FORESTS, LUMBER AND CONSUMER 



By E. T. ALLEN 

 Forester for Western Forestry and Conservation Association 



THE business of supplying us 

 with the products of the forest 

 is one of our three or four 

 greatest American industries. 

 It is our greatest manufacturing in- 

 dustry. Consequently all others are 

 largely dependent upon it. It employs 

 more men, supports more families, than 

 any other manufacture. Lumber is 

 made by labor and its cost is in pay- 

 rolls, returning to the consumer, what- 

 ever his vocation. Government statis- 

 tics show that in my own great lumber- 

 ing region, the Pacific northwest, 85 

 per cent of the price the mills receive 

 have already gone to the community in 

 costs. It probably surpasses every 

 other industry of importance in small- 

 ness of profit. In individual cases, un- 

 usual opportunity has built large for- 

 tunes, but for every one of these are 

 many cases where the public has profit- 

 ed by failure. Also there have been 

 temporary or local situations where one 

 branch of the industry has profited at 

 the expense of another. But on the 

 whole lumber does not cost the con- 

 sumer as much more than the actual 

 cost of producing it as do most other 

 commodities. Few, if any, things are 

 sold at so much less than their intrinsic 

 value as the trees of which lumber is 

 made. It is essentially a business of 

 service ; not one of middleman exploita- 

 tion, or of fabricating luxuries, or of 

 parasitism in any form. And we, a 

 wood-using and wood-selling ' nation, 

 depend upon it almost as much as upon 

 food itself. 



I wish to emphasize that we cannot 

 consider forestry intelligently until we 

 realize that it is not forests at all, but 

 forest industry, that we seek to perpet- 

 uate. The community has little to gain 

 from forests unless it encourages and 

 helps to a sound permanent footing the 

 activities which make them useful and 

 worth preserving. And, conversely, 



unless it does this, it is not likely to 

 guide or force these activities along 

 lines which do preserve forests. \Yhat 

 would be their object? Forests, lum- 

 bering and community ; community, 

 lumbering and forests the sequence is 

 inseparable, whether it reads forward 

 or backward, and inseparably it un- 

 derlies forestry and every forestry 

 problem. 



Twenty years ago we had practically 

 nothing, now we have an efficient na- 

 tional forestry administration. Many 

 States have forest laws, some have good 

 ones, a few are fairly liberal with 

 funds. We have forestry associations 

 and congresses. Lumbermen are tak- 

 ing the lead in fire prevention, for in 

 less than ten years the systematic pro- 

 tection of private timber has grown 

 from practically nothing to cover about 

 100,000,000 acres, with an increase of 

 3000 per cent in the last five years. But 

 the Forest Service has to fight for ex- 

 istence in . every Congress. Many 

 States still have no forest legislation 

 and few legislation that is adequate. 

 In many sections lumberman and public 

 are so mutually suspicious that neither 

 supports any real solution of their com- 

 mon problems. In short, who can 

 claim that there is any recognized 

 American forest policy, existing not 

 because reformers have prevailed on 

 some occasions but because a majority 

 of our population understands what is 

 needed and why, and has insisted upon 

 putting it into effect? 



All this is because we have never 

 seen forestry in its practical aspects as 

 we do agriculture, for example. Our 

 average citizen knows when in his town 

 or vicinity, where community relations 

 are so clearly under his eye that they 

 are familiar and clear to him, any in- 

 dustry employs a large part of the 

 population, produces the chief manu- 

 factured product, and pays an impor- 



745 



