3SS JOURNAL OF FORESTRY 



The Reserves of Standing Timber 



To define the general situation in the lumber industry in one sen- 

 tence, I should say that the trouble with the lumber manufacturer 

 today is that he is a timber owner. To one familiar with the tradition 

 of the industry that all the profit comes from the ownership of stand- 

 ing timber and "the more timber the more profit," this statement may 

 sound like heresy; and thus it appears to many lumbermen. But I 

 will go yet farther and will venture the assertion that a part of the 

 timber standing in the Pacific Northwest — the most inaccessible of it, 

 to be sure — some of which seven or eight years ago was bought and 

 sold at as much as $1.50 per thousand feet in actual cash outlay, is, 

 in view of the probable future price to be realized for it and in view 

 of the lapse of time before it can profitably be cut, not worth today 

 more than 20 cents a thousand feet, if indeed that much. There stands 

 today, in the Pacific Northwest, more than half of the remaining mer- 

 chantable timber in the whole of the United States, or about 1,500 

 billion feet. At the present rate of cutting it constitutes approximaely 

 IGo years' supply. If the rate of cuting shall double within ten years 

 or be quadrupled within twenty years there will nevertheless be some 

 timber that cannot be cut for more than fifty years to come. 



As business calculations are made in the industry today if timber 

 owners knew with certainty that for underlying economic reasons it 

 would be impossible profitably to cut certain timber for, say, fifty 

 years and that not more than $6 or $7 could even then be realized for 

 it, I doubt much that some owners would refuse a price of as little, 

 perhaps, as 10 cents today. 



The Change in Conditions of Timber Holdings 



Such certainty does not, to be sure, exist in the lumber industry 

 today. The enterprise of holding timber over long periods of time is 

 essentially speculative. The returns are uncertain and the years of 

 waiting before the returns are realized is equally indefinite. But the 

 fundamental facts with respect to the use of lumber are not encourag- 

 ing to the investor in great reserves of standing timber. For example, 

 with the filling up of the "silent places" in the western prairies, the 

 per capita consumption of lumber has declined greatly. Likewise 

 throughout the United States the per capita use of lumber has fallen 

 from a maximum of 527 feet in 1906 to 375 feet ten years later, in 

 1915. During the same period the total production declined from 46 



