380 RgPORT of THE FORESTRY COMMITTEE 



usefulness to none except agriculture, and this would fare ill without its aid in 

 many ways. The only reason the average citizen does not realize this and give 

 it the same active and intelligent interest that he gives home town problems is 

 that he cannot see it so clearly. The very immensity and importance of the 

 industry causes its several processes of growing, manufacturing and distributing 

 to be conducted separately and thus confuses the public mind. DiflFerent com- 

 munities see different parts of the process and get no thorough grasp of forest 

 economics. 



In many a little German village the whole community sees the forest grown, 

 cut, manufactured and used. Those who do not actually participate, serve or 

 supply those who do. All use the crop or profit by what is sold elsewhere. 

 There forestry needs no propaganda. The people could not understand the 

 need of it, any more than of propoganda for raising wheat and making bread. 

 Yet their situation is really no different — it is only more concentrated. Here, 

 too, forest industry is an entirety. Man needs wood in various forms. To make 

 the earth supply it, employing such labor as is required to make it suitable and 

 available for his use, is a business. Its performances and service to the com- 

 munity; supplying the consumer, employing labor, using supplies, and paying 

 taxes, requires, like other business, perpetuation of the resource dealt with, 

 economy in every process, and just payment by the consumer for service rendered. 



Here is where we, who should be the teachers, are at fault. We talk too 

 much about forests, as though they were an end in themselves. We might just 

 as well talk only of land when trying to improve agricultural conditions, or 

 water when urging the protection and propagation of food fishes. How can 

 the average citizen understand forests? It is the business of producing and 

 making them useful to him that he must understand — its place in the society 

 under which he exists, the economic laws under which it exists. He must be 

 brought to consider all forest production and all forest use as little or no different 

 from the production and use of any other necessary crop, obviously to be en- 

 couraged and stabilized on a permanent basis profitable to all concerned. Whether 

 he is a private citizen or a law maker serving private citizens, he must be fairly 

 familiar with the factors which govern lumber prices, logging and manufacturing 

 methods, the cost of growing and protecting the raw material. As long as he 

 thinks an uncut forest is forestry, and that such forestry is good and all lum- 

 bering bad, there will be no real progress. Nor will he have lumber to use 

 sometime when he needs it. 



We are moving in the right direction slowly. Once propagandists made 

 forestry an abstract problem of public or private conscience. They dwelt on 

 the needs of posterity and urged present sacrifice as a duty. They practically 

 said, "You are partly responsible for lack of forest protection. Forest destruc- 

 tion is bad for somebody's grandchildren. Badness is wicked. Therefore you 

 are wicked. You need a sermon and we'll preach it." Nowadays we realize 

 that abstract ethics do not influence human action as quickly as does fear of 

 immediate personal injury. It does not offend our reforming instinct to add 

 to our preachments of duty more vigorous and skilful appeals to human selfish- 



