Forest Management Required aly 
The unprecedented rise in lumber prices, which reached its 
peak in March, 1920, has drawn the attention of thinking 
men to the widespread forest depletion as no amount of asser- 
tons and discussions could do. The acute shortage of supply 
and the widespread discomfort and suffering arising from it 
will eventually have most beneficial effects, if they result in 
a wiser management of natural resources hereafter. 
It seems obvious that the rising prices of forest products will 
permit and even compel much closer utilization of wood and 
more general protection of wooden structures. But economy 
alone is far from sufficient to supply the needs of the present 
and the future. There must be vastly greater production. 
Nature must be aided in every possible way to increase the 
production of existing forest areas, and there must also be the 
development of new producing forests on a scale never before 
attempted by a State. 
New York needs a lumber cut two or three times as great as 
at present, and has forest lands capable of producing it. 
Without prompt and vigorous action looking to that end the 
pre-eminence of New York wood-working industries 1s as uncer- 
tain as that of her wood-pulp industry. So long as wood was 
cheap there was no possibility that business men would turn 
from the old ways, but the experience which the American 
people are now going through may be just the stimulus needed 
to bring about the active practice of forestry on both publi 
and private holdings. 
Fortunately, New York State has its future largely within 
its own hands. The heavy precipitation of her mountainous 
regions insures dense forests in the future, the composition of 
which will be determined in part by her foresters, though 
past lumbering has already resulted in a strong set toward 
the reproduction of hardwoods rather than white pine and 
spruce. 
Although the productive capacity of the forest soils has in 
many instances been reduced by fire and erosion, yet the soils 
themselves are not extensively removed, as in some deforested 
