130 The Forest Products Laboratory 



east of the Great Plains. We are fast losing the great leveler of lum- 

 ber prices, the competition between different forest regions available to 

 a common market. The scarcity of forest products of high quality, 

 cut from old growth timber, will not be readily or quickly overcome. 

 Meantime forest depletion is going steadily on, unchecked. It must 

 lead inevitably to rising price levels under normal conditions. It will 

 contribute to sudden and excessive increases in lumber prices in any 

 future transportation, labor, or other crisis. 



The real cause of our timber depletion is idle forest land. Short- 

 ages of wood have not resulted primarily from the use of our forests, 

 but from their devastation. The kernel of the problem lies in the enor- 

 mous areas of forest land which are not producing the timber crops 

 that they should. There are 326 million acres of cut-over timber lands 

 bearing no saw timber in the United States. Their condition ranges 

 from complete devastation through various stages of partial restock- 

 ing or restocking with trees of inferior quality, to relatively limited 

 areas which are producing timber at or near their full capacity. On 

 eighty-one million acres there is practically no forest growth. This 

 is the result of forest fires and of methods of cutting w^hich destroy or 

 prevent new timber growth. There m ere twenty-seven thousand re- 

 corded forest fires in 1919, burning a total of eight and one-fourth 

 million acres. During the preceding year, twenty -five thousand fires 

 burned over ten and one-half million acres of forest land. An addi- 

 tional large acreage was burned each year, of which no record could 

 be obtained. 



The area of idle or largely idle land is being increased by from 

 three to four million acres annually as the cutting and burning of for- 

 ests continue. The enormous area of forest land in the United States 

 not required for any other economic use, estimated at four hundred 

 sixty-three million acres, would provide an ample supply of wood if it 

 were kept productive. Depletion has resulted, not from using our 

 timber resovu'ces, but from failure to use our timber-growing land. 



It is unthinkable that the United States should be compelled to 

 steadily contract its use of timber — down to the level of civilized exist- 

 ence as in other countries of western Europe. We are not an old 

 world nation. We still have millons of acres of raw agricultural land 

 to be developed. We still have millions of homes to be built and thou- 

 sands of miles of T-rails to be laid. We are at the threshold of the 



