568 A NATIONAL PLAN FOE AMERICAN FORESTRY 



operations are coming more and more to depend partly or entirely 

 on the national forests as the private timber is cut out. Since the 

 cut of national-forest timber is limited to the growth capacity of the 

 area, there is an ever-increasing leaven of permanence added to the 

 timber industry as a portion of it moves steadily into the national 

 forests. 



The influence of this leaven goes beyond the direct contribution 

 of the national-forest timber. The obvious economic and social 

 advantages of stabilized forest industries and communities are be- 

 coming more apparent to the local population and local public 

 agencies, and public measures in such matters as cooperation in 

 forest-fire protection and improved methods of forest taxation are 

 more widely favored and adopted as a means of encouraging permanent 

 forest management on private forest lands. Timber owners them- 

 selves are gradually becoming more interested in managing their 

 lands under sustained yield, both independently and in cooperation 

 with adj acent national-forest timber. 



Because the national forests contain one third of the saw timber 

 in the United States, including a third of the Nation's last large 

 remaining supply on the Pacific Coast, the regulated cut of national- 

 forest timber will have a noticeable effect in lessening the gap between 

 the cutting out of the remaining virgin supply of private saw timber 

 and the coming into merchantability of the great areas of young 

 growth on cut-over areas. 



The substantial Federal ownership of timber on the Pacific Coast 

 and in the northern Rocky Mountains has had a very real and very 

 great value in preventing a still greater overburden of mature timber 

 in private hands in these regions. This overburden is one of the 

 major causes of the disastrous overproduction of forest products in 

 the Pacific Northwest, with its bad economic and social consequences. 

 Both the general and local economic welfare would be much better 

 served if the national forests had been created before so much of the 

 timber was privately acquired. 



In the eastern half of the United States the national forests contain 

 less than 2 percent of the commercial forest area and the saw-timber 

 volume. Here their value so far is one chiefly of demonstration of 

 the advantages of permanently managed forest properties. In the 

 South, especially, where lies 40 percent of the Nation's forest land, 

 nearly all privately owned and in the main potentially very productive, 

 and where forest-fire protection and forest management are less 

 advanced than in any other region, the demonstration forest and 

 leadership possibilities of the little national-forest nuclei are very 

 great. 



These values as stabilizers and demonstrators relate not only to 

 the timber of the national forests as a commodity ; they concern also 

 the watershed values, the forage resources of the western national 

 forests, and the less tangible but highly important scenic, recreational, 

 and educational values in the national forests. As each resource is 

 discussed this will be brought out in greater detail. 



Despite many acknowledged imperfections in the past and current 

 execution of the national-forest project, and despite the fact that 

 many problems remain for future solution, the foregoing is believed 

 to be a fair appraisal of typical contributions by the national-forest 

 enterprise to the attainment of the whole of the Nation's forestry 



