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EDITORIAL 



LOAVES AND LUMBER 



T F only one bushel of wheat out of every four grown 

 ' in the fields reached the consumer, the American pub- 

 lic would have something to say the minute the price 

 of wheat began seriously to affect the customary size of 

 loaves in the Nation's bread boxes. It is safe to say that 

 there would be an immediate and united effort to save 

 the waste, and despite political and economic doctri- 

 naires, the effort would obtain a large degree of success. 

 As during the war, each of us, as demand outran supply, 

 would feel a personal responsibility to aid in conserving 

 the supply, and our individual and united efforts would 

 accomplish wonders. 



The Soap Box Test of the Public Mind 



One may stand on a soap box at a street corner and 

 with a few fiery and rhetorical sentences, punctuated by 

 the brandishing of a loaf of bread made from grain 

 grown in a few short months, incite a bread riot, but let 

 him substitute for the loaf of bread a section of a board 

 cut from a tree which it has taken 200 wheat harvests 

 to grow, and he will have difficulty in drawing an audi- 

 ence. Such is the state of the public mind with respect 

 to bread and boards. Perhaps one explanation is that 

 bread riots are actualities, whereas board riots are as yet 

 unheard of in this fair country. 



The Fatal Figure Four 



All of which does not alter the situation in regard to 

 forest waste or the needed assumption of public responsi- 

 bility which it demands. It merely accentuates the seri- 

 ousness of it. We are told by no less an authority than 

 the Forest Service, that only 30 per cent of the wood in 

 the forest gets into the form of seasoned, unplaned lum- 

 ber, and that of this amount an additional 10 to 25 per 

 cent is lost in the process of further manufacture. In 

 other words, 4000 feet of forest growth is sacrificed to 

 American wood-using customs and demand for every 

 thousand feet of wood placed in the consumers' hands. 

 We not only destroy four times what we use, but we are 

 using what is left of our forest heritage four times faster 

 than it is being replaced by new growth. 



The Public Has Its Faults 



The fatal inevitableness of the course is apparent, but 

 the public refuses to be concerned despite repeated warn- 

 ings that four-fifths of our original forests have gone, 

 that 60 per cent of that left is west of the great plains 

 and that decade by decade the price of lumber is jjushing 

 upward. It persists in clinging to old demands and old 

 customs handed down from days when forests were em- 

 barrassingly plentiful and forest waste was an economic 

 order of the time. It adheres to a rigid position of wood 

 particularity, regardless of its effect upon waste in the 



forest, and it recedes from that position only when eco 

 nomic changes force it to do so. 



Watchful Waiting and Forest Waste 

 There are men, who, measuring the future by the past, 

 assert that the development of better utilization of our 

 forests is meshed in an economic gear. They maintain 

 that when a market for material now wasted is available, 

 this waste will be saved. They slur over the utilization 

 phase of our forest problem with a taken-for-granted 

 attitude that economic pressure is the only effective rec- 

 tifier. They overlook the fact that this economic pres- 

 sure must spring from a serious off-balance of supply 

 and demand the very situation we are trying to guard 



,agai.nst. 



This is a do-nothing attitude masked in affectation of 

 economic learning. It is the quickest way of exhausting 

 our forests, next to burning them up, and of accelerating 

 ihe timber pinch. It can be justified only by admitting 

 that our system is a one-gear machine, or that we have 

 not the intelligence to change gears when a change is 

 clearly necessary. It is an attitude which will never en- 



ylighten the public to the possibilities of relieving the 

 drain upon our forests by developing a national con- 

 science for wood economy. 



The Octopus of Forest Depletion 

 Anyone who has gone very deeply into the situation 

 with respect to forest waste in this country knows that 

 it is the he-octopus of forest depletion. Its arms reach 

 out into every industry and its suckers permeate the 

 whole American wood-using public. Millions upon mil- 

 lions of feet of fallen timber are left to rot in the woods 

 every year. Why ? It may be one of many remedial rea- 

 sons. It may be because the public continues to stand, 

 year in and year out, for railroad tariffs which permits 

 the railroads to charge the same rate for hauling low 

 grade lumber valued, let us say, at $15.00 a thousand 

 feet at the mill, as for higher grade lumber valued at 

 $100.00 or more a thousand feet. When it does not pay 

 to log and manufacture lumber, industry will not do it. 

 More economics wrapped up in a flimsy tariff sheet. 

 Custom a Finicky Customer 

 Or, good timber will be left in the woods, burned, or 

 degraded at the mill, or sold for fuel at the wood- 

 using plant, because custom has so ordained. It has 

 always been so, therefore it must be an economic rock 

 which only the forces of dire necessity can alter. The 

 public has been miseducated to finicky wood tastes, which 

 often are at the root of forest waste. Old line industries 

 have "educated their trade" and new line industries are 

 out to "please the public," and all the time the public 

 does not realize the folly of its way. 



The Case of Grandmother's Spools 

 An example will serve to illustrate: A mill in the 



