LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

of Contents

      FORESTRY AND THE PUBLIC

      TIMBER MEANS PAY CHECKS

      Forest wealth is community wealth. The public's interest in it is affected very little by the passage of timber lands into private ownership, for all the owner can get out of them is the stumpage value. The people get everything else. Our forests earn nothing except by being cut and shipped to the markets of the world. Of the price received for them usually much less than a fifth is received by the owner. Nearly all goes to pay for labor and supplies here at home.

      Even now, when the western lumber industry is insignificant compared to what it will be soon, it brings over $125,000,000 a year into these five states. This immense revenue flows through every artery of labor, commerce and agriculture; in the open farming countries as well as in the timbered districts. It is shared alike by laborer, farmer, merchant, artisan and professional man. It is their greatest source of income, for lumber is the chief product which, being sold elsewhere, actually brings in outside money.

      That it is essential to the prosperity of every citizen to have this contribution to his livelihood continue requires no argument. From the manufacturing point of view alone, our forest resources are as important to everyone of us as to the lumberman, and in many ways more so, for if they are exhausted he can move or change his business; while the dependent industries cannot. But our welfare is at stake in a dozen other ways also.

      OUR INTEREST AS CONSUMERS

      Every person who uses wood, whether to build, fence, burn, box his goods, or timber his mine, is directly interested in a cheap and plentiful supply of timber. Every acre burned, every cut-over acre lying idle, raises the price for him without furnishing any revenue with which to help pay it. Every acre saved from fire, every acre of young growth, lowers it for him and puts money in circulation besides.

      Similarly, the cost to the consumer of most articles of every day necessity is directly affected by the connection of forest material with their production. Wood and water are almost as essential to mining as are, hence influence the price of metals. In the form of fuel, buildings, or boxes, if not as an actual constituent of the product itself, wood supply bears a like relation to almost every industry.

      Every reduction of the lumber traffic which helps support our railroads, or of their supply of poles, ties and car material, tends to raise the cost of our groceries and other rail-transported commodities.

      SCHOOL LANDS

      Most of our western states have immense areas of forested grant lands, the sale of timber from which supports the public schools and other state institutions. Destruction of this asset is a direct blow to these institutions which can be only partially met by increased taxation.

      THE FARMER HAS THE MOST AT STAKE

      In the case of western agriculture, the relation to the forest is fundamental and inseparable. Enough has been said to show that because of its importance as a sustaining industry lumber manufacture is a prodigious factor in creating a market for farm products, also that the cost of all articles used by the farmer is cheapened by forest preservation. But back of this lies the all-important dependence of western agriculture upon irrigation. We must save the forests that store the waters.

      Of particular significance to the farmer, too, is the tremendous importance of forests as a source of tax revenue to help support state and county government. The cost of government is growing as our population grows. Taxable property grows mainly in the cities. Elsewhere we confront the problem of diminishing timber to tax and consequent heavier and heavier burden on farm property. It will be a bad situation for the farmer if the timber is all destroyed and he has to pay all the taxes, as well as a higher price for his buildings, fences and fruit boxes. Every acre of timber burned or wasted hastens this day.

      The conservation thus suggested does not mean non-use of ripe timber, but does mean protecting it from useless waste and destruction, and replacing it by reforestation when it is used.

      CONDITIONS OF LIFE THE REAL ISSUE INVOLVED

      Lack of space forbids recounting many other ways in which the forest question touches the average citizen. It enters into our prospects of development, our investment values and our insurance rates. Like the keystone of an arch, or the link of a chain, forests cannot be destroyed without the collapse of the entire fabric. Their preservation is not primarily a property question, but a principle of public economy, dealing with one of the elements of human existence and progress. Failure to treat it as such means harder conditions of life, a handicap of industry; not only for our children, but for us as well.

      It all sums up to this: On every acre of western forest destroyed by fire, or that fails to grow where it might grow, we, the citizens of the West who are not lumbermen, bear fully eighty per cent of the direct loss and sustain serious further injury to our general safety and profit.

      HOW WE THROW AWAY MILLIONS

      Notwithstanding the above facts, we allow $40,000,000 which we and our families should share to vanish every year, leaving nothing more enduring than a pall of smoke from Canada to the Mexican line. The great area thus denuded uselessly, with that which produced public wealth through lumber manufacture, together having been capable of affording a community resource of $165,000,000, are abandoned to lie idle and a menace to remaining timber. It is exactly as though the owner of a 165-acre orchard should destroy forty acres wantonly and also abandon the rest, unfenced, uncultivated and uncared for.

      The one waste is as unnecessary as the other. Our Pacific coast forests owe their unparalleled productiveness to a peculiarly fortunate combination of climate and rapid growing species unknown elsewhere. Nowhere else is forest reproduction so swift and certain. Nowhere can it be secured with so little effort and expense. A little forethought in cutting methods and protection of the cut-over area from recurring fires, and an early second crop is assured. Saw timber can be grown in forty to seventy-five years; ties, mine timber and piles in less.

      HOW WE MIGHT MAKE IMMENSE PROFIT INSTEAD.

      It is reasonable to suppose that, although the quality may be inferior to that of the old forest removed now, timber scarcity will make a second cut in sixty years equally profitable per acre. Therefore, if the area denuded annually at present were encouraged to reforest and protected, it should at the end of that period again yield $165,000,000 to the community. Each year's growth at present would be worth a sixtieth of that sum, or $2,750,000. If given any chance to do so, the area deforested in only ten years would actually earn the people of our five western forest states $27,500,000 a year.

      Almost nothing is being done to make it do so. As the result of the same popular neglect, this annual loss of nearly twenty-eight millions of dollars is added to that of forty millions caused by destruction of merchantable timber by fire, and the injury to tax revenue, water supply and countless dependent industries still remain to be reckoned. And to this sacrifice of wealth we add that of scores of human lives, incredible suffering, and the wiping out of homes and villages by forest fires.

      PLAIN WORDS FOR OUR PRESENT POLICY

      Let us draw a parallel: If riot or invasion should sweep our Pacific coast states, killing unprotected settlers, plundering banks and treasuries of $40,000,000 of the people's savings and business capital, and by destroying the producing power of commercial enterprise reduce the community's income by twenty-eight millions more, the catastrophe would startle the world.

      If this stupendous disaster should threaten to recur the following year and every year thereafter indefinitely, annually taking $67,000,000 from the earnings of the people, diminishing their invested wealth and paralyzing their industries, the situation would be unbearable. It would dominate the minds of men, women and children. All else would be forgotten

Скачать книгу