A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 579 



permanently, though reporting to their respective chiefs. In either 

 case these technicians have functioned in an advisory capacity. The 

 advisory experts have determined facts, made recommendations, and 

 in some cases supervised operations which the administrative heads 

 of the Forest Service instituted on the basis of expert recommenda- 

 tions. 



The most conspicuous public advantages of this plan of unity of 

 purpose and undivided control have been : 



1 . The Forest Service as the agency responsible for the management 

 of the national forests has had a free hand to harmonize and coordinate 

 all the activities. No activity is an end in itself, but is merely a 

 means of accomplishing a larger objective in correlated land manage- 

 ment. No activity has been on an independent footing to follow its 

 own course regardless of the composite objective of national-forest 

 management. 



2. The Forest Service has had the full advantage of the best availa- 

 ble expert service without duplication, and without losing sight of the 

 fundamental fact that the expert service was a means and not an end. 



3. The constant contact with advisory experts has helped very 

 greatly in effecting continuous improvement in land management. 



Any move toward breaking down this plan of unified purpose and 

 single authority by introducing the functional organization idea would 

 be a move away from the public interest. Superficial consideration 

 sometimes prompts proposals to separate activities which seem to be 

 a logical part of the field of a functionalized organization. For ex- 

 ample, the national-forest organization handles the construction and 

 maintenance of trails and of simple dirt roads intended primarily to 

 furnish access for forest-fire fighters. Crews working on these projects 

 are made up of local men chosen for their fire-fighting ability as well 

 as for usefulness in road and trail construction, and they are used for 

 fire fighting whenever needed. For this purpose they must be at the 

 instant call of the forest officers. If this sort of work were turned 

 over to a separate engineering bureau it would at once lessen the 

 value of the crews for emergency fire fighting by dividing the super- 

 vising authority, and it would also increase the cost of the activity 

 by duplicating in part the overhead already available in the Forest 

 Service, which handles this job in combination with many others. 



TIMBER USE 



On the national forests are found representative stands of every 

 major forest type in the United States, except the hardwood stands 

 of the Central States, the bottomland hardwoods of the Mississippi 

 Delta, and the coast redwoods of California. Quantitatively, the 

 most important national-forest timber resources are in the Douglas 

 fir, ponderosa pine, western hemlock, sugar pine, lodgepole pine, 

 and Engelmann spruce stands. Qualitatively the white and Nor- 

 way pine of the Lake States, the Port Orford cedar of Oregon, the 

 western white pine of Idaho, the sugar pine of California, and the 

 cypress of Florida bring the highest stumpage prices. The total stand 

 of national-forest timber of saw- timber size is estimated to be 552 

 billion board feet, of which 357 billion are in the three Pacific Coast 

 States and 189 billion in the Rocky Mountain States. 



Part of this is now economically inaccessible because of location, 

 quality, etc. How much of it will ultimately be available depends 



