FORESTRY AND PERMANENT PROSPERITY 13 



A NEW TYPE OF FOREST COMMUNITY 



As a whole, the lumber industry, though it has endorsed sustained 

 yield as an objective, is still financed and operated on a basis of quick 

 liquidation. Consequently, woods labor is largely transient and with- 

 out permanent community ties. This makes for an unsatisfactory, 

 unsound social structure. It is a definitely inadequate policy for 

 successful sustained-yield operation of forest lands, to which per- 

 manent communities of skilled workers are essential. 



In cooperation with the Resettlement Administration, the Forest 

 Service has been studying possibilities for developing within the 

 national forests new types of forest communities, so located that 

 forest-land resources may assure economic freedom through stable, 

 permanent work. Plans for a number of such projects, based upon 

 sustained-yield utilization of national-forest and other timber pro- 

 ducts, have been developed. 



SUSTAINED-YIELD MANAGEMENT AND PERMANENT 



COMMUNITIES 



If our forests are to do their part in maintaining permanent, 

 prosperous communities, they must be so handled that a continuous 

 supply of timber is assured for each community dependent upon 

 forest industries. This means sustained-yield forest management. 



To the layman "sustained yield" may sound mysterious. If so, 

 one might consider, by way of example, an individual who has 

 fortunately accumulated a capital of $200,000 and then invests it 

 so that he secures a safe return in the form of annual interest. If he 

 keeps his expenditures within this interest, he has a sustained-yield 

 operation. If not, sooner or later his capital is dissipated, his income 

 gone. 



This situation has a direct parallel in forest management. A man 

 who owns 200,000 acres of productive timberland may establish 

 sawmills and cut all the timber quickly. He may, in other words, 

 liquidate by way of the cut-out-and-get-out policy under which 

 there is feverish activity — for a time. A sawmill town is built, 

 everything booms. But in a few years the operation is ended, the 

 goose plucked. Unless some other activity intervenes, women and 

 children are forced by economic necessity to follow their menfolk 

 along tortuous job-hunting trails. Homes, schools, and churches are 

 left empty and, forlorn. Obviously, this way of doing things does 

 not constitute a sustained-yield operation. 



But if this timberland owner first determines the yearly interest — 

 in the form of annual growth — which his 200,000-acre forest will 

 yield, then builds sawmills to handle, each year, not more than the 

 amount of timber which this growth represents, both property and 

 town are on an all-time basis. For then annual growth replaces 

 annual harvest; the forest capital is not depleted. Jobs, homes, 

 schools, churches, are permanent. This is a sustained-yield operation. 

 It is the type of management which is standard for all resources on 

 the national forests; it has as a major objective community mainte- 

 nance through production adjusted to growth. 



Sustained-yield forest management can be practiced in every forest 

 region of the United States. It may not be achieved everywhere by 



