818 JOURNAL or" FORESTRY 



2. To indicate that fire protection and good silviculture are very 

 difficult of accomplishment, if indeed not impossible in many regions, 

 without sustained forest business such as v^ill result from continuous 

 forest production of the property. 



3. To point out that taxation of private timber lands can be satis- 

 factorily arranged only when the property returns are. annual and 

 approximately equal in amounts, as in sustained annual yield. 



4. To summarize and to point out briefly the value of Professor 

 Roth's plan of regulation of the forests of the United States. This 

 plan calls for feasible and satisfactory working plans for all forest 

 properties. If any owner does not prepare a working plan, a man- 

 datory form of selection cutting with 20-year period of return is im- 

 posed. In either case the Government stands ready to purchase the 

 land if the owner desires. 



WHY CONTROL THE AMOUNT CUT FROM THE FORESTS 



To get the forest lands of the United States, excepting those in the 

 Far West and parts of the South, into satisfactory timber production, 

 must take at least a hundred years of the most energetic and sustained 

 efifort. It is not conceivable that we will actually begin a rehabilitation 

 of our devastated forests on the scale necessary to bring them into 

 good production, within many years (twenty-five or thirty). As a 

 result the control of the cut on the remaining virgin forests of the 

 West is of the greatest importance. 



It should be remembered, also, that even with the best timber pro- 

 duction possible on all the forest lands of the country, no more timber 

 can be produced than will be needed by the people and the industries. 



At the present time the growth needed to replace our destroyed 

 forests has not even started. There is a total of about 85,000,000 

 acres of land, once forested, now so ruined from fire and lumbering 

 that merchantable trees only will come again onto the land, within 

 reasonable time, by reforestation. There is also a matter of 250,000,000 

 acres of land lumbered over, and some of it burned over (mostly in 

 New England and the Southern Appalachian Mountains) which sup- 

 ports a volunteer growth of poor timber trees intermingled with those 

 poorest trees left by the lumberman — a forest iisually poorly stocked 

 with undesirable tree species which most certainly is not producing 

 more than 30 per cent of the timber that it should. 



