526 



Canadian Forestry Journal, December, 1919 



FACTS FOR THE WEST TO DEAL WITH 



(From the Manitoba Free Press) 



That one path of future prosperity in Man- 

 itoba hes in developing; the enormous possib- 

 ihties in timber and pulp wood growing was 

 explained to a special meeting of the Win- 

 nipeg bankers' and mortgage companies' man- 

 agers yesterday afternoon by Robson Black, 

 Secretary of the Canadian Forestry Association. 

 Mr. Black addressed a meeting at Young Church 

 Sunday night, and spoke again at Grace Church 

 last evening, with motion picture illustrations. 

 A total of ten meetings have been held in Win- 

 nipeg. 



Forestry, said Mr. Black, is the science of 

 obtaming maximum profits from a great natural 

 resource. It is concerned with growing repeat- 

 ed crops of timber on non-agricultural soils; 

 75 per cent of Manitoba is under tree growth 

 and not more than 35 per cent of the whole 

 provincial area will ever pay a profit to the 

 farmers' plow. One-third of Saskatchewan and 

 Alberta are adapted by nature for the growing 

 of profitable crops of timber. The timber and 

 pulp wood of Manitoba, therefore, is the largest 

 crop in point of acreage, and in view of the ex- 

 perience of such provinces as Quebec and New 

 Brunswick and nations like Sweden, it offers 

 incredibly great potentialities. 



"Since Confederation the forest areas of Can- 

 ada have been responsible for over 1,500 million 

 dollars of export trade as compared with 2,000 

 million dollars received for cereal crops. This 

 year pulp and paper exports alone from the 

 spruce growing sections of Quebec. Ontario and 

 to a smaller extent from British Columbia have 

 jumped to 120 millions, as against 120 dollars 

 in 1890 — a million times as great." 



THE PROFIT IN CONSERVING. 



' Mr. Black told how spruce areas in United 

 States and Canada were making enormous rises 

 in value. Forty million newspapers a day are 

 produced on this continent and this publishing 

 industry alone makes prodigious demands upon 

 the very limited sources of spruce wood supply. 

 Several American newspapers stripped from 15 

 to 30 acres of forest for each Sunday edition 

 turned out. The Winnipeg daily papers were 

 consuming probably 250 spruce and balsam 

 trees with each day's run. Coupled with the 



lumbering industry the pulp and paper industry 

 had shown the old time phrase of "exhaustless 

 forests" to be nothing short of undiluted moon- 

 shine. These industries in the eastern States 

 and Canada were now coming forward with 

 schemes which approximated scientific forest 

 management. The day of forest butchery musl 

 end or the country ceases to be an international 

 competitor. The history of the lumbering in- 

 dustry has been one of a continuous chase of 

 virgin timber supplies from county to county, 

 east to west, and north to south. President 

 Dodge, of the International Paper Company, 

 recently declared that there were not to-day two 

 stands of spruce in eastern America that would 

 justify the erection of two fifty-ton pulp mills. 

 In eastern United States the last stand of the 

 great American lumber industry was now being 

 made in the south after stripping Maine, Wis- 

 consin, Michigan and other lake states. The 

 president of the Southern Pine Manufacturers 

 has declared that 3,000 mills under his jurisdic- 

 tion will go out of business in ten years because 

 of exhausted forests. 



LOSING FORESTS RAPIDLY. 



Turning to Canada, the speaker showed that 

 the forest resources in the three prairie provinces 

 except for the areas in the forest reserves, are 

 in a state of progressive deterioration. Eighty 

 per cent of the west's original inheritance of 

 splendid forests has been destroyed by forest 

 fires in recent times. Mr. Black de- 

 clared that few, if any, lumbermen and pulp 

 company executives in eastern America were 

 any longer deluded by the old fiction that un- 

 regulated logging at present in vogue through- 

 out the Dominion will do anything but destroy 

 the capital values of a timber area. Hence 

 European practice now centuries old which look- 

 ed upon a timber tract as a source of permanent 

 timber crops was now being adapted to Ameri- 

 can and Canadian conditions. As far as the 

 three western provinces are concerned this calls 

 emphatically for the handling of the public- 

 owned timber berths by the Dominion Forestry 

 Branch, which is the Government's only tech- 

 nically qualified department. 



