which invests in reforesting, in forest regions, in an aimless manner may fail to save the region from degenerating and lose on the investment. In other words, if the reforesting effort fails to provide sufficient raw material for the plant, it will move on, leaving much the same condition as described above, as the result of destructive lumbering. Young forests maturing after the removal of their natural market might be so far from the next market as to eat up the profit in transportation. Of course in regions where there are other industries to maintain the population, loss from such causes are improbable.

Altho reforesting a region by the investment policy may save its industries and thus maintain a normal, healthy, progressive population, yet it hands on to the next generation debts which perhaps we ought to pay. Our manufacturing plants get their raw material for the cost of logging and transportation, plus the carrying charges, since it was first capitalized. (The future generation should not pay for our mistake of capitalizing forest land by purchase from the Government faster than it was needed.) Under the investment policy of reforesting, the present generation simply loses the privilege of investing that money elsewhere. The manufacturing plant of the future will have to pay for raw material. the cost of logging, transportation and cost of growing the crop, and probably the cost of reforesting for the next generation. By the time the next forest crop is being cut the replacement idea, which will be developed next will probably be universally accepted.

Is this generation willing to take the unearned increment of the vast forest resources we are harvesting, including the forest capital and force the next generation to pay for growing their own forest resources?

The third policy, that of replacing the forest growing area after we have used up our surplus forest capital, is probably the soundest. The general non-stumpage owning public is becoming more and more insistent that this should be done, while the stumpage owners have been struggling with large economic problems which the public has no conception of. Many of the pulp and lumber concerns would have been glad to cut so that the land would have reproduced itself, or plant on an area of equal growing capacity nearer their manufacturing plant, if they could have done so and competed successfully with other concerns engaged in purely destructive lumbering.

-Courtesy of Empire State Forest Products Association.

DR. B. E. FERNOW STANDING AT EDGE OF A SCOTCH PINE STAND WHICH HE PLANTED 16 YEARS AGO NEAR AXTON, N. Y.

Under this policy, the cost of reforesting is charged off each year to the cost of log production, and thus increases the cost of the manufactured products. Competition has been holding the price of manufactured products down so that most companies could not adopt the policy. A few companies with exceptionally good management or some natural advantage, such as good water power, have already put the policy into operation.

If the general public wants the pulp and lumber companies to maintain their forest capital, they must; first, control competition and, second, be willing to pay the necessary cost of manufactured product.

If the consuming public is not ready to pay the cost of reforesting thru increased prices on manufactured articles but still insists as it should, on the forest capital being maintained, Government management of our forest soil is the inevitable solution. By this method the general public will also pay the cost, but in the form of taxes instead of increased prices. Are we, the members of this generation, willing to pay the Price?

When the Geese Come North

Their faint "honk-honk" announces them,
The geese when they come flying north;

Above the far horizon's hem

From out the south they issue forth.

They weave their figures in the sky,

They write their name upon the dome,
And, o'er and o'er, we hear them cry
Their cry of gladness and of home.

Now lakes shall loose their icy hold

Upon the banks, and crocus bloom;

The sun shall warm the river's cold

And pierce the Winter's armored gloom;

The vines upon the oaken tree

Shall shake their wavy tresses forth,

The grass shall wake, the rill go free-
For, see! The geese are flying north!

-Douglas Malloch, "The Woods."

FORESTRY AND THE NEWSPAPERS

Royal J. Davis

New York Evening Post

Paper read before New York State Forestry Association
Forest Week at the Lake Placid Club.

own.

UR publicly-owned national forests alone contain enough pulp wood to supply our need for paper for the rest of the century. Yet we are already depending upon Canada for a third of our news-print paper, in the form either of raw material or of finished product, and this dependence is rapidly increasing. What is the explanation of this paradox? Partly the natural tendency to follow the line of least resistance. It is easier to slip across the border and begin on the virgin forests of the Dominion than to exploit further some of our The lumberman has taken literally Milton's words, "To-morrow to fresh woods." But this is not the whole truth. In many of our papermanufacturing States the work of destruction has proceeded so rapidly and so recklessly that the end is in sight. The available private supply of pulp wood in these States is not enough to last for more than a decade or so longer. Even this reduction in our resources, however, seems trivial when we look at the immense wealth we have left. The Forest Service has estimated the pulp wood in the national forests at three hundred billion feet. This means six hundred million cords, and, according to Secretary Houston, in his notable statement of last March on conditions in the paper industry, we are using for all kinds of paper only seven million cords a year. Three million of these go into news-print, the other four million being required for magazine and book paper, stationery and business papers, wrapping paper, wall paper, cardboard, fiber board, and the like. Beside the national forests are privately-owned lands in the West, with large amounts of pulp wood, to say nothing of the waste in the manufacture of lumber, which is estimated to run to sixty million cords annually, a part of which, as from spruce, hemlock, etc., can be col

lected and shipped with profit to news-print mills. Why, then, our increasing dependence upon Canada?

The mystery is to be explained by two considerations: cost of transportation and investment in existing paper-plants. The pulp wood in the West is much cheaper than the woods now being used by paper mills in the Northeast. While, according to Secretary Houston's figures, pulpwood stumpage in the northern States costs from $2.50 to $5 a cord as it stands in the forest, first-class western timber is obtainable at prices ranging from 25 cents to $1.50 a cord, or from a tenth to a third of present prices. Again, experts of the Forest Service have reported that it is entirely practicable to manufacture news-print in Alaska and deliver it in New York through the Panama Canal at a cost of not more than $35 a ton. To quote the Secretary of Agriculture once more, "When it is considered that recent prices have ranged from $60 a ton upward, it is evident that an excellent competitive basis exists for the introduction of western papers." But it is only a basis. The distance to these western forests and still more the distance to those in Alaska means a comparatively high cost for shipping. A more serious obstacle to the utilization of these sources of supply is the necessity of a transfer of capital from existing plants to new ones, inevitably a slow process.

But suppose these difficulties overcome, and all our vast forestresources at the immediate disposal of makers and users of paper. How many generations should we be able to enjoy them? In 1914, we were using about five thousand tons of news-print every day. Three years

later, the quantity has grown to six thousand tons, and appears to be increasing at the rate of ten per cent a year. We are not likely to see a slowing up of that speed. On the contrary, the probability is for its acceleration. If there is one thing for which Americans display an insatiable appetite, a limitless capacity for absorption, it is printed matter. Nature herself must stand aghast at the ceaseless conversion of her sturdiest creations into a flimsy product that to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven. What appalls one is the velocity of the transformation. A giant that has weathered the storms of three score years and ten is cut down and turned into flimsy sheets that the lightest wind can flutter away, almost between sunrise and sunset. What storehouse can supply the demands of so voracious a hunger?