A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 1579 



land that only recently supported splendid forests and were, and 

 still are, capable of yielding a continuous flow of even finer products 

 at low cost at the very doors of the consuming markets. 



Despite uncontrolled fire and a disregard of the primary principles 

 of forest culture, much of this potent forest land has restocked and is 

 producing a second crop, but a crop poor in quality, small in quantity 

 and long delayed in reaching maturity. The cost of producing such 

 timber, because of these facts, is greater than would be the case under 

 adequate forestry practice. Land and climate capable of producing 

 each year 500 feet of good-quality lumber per acre, as they are in 

 the shortleaf region of Arkansas, for instance, at a cost of 60 cents per 

 thousand feet under adequate forest management is, as a result of 

 common practice, producing less than a half of this amount of lumber 

 at three times the cost and of poor quality in the main. The exten- 

 sive forest lands of the Appalachian States that produced the finest 

 stands of hardwoods in the world are still as potent as they ever 

 were, but because of the disregard of simple requirements of forestry 

 in the original logging and subsequent treatment they are coming 

 back now to a scrubby, inferior forest that can not return to the 

 owners, to the community or to the Nation more than one third of 

 the potentiality of the soil. 



In all of the forest regions of the United States, from coast to coast, 

 privately owned forests and forest lands have been and are being 

 subjected to a continuous process of deterioration in greater or lesser 

 degree. This state of affairs is neither necessary nor unpreven table, 

 and it is certainly not inevitable. On the contrary, in many cases 

 it has cost as much in effort and money to defeat the fecundity of 

 soil and climate as it would have cost to have taken full advantage of 

 the favorable natural factors to grow more and finer forest crops. 



At the bottom of the trouble is, first of all, a state of mind that does 

 not understand and therefore fails to accept the principle of growing 

 and harvesting successive or continuous crops of timber on the same 

 soil, just as corn or cotton is grown and gathered. As a people, our 

 experience in harvesting a bountiful virgin forest, the accumulated 

 heritage of ages before the advent of the white man, is still too recent. 

 Our anticipation of the immediate future is too eager. We are not 

 yet patient enough to believe that what we will get even in one 

 lifetime henceforth will depend upon our growing another crop on 

 the lands we have cut over, rather than upon the possible opening up 

 of some new territory rich in virgin timber. Because of this preva- 

 lent failure to sense the change that 200 years of settlement has 

 wrought, there is an equally widespread inappreciation of the possi- 

 bilities that lie in the business of using forest land for the growing of 

 continuous supplies of timber. 



It is true that owners of forest lands in this country are at present 

 beset with many and serious difficulties in making their investments 

 pay. In periods of low prices for wood products the owning of 

 understocked forest lands by individuals and corporations always 

 becomes precarious, and ownership shifts rapidly from hand to hand, 

 eventually ending in abandonment to the State if no relief is found. 

 But this is not inherent in the nature of forest ownership. It is no 

 more necessary than it is desirable. Forest lands should be, and in 

 the older countries are, the most stable of investments, passing for 

 generation after generation from father to son, remaining always a 



