ITED,STATES 

 DEPARTMENT 

 GRICULTU^E 



OFJ=ieE OE^ 

 I NTF ORMATToN^ 



Of 



•/I 



(V' f^'ITH U1TCL3 SAJt'S :TATURALISTS 



SPEAKING Tllffi: 10 Minutes. 



Friday, Decem'ber 16, 1932. 



NOT FOR PUBLICATION 



AMOUNCEI lETT : T>-"-s is the day and hour for our regular Fridaj' visit \7ith Uncle 

 Sam's Naturalists, Our T7ilds Ilan has "been talking with men in the Forest Service, 

 United States Department of Agriculture, trying to get the facts on the future of 

 the United States' wood supply, TThere do we stand in reference to our stand of 

 timber? 



I can renern'ber the time when one of the great concerns of the farmer was to 

 get the timber OF? his land. That, in the country where I_ lived, was a time of 

 clearing the land. And clearing the land was no small job. But a big change has 

 come in the timber supplies of this country and now a whole lot of farmers would 

 like to see more tiraber ON their land. 



The same change has come about in the hills and in the forests, America's 

 great stands of virgin timber — once thought INHXHAUSTIBLE — have been used up so 

 fast that already the last extensive stands are being tapped. The United 

 States is a great wood-using nation. Our newspapers alone eat up thousands of 

 acres of timber every year. That morning or evuaijg paper you buy for a few cents is 

 printed on a wood-pulp paper and you have to have trees if you're going to have 

 •wood pulp. That's only one cxanrplc of the country's mamoth appetite for wood 

 and that wood Ins to be supplied somehow — unless ne can find a good substitute. 

 The trouble is, virgin timber is practically irreplaceable because of the length 

 of time necessary to grow material of the highest quality. You can't grow a tree 

 over the week-end, you know, 



I was talking this over with some of the men in the Forest Service of the 

 Department of Agriculture the other day and they gave me some figures. The forest 

 land of the United States, they said, amounts to atout 730 thousand square miles 

 altogether. About 150 thousand square miles is managed for permanent timber pro- 

 duction under public ownership. Federal, State, and local. The other 580 thousand 

 square miles — an area larger than France, Belgi-um, the Netherlands, Denmark, C-er- 

 many, and the British Isles, by the way — is privately owned. This privately owned 

 forest land supports industries giving employment to more than a million people 

 and turning out each year wood products valued at 2 billion dollars. This is 

 enough to supply domestic needs and f"urnish wood products worth about 200 million 

 dollars to foreign countries. 



That sounds very impressive — that sounds like very good business. That sounds 



like America's wood pile is a very big proposition and it is. But the trouble 



is, only a small portion of this woods land is now being handled so as to produce 

 timber continuously. The greater part of the land is gradually drifting into 

 idleness, producing so little that it is a biirdcn to its owners md to the com- 

 munities within whose territory it lies. Some 125 thousand square miles have 



