10 THE FORESTS OF THE UNITED STATES: THEIR. USE. 
One-fourth of the standing timber is left or otherwise lost in logging. The 
boxing of longleaf pine for turpentine has destroyed one-fifth of the forests 
worked. The loss in the mill is from one-third to two-thirds of the timber 
sawed. The loss in the mill product through seasoning and fitting for use is 
from one-seventh to one-fourth. Great damage is done by insects to forests 
and forest products. An average of only 320 feet of lumber is used for each 
1,000 feet which stood in the forest. 
Prodigious waste has accompanied our use of the forest. The chief 
causes are fire, wasteful methods of logging and turpentining, waste 
in the mill, and waste in the use of wood. 
Forest fires have destroyed many billion feet of commercial timber. 
They have driven the forest from vast areas, upon which the actual 
planting of trees will be needed before the forest will return to them. 
They have destroyed or injured young growth whose value is much 
more than that of the timber burned. They have changed greatly for 
the worse the quality and composition of existing forests. To them 
is due, far more than to the wasteful logging which they have usually 
followed, the decline in the utility of our streams for all useful pur- 
poses; and, through erosion, forest fires are working destructive 
change in the configuration of the land itself. 
The average waste in the woods 1s 1,000 board feet to every 4,000 
board feet logged. This is due to a variety of causes, many of which 
could be wholly removed with both present and permanent profit, and 
all of which could be greatly reduced with the same result. Chief 
among them are plans for logging poorly made or poorly carried out; 
the leaving of merchantable timber in the woods either actually cut 
or in dead trees, trees partly unsound, or trees of the less valuable 
kinds; the waste of timber in high stumps and long tops, and in the 
failure to cut logs to such lengths that the tree is most profitably 
used ; breakage in felling, loss in lodged trees, and in driving; and the 
use of good timber for temporary construction in logging, for which 
inferior timber would serve equally well. But still more serious than 
all these forms of waste combined, in its effect upon the future timber 
supply, is the well-nigh universal damage in logging, for the most 
part wholly unnecessary, to the young growth. 
The experience of half a century has clearly shown in Virginia, the 
Carolinas, and Georgia that turpentining under present methods 
renders a permanent naval-stores industry in the South utterly im- 
possible. These methods usually render the forest unproductive in 
four or five years. They have so greatly reduced the longleaf-pine 
forests available for turpentining that in some localities trees 4 or 5 
inches in diameter are now being boxed. This generally means an 
exceedingly low return in turpentine and the death in a few years 
of trees, which would otherwise have grown to make lumber. 
[Cir. 171] 
