12 PRACTICAL FORESTRY IN 



How We Throw Away Millions 



Notwithstanding the above facts, we allow $40,000,000 

 which we and our families should share to vanish every year, 

 leaving nothing more enduring than a pall of smoke from 

 Canada to the Mexican line. The great area thus denuded 

 uselessly, with that which produced public wealth through 

 lumber manufacture, together having been capable of afford- 

 ing a community resource of $165,000,000, are abandoned to 

 lie idle and a menace to remaining timber. It is exactly as 

 though the owner of a 165-acre orchard should destroy forty 

 acres wantonly and also abandon the rest, unfenced, uncul- 

 tivated and uncared for. 



The one waste is as unnecessary as the other. Our Pacific 

 coast forests owe their unparalleled productiveness to a pecu- 

 liarly fortunate combination of climate and rapid growing 

 species unknown elsewhere. Nowhere else is forest reproduc- 

 tion so swift and certain. Nowhere can it be secured with so 

 little effort and expense. A little forethought in cutting 

 methods and protection of the cut-over area from recurring 

 fires, and an early second crop is assured. Saw timber can be 

 grown in forty to seventy-five years; ties, mine timber and 

 piles in less. 



How We Might Make Immense Profit Instead. 



It is reasonable to suppose that, although the quality may 

 be inferior to that of the old forest removed now, timber 

 scarcity will make a second cut in sixty years equally profita- 

 ble per acre. Therefore, if the area denuded annually at 

 present were encouraged to reforest and protected, it should 

 at the end of that period again yield $165,000,000 to the com- 

 munity. Each year's growth at present would be worth a six- 

 tieth of that sum, or $2,750,000. If given any chance to do 

 so, the area deforested in only ten years would actually earn 

 the people of our five western forest states $21,500,000 a 

 year. 



