Cutting on National Forests of Pacific Coast. 387 



lutely waste. Such land brings no revenue to the State, and 

 produces no future wood supply. 



Every timber sale which has been made on the Snoqualmie 

 Forest furnishes a concrete instance of the fact that cutting of 

 National Forest timber displaces just so much cutting elsewhere. 

 Nearly every applicant is a logger or millman, who, if he does 

 not operate on the National Forest, will do so elsewhere. They 

 are usually not owners of stumpage, but can buy it when needed. 

 Whether or not cutting takes place on the National Forest at 

 the present time has no effect on the amount of stumpage stored 

 up in Washington and Oregon as a whole. These are facts easily 

 demonstrable on the ground. Hence, whether we are to have 

 forest management on an annual sustained yield basis beginning 

 now or later, or only on a periodic sustained yield basis, nothing 

 can be more certain than the fact that no future generation is 

 benefited in the slightest degree by withholding cutting from the 

 National Forests of this region now, providing it does not ex- 

 ceed a safe cutting limit. It should be unnecessary to state that it 

 is of vast benefit to the present generation to have cutting take 

 place, and that this constitutes an unaswerable argument for 

 encouraging cutting in every legitimate way. 



Effect of Cutting of Soils of Different Qualities. 



Having concluded that cutting is essential, it is worth while to 

 examine briefly the question of where it can best take place. 

 Since one of the chief advantages of cutting over-mature stands 

 is that they may be replaced by growing young stands, it will be 

 advantageous to displace poorly stocked stands on the best forest 

 soils first. If a stand on poor soil is replaced, little growth is 

 secured in the stand which follows, while the reverse is the 

 result on good soils. This principle should be applied locally in 

 confining cutting, except of dead timber, to lower slope and 

 bottom land types, as a rule. Broadly it indicates that it is more 

 advantageous to encourage cutting in stands on the Pacific Coast, 

 because they are on the best forest producing soils, than it is in 

 stands in the Rocky Mountains. This argument is partly neu- 

 tralized, however, by the fact that poor soils usually have smaller 

 stands, and hence the removal of an equal volume from them 

 leaves a larger area available for forest growth. 



