UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



MISCELLANEOUS PUBLICATION No. 247 



Washington, D. G. 



Issued November, 1936 

 Revised December, 1939 



FORESTRY AND PERMANENT PROSPERITY 



By R. F. Hammatt, assistant to the chief, Forest Service 



Contents 



Page 



Forest-land misuse 1 



Forestry in the United States 2 



Forestry as an aid to economic recovery 2 



Forestry helps to build permanent economic 



prosperity 4 



The forest problem is a social one 4 



The national forests 5 



Farm woodlands 5 



Prairie States forestry project 5 



Integration of agriculture with forest resourses. 7 



Forest-land forage 9 



National-forest ranges 9 



Page 



Acquisition of forest lands by public agencies- 10 



A new type of forest community 13 



Sustained-yield management and permanent 



communities 13 



Wildlife 14 



Recreation 16 



Multiple-purpose management 17 



Forest research 18 



Universal use of wood 20 



Forest problem is more than one of growing 



timber 21 



FOREST-LAND MISUSE 



The American record of land misuse is almost unparalleled. Our 

 forest lands, which constitute almost one-third the area of the conti- 

 nental United States, offer a striking example. Today a little more 

 than two-thirds of them — and three-fourths of the most valuable, or 

 commercial forest lands — are in private ownership. On these lands 

 in recent years fires have burned about 40,000,000 acres annually — 

 an area greater than that of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hamp- 

 shire, Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia combined. Ax and 

 fire together have devastated or left with crippled, inadequate growing 

 stock an area three-fourths larger, even than this. 



For more than a century these forest lands were literally forced 

 from public to private ownership. Deliberately undertaken, it may 

 have been assumed that this course would, through individual self- 

 interest, bring about economic prosperity ; would somehow^ develop a 

 wholesome and stable social and economic structure based uponindivid- 

 ual operation of privately owned forest lands. There was precedent for 

 the assumption that this might be a sound economic policy here. For 

 in Old World countries there were privately owned forest lands and 

 forest industries managed on an ever-producing, sustained-yield basis, 

 and they had for centuries helped maintain permanent communities. 

 They had always ranked high as a source of stable employment. 

 Integrated with agriculture, they had been the backlog of a sound, 

 enduring rural economy. The attitude of their owners may have 

 been a key to this situation. Certainly it seems so. For in Europe, 

 the private owner of forest lands so managed considers himself a 



