FIFTH NATIONAL CONSERVATION CONGRESS 41 



CONCLUSIONS * 



IT is obviously impossible to make this report a complete text book. Its aim has 

 been to present a few suggestive examples leading logically to certain con- 

 clusions. Summarized, these are : 



Progress in forestry depends more on what the public will permit than upon 

 foresters and lumbermen. 



Consequently public education is of primary importance. 

 Education is a matter of publicity and publicity is a trade in itself. It can 

 not be practised intuitively. 



Since no one else has the interest or the requisite forestry knowledge, fores- 

 ters and lumbermen must learn this trade. 



It is not forests, but the use of forests, that we seek to pertetuate. There- 

 fore, to be sound and convincing, educational publicity must include the lumber 

 business. So long as the public believes forestry good and lumbering bad there 

 will be confusion and no real progress. 



DISCUSSION OF THE REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLICITY 



IN opening the discussion on this report, Mr. E. T. Allen said : 

 The moral of this whole report is, that the forester and the lumberman 

 knows very little about publicity ; he is an amateur at it, he does not study it, 

 and does not get results, and is generally about the poorest propagandist publicity 

 artist of any industry in the United States. What the committee has attempted 

 to do in its report is rather to get up a brief, concise worded manual of sugges- 

 tions for the lumberman, or forester, or the worker .along any of these lines, who 

 wants to get his business and his needs before the public and does not know how. 

 Of course, such a manual containing detailed suggestions we cannot read as it 

 is too long. 



I would like to say that personally, and I think this committee believes also, 

 that this Conservation Congress will do a great deal more if it is built up of 

 sections of this kind. Let there be a dozen of them, including, water power people, 

 welfare people, and others working in the same town, and not in one great big 

 general inspiration meeting, because we are afraid that will die, but do thin|j that 

 a series of such meetings as I have outlined could be kept running perpetually 

 and the results would be of a great deal of benefit. 



It is not forests, but the use of forests, that we seek to perpetuate. There- 

 fore, to be sound and convincing, educational publicity must include the lumber 

 business. So long as the public believes forestry good and lumbering bad there 

 will be confusion and no real progress. 



I firmly believe from the work that we have done on the coast, and that we 

 have watched elsewhere, that you can absolutely measure the progress of forestry, 

 and forestry protection in any community, not by the skilled foresters, and not 

 by what they learn at the forest schools, but by their ability to do the same kind 

 of advertising they use in life insurance, soap, or anything else. In other words, 

 we have a sort of commodity to put before the public, you might call it prosperity 

 insurance, if you will, and one way we can get that over is to put it before them 

 in business like and convincing language, to use all the art of the side show barker, 

 the real estate agent and the newspaper man. It is forestry, and it is just as 

 dignified as anything else we do. You will find in the regions where that sort of 

 thing is studied and applied intelligently, that it is where you get appropriations 

 to fight fires, that it is where you get lumbermen to work for you, that it is where 



