TIMBER AND RECREATION 139 



do not conflict. But many restless people throng where timber is best. 

 There are often roads there, to get the timber out; and these roads get 

 broader and harder each year, speaking generally, as more and more timber 

 is moved by truck. 



Lumbering operations and recreational use conflict measurably in many 

 places, and they conflict most seriously in places where it is impossible for 

 the local people to live without logging and the attendant industries. 



Sawmills, planing mills, remanufacturing plants, furniture and other 

 factories, together with the forests supplying them, had, in "normal" times, 

 a capital value estimated at 10 billion dollars. The woods industry is pretty 

 well on its back now, especially at the source of supply. But in 1929 it con- 

 tributed about 3 billion of the 80-billion-dollar national income, and in 

 normal times it supports some 6 million people, their homes, churches, and 

 schools. 



There is no compelling ultimate reason why this industry has to gut its 

 sources, leave them dead. If rather simple sustained-yield measures, plainly 

 demonstrated on private lands here and there and on the national forests, 

 were to spread in practice much faster than they are now spreading, there is 

 no reason why our remaining forests may not provide refillable reservoirs of 

 materials, employment, and sustenance for more than twice as many people 

 as they do now. 



Such possibilities, and the risk of another final surge of despoliation, 

 apply especially to the South, where technological imponderables enter fast 

 into a changing picture. The South, as has been noted, boomed and spread 

 in the main on cotton. Then healing pine marched into vast washed-out 

 cotton lands. It used to be thought that the pitch in these southern pines 

 made them useless for the better grades of paper pulp and for rayon. Thanks 

 to pioneer researches of the Forest Products Laboratory and to those of a 

 great Georgian, the late Charles H. Herty, this now appears untrue. 



In consequence, new mills and big money are rushing into the South; 

 and pulpwood towns northward, in Canada and from Maine to the West 

 Coast, are beginning to feel economic pressure from the South's rapidly 

 expanding pulp and paper industry. 



The southern agrarian poets and writers who worry about the South's 



