10 Miscellaneous Circular 15, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture 
is producing half of the lumber cut of the world and using 95 per 
cent of it at home. The consumption and destruction of wood in 
the United States amounts to about 56,000,000,000 board feet an- 
nually. The present population of Arizona and New Mexico is 
using 300,000,000 feet a year, not including cordwood or mine props. 
As the Southwest develops and the population increases, demand 
for timber here as elsewhere will increase correspondingly. 
Need for management—The United States contains 469,000,000 
acres of forest land of all sorts, timbered, cut-over, and burned. 
Most of this should always be forest land. It is an area which, if 
it can be kept at work growing trees, is ample to furnish all of the 
wood needed for home use and for export trade. Eighty million 
acres of these forest lands, however, have been denuded to the point 
of absolute idleness so far as the production of timber of commer- 
cial value is concerned and millions of other acres of cut-over land 
are reproducing at but a fraction of their capacity. This waste is 
Proper range management makes sheep grazing in the forests profitable 
being increased through fire and destructive lumbering by 10 to 15 
million acres every year. Timber is being cut or destroyed four 
times as fast as timber is growing. Freight on lumber into States 
that have idle forest lands costs hundreds of millions of dollars 
every year. Fishing, hunting, and other recreational pursuits are 
everywhere subjected to sharp limitations. Because of devastated 
watersheds floods follow continued rains and bring damage beyond 
realization alike to town and farm, while cities run short of water 
during drought. 
Things that hinder —Timberland owners are unable to see profit 
in growing a crop that requires 150 to 200 years to mature and which 
will be harvested by a future generation. Distances between timber 
and transportation lines or markets, and lack of near-by market for 
by-products work in combination with rough topography and small 
number of trees per acre to prevent the manufacture ot lumber cheap 
enough to carry the interest of the owner beyond the harvesting of the 
