386 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



TIMBER PRESERVATION— A FORM OF FOREST 

 CONSERVATION 



F. C. Bohannoist, Galesburg High School 



Theodore Roosevelt and Clifford Pinchot did the peo- 

 ple of the United States a great service by calling atten- 

 tion to the problem of conservation of our forests. The 

 Forester now has his work well organized and under 

 way ; it remains for the work of the timber engineer to be 

 recognized by the public and for his methods generally 

 to be adopted, to complete the program of conservation. 



Saving the supply of timber already grown is doubt- 

 less as important as growing a new supply. U. S. Bul- 

 letin of Agr. 112 is responsible for the statement that we 

 are using 40 billion feet of lumber and 87 million hewed 

 railroad ties annually, besides pulpwood and fuelwood. 

 W. B. Greeley, chief of the U. S. Forest Service, urges 

 preservative treatment of railroad ties, mine timbers, 

 fence posts, telegraph poles, shingles and construction 

 lumber. He endorses an estimate of 3,650,000,000 board 

 feet as the annual saving by this method. The import- 

 ance of saving becomes significant when we are told 

 in the same bulletin that "We are taking about 26 bil- 

 lion cubic feet of material out of our forests every year 

 and growing about 6 billion feet in them". 



Our outgo in forest resources is more than our income. 

 Bankruptcy of natural forest resources is inevitable un- 

 less we face the situation and save what we have. First, 

 we can produce more; every state has its program of 

 forestation, but without hope of catching up to increas- 

 ing demand in an economically active country. We are 

 now using one half of the consumption of forest products 

 of the entire world. Yet in the state of New York, as 

 reported by its conservation commissioner, the number 

 of wood-using factories including furniture factories, 

 agricultural implements plants, and concerns using lum- 

 ber in the form of plank had shrunk from 3,300 plants 

 in 1913 to 2200 in 1900, 1100 industries having gone out 

 of business in six years. 



We can use less timber; the older nations of the earth 

 have reduced their consumption to a very low and stable 



