1254 A NATIONAL PLAN FOE AMERICAN FORESTRY 



shift toward public ownership. Other sections of this report in fact 

 suggest or recommend increase in public ownership as a means to 

 accomplish such purposes as watershed protection, balancing the 

 timber budget, and conservation of recreation and wild life values. 



Public acquisition programs by some of the States and by the 

 Federal Government are already established, but with the exception 

 of a few outstanding States such as New York, Pennsylvania, and 

 Michigan they are going ahead slowly. These public programs with 

 few exceptions were based on what today appears to be an under- 

 estimate of the public values of forest lands, or on an overstimate of 

 the stability" of private ownership and management, and of the degree 

 to which private ownership conserves them. 



Clearly, a fresh appraisal of the probable distribution of forest land 

 ownership is needed, one that takes account both of what is likely to 

 happen anyway as a result of the breakdown in private ownership, 

 and of what should be done in the direction of public ownership to 

 meet the known needs of the forest situation. Such an analysis, 

 which this section of the report attempts, is beset by many difficulties. 

 Major trends, involving hundreds of millions of acres of land, varying 

 economic conditions, deeply planted habits of political and economic 

 thought and tradition, and complex interrelation and conflict between 

 public and private needs and values, are not to be resolved into 

 formulae accurate to the last decimal point. Estimates and approxi- 

 mations have necessarily been used in analyzing the problem, and 

 great accuracy in the conclusions cannot be claimed. But even rather 

 wide approximations, and the differing results obtained from various 

 approaches to the problem, emphasize rather than obscure the con- 

 clusion that very large shifts from private to public ownership are 

 both inevitable and necessary. 



The present distribution of forest-land ownership, summarized in 

 table 1, focuses attention on several major questions that are neces- 

 sarily involved in any appraisal of future distribution of forest-land 

 ownership. At the start, it is necessary to consider what are the bases 

 for private and public ownership. 



