1580 A NATIONAL PLAN FOE AMERICAN FORESTRY 



firm base for family, community, and national wealth and welfare. 

 This stability of ownership through the years is mainly due to care 

 and skill expended upon the forests and their consequent high pro- 

 ductive capacity. 



No nation such as ours, in which so large a share of wealth is in 

 the form of forests and forest land and tied up in the business of 

 manufacturing, selling, and distributing forest products, can remain 

 complacent in the face of conditions as they now exist in this coun- 

 try. In the section on the breakdown of private ownership in this 

 report is treated in some detail the state of affairs that has developed 

 as a result of mismanagement of our forest resources on the one hand 

 and the inevitable working of economic laws on the other. The 

 existing depression has only intensified a situation that has been 

 building up for years. The farmer's woodland, where it is not 

 reached by successful extension effort, is, by and large, becoming 

 less and less a dependable, considerable source of cash revenue 

 and this in the face of greater need on the owner's part for an addi- 

 tion to the income obtained from his fields and pastures. The wood- 

 land is doing far less than it could to help stave off the foreclosure 

 of the farm mortgage, to pay taxes, and to furnish seasonal em- 

 ployment for surplus labor. The farmer owns no inconsiderable part 

 of our Nation's forest resources and furnishes a large portion of the 

 country's wood material, and his distress is passed on to the rest of 

 us in an inevitable economic cycle. 



The effects of a short-sighted forest policy of land use and forest 

 management are even more general and more serious in the case of 

 industrial forests than in that of farmers' woodlands, and because 

 the industrial forest investment must stand on its own merits and 

 pay its way without aid from other income, the results may be all 

 the more disastrous. 



Any action that will ameliorate the conditions that prevail, and 

 that have gradually been getting worse for years, will be felt with 

 relief, not only by the owners of forest land, but by all classes of 

 industry and by taxpayers everywhere. 



Fortunately there is no reason whatsoever to believe that this 

 situation will continue indefinitely. It has been brought about as a 

 result of failure to appreciate the possibilities of intelligent forest 

 management; it can be materially improved and eventually cured 

 by the application of available knowledge, and that, too, by the 

 average owner under average conditions. Within the last 30 years 

 American foresters, engineers, and chemists have developed the 

 technic of handling American forests and forest products to the 

 point that there is actually available a fund of knowledge which, if 

 applied generally, would reestablish and perpetuate our forests as a 

 major source of national wealth, assuring the future welfare of our 

 people as no other one natural resource could. 



This fund of knowledge is not reaching the class who alone can 

 put it to most telling use the private timber owners. Federal and 

 State Governments as owners are not the answer to our major forest 

 problem. Our present forest extension efforts are insignificant either 

 in comparison to what is needed or as measured against reasonable 

 and justifiable objectives. We have the stimulus of urgent necessity 

 for more income from our forests, we have the best forest lands in 

 the world on which to work, and we already have an available fund 



