CANADIAN FORESTRY ASSOCIATION 27 



are enough people in the United States to-day who appreciate the urgent importance 

 of conserving our forest by wise use, to ensure, as nothing else can ensure, that the 

 forest movement will go forward instead of backward, from this time on. 



How fast and how securely it goes forward will depend on how well Americans 

 foresters do their work but go forward it will. This public sentiment has not 

 come in a month or a year. It is the cumulative result of a condition which has 

 got to be faced. We lack accurate estimates of the commercial timber now stand- 

 ing in the United States that lack we hope to supply before long. But we know 

 that it will not last the country as a whole beyond somewhere between 20 and 30 

 years, even if we use no more wood annually than we are using now, and that the 

 end of the local supply in certain parts of the country is already clearly in sight. 

 Not only do we know that the pinch is bound to come we are feeling it already. 

 On the other hand we know that there is enough forest land in the United States 

 to grow, rightly handled, sufficient timber to meet our present yearly need. The 

 case is not hopeless. It is full of hope, if we apply the remedy, because that remedy 

 is still adequate, in spite of improvidence in the use of the forest of which we have 

 been guilty as a nation. But we have no time to lose. 



To make these conditions and their remedy plain to the people, is a task as 

 urgent and as important as any before the Forest Service. And the Service is 

 attacking this task vigorously and along somewhat novel lines. It was evident at 

 the beginning that to print and distribute at Government expense information on a 

 sufficient scale to reach the great body of the people could be done only at enormous 

 and utterly prohibitive cost. With the present resources of the Service, it would 

 be about as effective as to try to cut down a big Redwood with a hatchet. So we 

 began to make use of the opportunities afforded by the press. And to-day, at a 

 trifling cost, the Service maintains a system for giving out useful information to 

 the newspapers, which increases its circulation from the thousands possible under 

 the distribution of public documents to many millions. 



Every useful fact to the private owner and user of timber which is gathered 

 and which can be handled in the scope of a newspaper article, is so prepared, and 

 distributed to the papers in the region which it concerns, and thus reaches the people 

 to whom it belongs. We are trying to get the principles of forestry taught in the 

 public schools, because we believe that the American citizen in the making will 

 be the better and more usefully made, if he knows what forests mean and what no 

 forests would mean to his country. 



We need more trained foresters in the United States. We have not skilled 

 men enough, nor nearly enough, to give direction and achievement to the awaken- 

 ing impulse towards economy in the use of forests and in the use of wood. But a 

 more vital need still, is to keep alive and growing that understanding by members 

 of no one industry or section of the American people, but by all industries and by 

 the whole people, of how inseparably the forest is bound up with the welfare not 

 only of the nation, but of every industry and of every citizen. When that 

 understanding is adequate and general, forestry in the United States will be not 

 merely a Governmental enterprise, not an occasional private enterprise, but a truly 

 national one. 



On the National Forests our work is past the experimental stage. The Service 

 has made these forests more than self-supporting in little over one half the time in 

 which it promised to achieve that result. And what is a good deal more important, 

 the National Forests are being fully used, and so used that their usefulness grows 

 greater each year. They are not only aiding in the development of the West, 



