmountable in spite of ever increasing 

 expenditure of public money so long as we attempt to correct the 

 evils of denudation through appropriations and fail to remove the 

 cause which lies back of the condition, whatever the cause may be. 

 You cannot permanently aid a famine-stricken country by continuing 

 ". . . to pour a pitiful stream of rice porridge down the bottom- 

 less throat of famine." Rather, the occasion for it must be removed. 

 And so it is with denudation — the cause must be discovered and de- 

 stroyed. In nature the forces of production and destruction are equal 



^Abstract of a paper read before the convention of Northeastern Tax Com- 

 missioners, Burlington, Vermont, Dec. 12, 1920. 



" Issued June 1, 1920, in response to Senate Resolution 311. 



652 



