152 THE SCHOOL BOOK OF FORESTRY 



All the forest land now in the United States in- 

 cluding culled, burned and cut-over tracts, totals 

 463,000,000 acres. We now have more waste and 

 cut-over lands in this country than the combined 

 forest area of Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Hol- 

 land, France, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal. 

 The merchantable timber left in the United 

 States is estimated at 2,215,000,000,000 board feet. 

 The rest is second-growth trees of poor quality. 

 One-half of this timber is in California, Washing- 

 ton and Oregon. It is a long and costly haul from 

 these Pacific Coast forests to the eastern markets. 

 Less than one-fifth of our remaining timber is 

 hardwood. 56,000,000,000 board feet of mate- 

 rial of saw timber size are used or destroyed in 

 the United States each year. Altogether, we use 

 more than 26,000,000,000 cubic feet of timber of 

 all classes annually. Our forests are making an- 

 nual growth at the rate of less than one-fourth of 

 this total consumption. We are rapidly cutting 

 away the last of our virgin forests. We also are 

 cutting small-sized and thrifty trees much more 

 rapidly than we can replace them. 



The United States is short on timber today 

 because our fathers and forefathers abused our 

 forests. If they had planted trees on the lands 



