A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 881 



payer, faulty collection methods, or temporary financial embarrass- 

 ment of the owner. 



It is with long-term delinquency that this discussion is concerned, 

 the delinquency that results in abandonment by the owner, and 

 indicates a breakdown from private to public ownership. Such long- 

 term delinquency in the case of forest land can be said to be mainly 

 purposeful that is, the owner deliberately ceases to pay his taxes 

 because he would rather forfeit the property than pay the annual 

 carrying charges. This is, of course, true in varying degrees; if the 

 taxes are very low (in proportion to the true value of the land for 

 any purpose) he may be more inclined to hold on even to the most 

 unpromising land than if the taxes were high. There are many 

 gradations between the type of land which the owner decides he has 

 no desire to retain and that which he would like to keep for its pro- 

 spective value but on which he is unwilling or unable to pay the tax. 



CUT-OVER LAND 



The most fundamental and underlying cause for the delinquency 

 and abandonment of much cut-over land is that it was acquired by 

 lumberman owner not as property to be cropped in perpetuity, but 

 rather merely for its virgin timber values. After these were taken 

 off, the naked land by itself was of no interest to him. The tradi- 

 tion of the American lumber industry has been "to cut out and get 

 out"- an outgrowth of the once prevalent impression that the virgin 

 timber supplies of the country were inexhaustible and of the very 

 low prices at which virgin stumpage could be bought. The public 

 land laws and the early policies of the States and Nation made easy 

 this practice of stripping off the virgin timber in one region and moving 

 on to another. The unwisdom of this, not only from the point of 

 view of the public but from that of the private owner who might 

 have benefited in the long run by a sustained-yield policy of manage- 

 ment, is becoming more and more apparent. A question raised very 

 sharply by this breakdown in private ownership is whether the whole 

 conception of transferring to private ownership so much forest land 

 was not in error. In the public-land States there was acquired for 

 private ownership in a comparatively few years an area of virgin 

 timberland which the owners were wholly unprepared to hold and 

 manage conservatively. This is discussed further in the section, 

 'The Probable Future Distribution of Forest Land Ownership". 



A contributing cause for the delinquency and abandonment of 

 much cut-over land is that its forest productivity has been wrecked 

 in the process of logging. Land left in unproductive condition and 

 subject to repeated fires is very unattractive for private ownership. 

 There is an enormous acreage in this category. Had this land been 

 logged with thought of the future under sustained-yield principles, had 

 seed trees been left and slashings carefully disposed of, this situation 

 of land abandonment would not be so acute. Forest productivity 

 would be unimpaired and permanent private ownership might have 

 been attractive. The situation is analogous to that on agricultural 

 lands on which farming methods in use have depleted the fertility 

 of the soil or allowed it to erode to the extent that the land has become 

 unproductive and is abandoned by the owner. 



