FIFTH NATIONAL CONSERVATION CONGRESS 367 



stituted most of the activities up to the present time, and is extremely helpful in 

 developing methods and arousing public interest; v^rhile the latter, although it 

 does not exist as a fully developed business policy, is developing through protec- 

 tion and other measures absolutely essential to private forestry. It has been 

 said that "forest conservation is more expensive than forest waste, in the imme- 

 diate future." This statement will bear modification according to regional or 

 local conditions. It would certainly be true in the heavy forests of the Pacific 

 Northwest, where the elimination of waste is impossible with present market and 

 transportation facilities, but even so, fire protection, which is an initial and 

 indispensable factor in conservation, is intensively and successfully applied. Fire 

 protection is also practiced successfully in the Northeast, and here close utiliza- 

 tion is far more feasible. As an example, today the small hardwood mills in 

 Southeastern New York are paying as high as $12 per M. for logs 6 inches at 

 the small end, and many of them are so knotty and crooked they won't lay still 

 on a skidway. On the Pacific Coast the finest No. 1 logs, running practically all 

 clear, 30 inches and up, are going begging at less than $10 per M. The answer is 

 enormous reserve supply and over-production in one case and scarcity and a 

 ready market in the other. A surfeited market and excess supply will mean 

 excessive waste until conditions change. 



FOREST CONSERVATION NECESSARY. 



Whatever the present status of private forestry, and the conditions which 

 retard or encourage its development, there will come in the near future, and 

 there is even apparent today, a national need for the maintenance of an adequate 

 timber supply from public and private forests. All that is necessary to interest 

 private interests in forest crop production is a sustained demand for lumber and 

 for minor products at a price which will make their production profitable. Broad 

 public interests demand forest conservation for special purposes, as watershed 

 protection, and these, together with an indeterminate amount of general lumber 

 production, will be provided by Federal, State and municipal agencies. 



After our present stored-up natural heritage of timber is exhausted, future 

 supplies will have to come from trees which have grown on land maintained in 

 forest and not suited for agriculture. These future wood supplies will come from 

 three principal sources. First, the national forests and the State forest reserves, 

 on which timber has been systematically protected and grown as a crop; second 

 from forest growth which has sprung up voluntarily on cut-over lands, and has 

 escaped fire and reached maturity without being systematically planned for or 

 protected; and, third, from individual or corporate owned forest lands which 

 have been devoted to forest crop production as a private business enterprise under 

 scientific long-time management. 



WHAT OF THE FUTURE. 



The development of private forestry operations will be a potent factor in 

 determining whether forest crops adequate for the nation will be available in the 

 future, when the inaccessibility or exhaustion of the stored supply forces depend- 



