32 Circular 211, Dept. of Agriculture 



A study recently made by the Forest Service showe' 

 that over two-thirds of the original forests of the 

 United States have been culled, cut over, or burned, 

 and that three-fifths of their merchantable timber is 

 gone. The country is losing about 25,000,000,000 

 cubic feet of wood annually from its forests and is 

 growing but 6,000,000,000 cubic feet. We are cutting 

 every class of timber, even trees too small for the 

 sawmill, much faster than it is being replaced. 



The effect of the depletion of timber is being felt 

 more and more among the wood-using industries. A 

 recent study of the pulp-and-paper industry made by 

 the Forest Service shows that diminishing of the 

 timber supply in the Northeast and the Lake States, 

 where the industry is largely concentrated, has led to 

 an increasing dependence upon imports for our paper. 

 Of the 9,148,000 cords of wood required for our paper * 

 consumption in 1922, over half was imported in one 

 form or another. 



There are still large supplies of timber in the United 

 States but they are not in the right place. Sixty-one 

 per cent of what is left lies west of the Great Plains, 

 far from the bulk of our population, agriculture, and 

 factories. The distance between the average sawmill 

 and the average home builder is steadily increasing, 

 and we shall soon be dependent for the bulk of our 

 construction lumber upon the forests of the Pacific 

 coast. 



We have used up our forests without growing new 

 ones. At the bottom of the whole problem is idle 

 forest land. The United States contains 331,000,000 

 acres of cut-over or denuded forests containing no 

 saw timber; 81,000,000 acres of this amount has been 

 completely devastated by forest fires and methods of 

 cutting which destroy or prevent new timber growth. 

 The area of idle or largelv idle land is being increasedr- 

 by from 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 acres annually, as 

 the cutting and burning of forests continue. We are 

 short of growing forests. 



The situation necessitates a broad policy of forestry 

 for the whole Nation which will include both an en- l 



