ARE THERE ENOUGH PLANTS? 41 



simply as wood, not as functioning biological units. The common- 

 place act of purchasing a few boards is today (and was before the 

 war) a major operation on the pocketbook. The purchase of a frame 

 house is and was beyond the financial ability of a large per cent of 

 citizens, or it becomes a life time struggle. To the pioneer east of 

 the Mississippi it was not so. Setting up a home was a minor incon- 

 venience. After reserving what timber he needed for furniture, sheds, 

 tool handles, fences, and fuel, he still had mountains of wood to burn 

 and he did burn it, to get rid of it, burnt it in huge piles that 

 roared for days. 



Today a quick inventory of our daily uses of wood is revealing. 

 Take a look. And if you will calculate the cost of common wood 

 products by the pound, you will be amazed. Wheat can be bought 

 for (let's say) three cents per pound. Hardwood, or even good soft- 

 wood, will cost two, three, or four times as much. This should not be 

 true of a crop that once grew naturally and easily over nearly half 

 of the country. 



Half of our timber harvest becomes lumber ; one-fourth is used 

 for fuel. The remainder becomes paper, railway ties, poles, posts, 

 boxes, barrels, veneers, furniture, and thousands of other articles 

 necessary to our way of life. 



Forest Destruction. The cutting of forests has been caused by two 

 primary forces : the need for wood, and the need for farmland. Prior 

 to the industrial development most cutting was for land clearing. 

 Then, in a hundred years (1800-1900), it gradually shifted to lumber- 

 ing operations for wood itself. 



Going back in history to early civilizations, we find in Mesopotamia 

 today about one-sixth of the population which flourished in the eastern 

 end of the Fertile Crescent 4000 years ago. 4 The degrading of the 

 country is attributed to invasions by over-populated, nomadic, desert 

 tribes which broke up, time after time, the agricultural system which 

 fed the settled agrarian people. This system was based on irrigation 

 of the flood plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The canals filled 

 rapidly with silt, requiring a great force of slave labor to keep them 

 cleaned out. The silt came from the uplands, and from the headwaters 

 in Assyria where overgrazing and forest cutting exposed the soil to 

 erosion. Trees have always been scarce in that part of the world, but 

 no provision or thought was ever given (until recently) to a sustained 

 yield forestry plan. 



Later, in Palestine, Kings David and Solomon made a deal with 

 King Hiram, of Tyre in Phoenicia to the north, whereby thousands of 

 the Cedars of Lebanon became Solomon's temple and palace. The 

 Phoenicians also sold or traded lumber to the Egyptians, who had 

 little wood. As a result, the mountains of Phoenicia and Syria were 

 denuded. Those four-legged locusts, the goats, searching for every 



4 jjowdermilk, W. C., Conquest of the Land, U, S, Department of Agriculture, 

 Washington, D. C., p. 10, 



