CONSERVATION OR WASTE OF TIMBER?

...RICHARD H. D. BOERKER, onetime forester and now teacher of biology in the Kingston, N. Y., high school, makes this story plain in Behold Our Green Mansions...

...We already import a lot of pulp and newsprint, which indicates that something like a famine in some types of wood is already upon us...

...But, though a timber crop, unlike an iron or coal mine, can replenish itself, you can see that, if the decimation of the forests by man and nature continues at the present alarming rate, a timber shortage is inevitable...

...Mr...

...The United States would not have enough wood to satisfy all our demands...

...Reviewed by Anthony Netboy TO the average American, particularly if he is a denizen of cities, a tree is something that fills up space in a landscape, shades a sun-baked street or yard, or provides a nesting place for birds...

...In a final chapter, "Economic Factors in Private Forestry," Mr...

...and as the deficiency in timber growth is worldwide, we probably could not depend on imports to meet all our needs...

...Boerker is inclined to overstate the case...

...And what we have left are fewer of the big venerable specimens that produce high-quality logs, and more of the younger, thinner second-growth that will only make inferior grades of lumber...

...During the war, there was a critical shortage of wood products, and demands are so great that, as soon as manpower becomes available, production will shoot up rapidly...

...In this he is far ahead of the majority of lumber operators who usually wince at the mere mention of regulation of their cutting practices...

...The role of trees and forests in the economy of the nation is about as vague to the average citizen as the boundaries of Zanzibar...

...S. Patent Office) euphemism for conservation, to indicate that a considerable portion of our forest industries are dedicated "to efficient fire protection . . . practicing conservative logging, leaving adequate seed trees, and in other ways providing for a continuous yield of forest products...

...It is also something that grows in Brooklyn...

...Boerker gives the impression that the timber tycoons who, in the past, picked clean a large part of the forested acreage of the Northeast, the Lake States, and the South, not to mention parts of the fabulously-timbered areas of the West, are by and large mending their ways...

...The uses of trees in our civilization are almost uncountable^—they range from lumber to alcohol, from sugar to paper, and from medicines to rayon cloth and plastics...

...It is a splendid introduction to the subject, with one major reservation...

...Using statistics and other data compiled over the years by the U. S. Forest Service, other government agencies, and by private organizations, he has laid out the picture, as it were, of our forest economy on a broad canvas...

...The original forest is said to have covered about 820 million acres, or 43 per cent of the land area of the U. S. In three centuries of white settlement, old growth has been reduced to about 100 million acres...

...ONCE upon a time, almost half of the United States was blanketed with trees...

...Boerker believes that private industry "should be allowed to work out its own problems," he recognizes the, fact that "no country has solved its forest problems completely without some measure of public regulation...

...able objectivity...

...prices would go up...

...WHILE Mr...

...Here is the alpha and omega of forest use and conservation—written in a limpid (if not exciting) style, carefully documented, and presented with reason...

...Some big operators—and many medium-sized ones— are practicing good forestry because they know that this is the only way to stay in business permanently...

...But the bulk of them are conscious only of immediate profits, not future crops, or the need for providing continuing jobs for their workers and safeguarding the future of the communities where lumber is the mainstay of the local economy...

...He cites the growing movement of "tree farms," a copyrighted (U...

...For every timber operator who follows these sensible but costly practices, there are several who live by the cut-out-and-get-out philosophy, hoping to make a killing while the timber lasts, and then dismantling their operations, leaving their workers stranded, the mill town hard hit, the land unproductive, and the county taxing body bereft of a lot of income...

...Yet, without an abundance of trees—dea gratias!—we would not be a first-class nation, and our standard of living would be much poorer...