ANNUAL MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATION 



fT> HE annual meeting of the American Forestry Associ- 

 ation held at Washington on January 26th marked 

 the fortieth anniversary of the organization. There was 

 a good attendance. President Charles Lathrop Pack 

 called the meeting to order, referred to the work of the 

 Association during 1921 and in his address said : 



"The year 1922 is a vital year in forestry in the United 

 States. Let us mark this fortieth anniversary with a uni- 

 ted front for a forest policy. Thanks to the fine coopera- 

 tion of the editors of the country the American Forestry 

 Association has awakened hundreds of thousands of peo- 

 ple to the value of our forest resources. The Association 

 has preached forestry day in and day out and now Con- 

 gress is considering a bill providing for a national forest 

 policy. 



"Threatening the future prosperity of the country are 

 two big items, our yearly loss from forest fires and our 

 hundreds of millions of acres of forest lands which are 

 not growing forests. Just what this means to big indus- 

 tries in states like New York and New England is shown 

 in the three million dollars a year freight bill New Eng- 

 land pays on imported lumber because of the idle acres 

 close to her factory doors. The lumber cut in the state 

 of New York has dropped almost sixty percent since 



1910. Her consumers of lumber are paying $66,000,000 

 a year for imported lumber and $11,000,000 a year for 

 state grown lumber. If that $55,000,000 could be kept in 

 the state you could see what the effect would be. They 

 imported lumber three thousand miles by rail. As a 

 result nearly 1500 wood using industries in the state of 

 New York have closed up shop. 



"Timber enough to build a five-room house every hun- 

 dred feet on both sides of a road extending from New 

 York to Chicago is destroyed by forest fires every year. 

 With four people to a house these one hundred thousand 

 or more buildings would provide a home for nearly one 

 fourth of our yearly increase in population a number 

 sufficient to populate a new city each year the size of 

 Cincinnati, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Kansas City or 

 Seattle. 



"During the past five years more than 160,000 forest 

 fires have occurred in the United States, 80 per cent of 

 which were due to human agencies and therefore prevent- 

 able. The conflagrations burned over 56,488,000 acres 

 an area greater than that of either Ohio or Pennsylvania 

 and destroyed $85,700,000 worth of timber. 



"Stop this waste and put that material into houses. If 



AMERICAN FOKKSTRV ASSOCIATION OFFICIALS 



From left to right Charles F. Quincy, treasurer ind director; E. A. Sterling, director; Charles Lathrop Pack, president; Col. 

 W. B. Greeley, chief of United States Forest Service, director; Dr. Henry S. Drinker, director; Ovid M. Butler, forester; 

 Standish Chard, director, and Percival S. Ridsdale, secretary and editor of American Forestry. 



