UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



BULLETIN No. 638 



Contribution from the Forest Service 

 HENRY S. GRAVES, Forester 



Washington, D. C. 



April 8, 1918 



FORESTRY AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT. 



By Samuel T. Dana, Assistant Chief of Forest Investigations. 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

 Too little attention paid to some effects of 



forest devastation 1 



Why our forests have been devastated 2 



Neglected evils of destructive lumbering 3 



A roving lumber industry 3 



Abandoned towns 4 



Deserted farms 6 



Local shortages of timber 8 



Speculation -. 10 



Community development interrupted ... 16 



Abandoned railroads 19 



Page. 



Neglected evils, etc.— Continued. 



A lower stand ard of population 20 



Suggestions for a rational timberland policy. . 21 

 Need for a different system of handling 



forest lands 21 



Land classification 23 



Continuous forest production 25 



Stability of policy 28 



Public control and ownership 30 



Community benefits 32 



TOO LITTLE ATTENTION PAID TO SOME EFFECTS OF FOREST 



DEVASTATION. 



Nowadays the more obvious results of forest devastation, such as 

 fires, increase in soil erosion, and irregularity of stream flow, are 

 pretty generally recognized. But so far comparatively little atten- 

 tion has been paid to certain economic and social effects of forest 

 devastation, perhaps less apparent but scarcely less harmful. These 

 are at once an indictment of the system that has made them possible 

 and a challenge to devise a better one. 



In a very literal sense our civilization has been built on wood. 

 From the forests that once stretched almost unbroken from Maine 

 to Florida, from the immense timber stands of the Lake States, and 

 from those of the Rocky Mountains and Pacific coast has come, in 

 turn, the material needed for the development of farms and the 

 building of homes as settlement pushed ever westward. Unquestion- 

 ably, the remarkable progress of agriculture has been made possible 

 in large measure by an easily accessible supply of timber. 



And along with the material for agricultural development the for- 

 ests have given us also one of the greatest of our basic manufacturing 

 industries. Of the 14 groups of industries recognized by the last 

 census, the lumber industry stands third in number of wage earners 

 and fourth in value of product. In its allied branches of logging, 

 milling, and manufacture it employs 907,000 persons, or 13.7 per cent 

 of all the wage earners in the country. The value of its annual 



16940°— Bull. 63S— IS 1 



