EDITORIAL 



745 



the purchases and for the sake of doing 

 the remedial work as rapidly as possible, 

 now is the time to act." 



Now is the time to act, as Governor 

 Spaulding says. The work has been 

 well started and it should be continued. 

 It is safe to say that the citizens of 



every New England and every Southern 

 Appalachian State wish it continued 

 and will petition their Senators and 

 Congressmen to vote in favor of pro- 

 viding the $10,000,000 desired for the 

 increase in these forest reserves during 

 the next five years. 



LUMBER WASTE IN THE WOODS 



COMMENTING upon a photo- 

 graph of piles of cordwood and 

 fagots in a German forest, 

 published in the May issue of 

 American Forestry, Mr. Frank A. 

 Cutting of Boston, Mass., a lumber- 

 man, voices the feeling of practically 

 all lumbermen in his remarks. The 

 photograph called attention to the 

 fact that the cordwood and fagots so 

 well utilized by the Germans are 

 usually wasted in American woods and 

 forests. 



Mr. Cutting expresses the situation 

 thoroughly well when he says in his 

 letter: "All lumbermen in the United 

 States would be glad to utilize their 

 waste if it could be done, but the fact 

 is that the American people have been 

 taught to burn coal, use gas and elec- 

 tricity, and there are only few localities, 

 populated by foreigners, who will use 

 wood at all, and they are able to pick 

 up waste materials in cities to quite an 

 extent. The railways are not interested 

 in having waste products from their 

 woods utilized as fuel; they wish to 

 sell the coal that is in the mines they 

 own, and they encourage use of coal 

 and discourage the use of wood. Freight 

 rates are high on wood waste for fuel 

 and it is impossible to use it to any 

 extent. 



"I am operating a tract of land in 

 the Adirondacks and I would be glad 



to give any one all the waste material 

 they wanted at 25 cents per cord of 128 

 cubic feet, if they would take it away, 

 and there is some of the waste material 

 I would be pleased to give them for 

 nothing if they w r ould move it. All 

 lumbermen would give away their 

 defective trees if they could get anyone 

 to cut them down and take them away. 

 It is not the lumberman who is to 

 blame because waste material is left 

 in the woods ; he would be very glad 

 to have this waste material removed 

 and utilized." 



Mr. Cutting is quite right, it is not 

 the lumberman who is to blame for 

 waste material in the woods. If he 

 could get it out at even a very little 

 profit the lumberman would do so. 

 But he cannot. It would be better for 

 the forest if he could, for thus one 

 forest fire danger would be removed. 

 Perhaps some day when utilization of 

 wood waste has reached the point 

 where value is secured from every 

 portion of the tree the present condition 

 will be overcome. 



One hesitates to think of what 

 suffering would be saved the very poor 

 in big cities during the winter if the 

 hundreds of thousands of cords of 

 waste wood now annually left to rot 

 in the forests could by sonic means be 

 made available for their ua 



