Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/317

Rh In spite of steady improvement in tools, in machinery and in facilities for transportation, the increase in the value of logs and lumber becomes more and more rapid. The American lumberman has always been remarkable for enterprise and effectiveness, while American saw-mills compare favorably with those in any other country. These conditions, which would naturally tend to a sustained decrease in the cost of lumber products, are more than offset by the scarcity of available timber.

To sum up, the lumber industry of this country is approaching the end of its resources with alarming rapidity. It has, by over-production, fostered an abnormal demand, and by methods aimed at present profit alone, hampered the production of a second crop upon the lumbered area. Notwithstanding the growing economy in the harvesting, manufacture and distribution of forest products, their value is each year higher, while there is enormous increase in the importation of softwoods from Canada and of hardwoods from the tropics. Existing data as to the quantity of standing timber in the United States is insufficient for a close estimate of how long it will last at the current rate of consumption. It is inevitable, however, that the present generation will see the exhaustion of our first growth timber. Nor is the supply now standing so secure that it may be counted upon with certainty. Forest fires destroy annually timber aggregating over $50,000,000 in value, and measures to prevent them so far have not proved generally effective. It will be understood, moreover, that the crippling of the lumber trade and of all industries dependent upon it does not await the actual exhaustion of our forests. The geographical distribution of the great timber regions in this country, with relation to the chief sources of demand, is such that the local and not the total available supply is the urgent question. The fact that the heavy forests of the Pacific slope are sufficient to yield for many years an amount equal to the present annual consumption will not prevent a timber famine in the East, when to the price of the bulk of the wood it consumes is added the cost of transportation across the continent. Statistics giving comforting assurance of an abundant yield still at hand do not consider the effect upon wood industries of the substitution of timber of a few kinds only to fill a widely varying demand. The presence of hardwoods in the southern Appalachians and pine in the southern pine belt, in quantity sufficient to replace for some time the waning supply of spruce in the north woods, offers no substitute for the latter species in the manufacture of paper pulp. The redwood, red fir and hemlock of the Pacific coast will in some respects take the place of the longleaf pine, the exhaustion of which, at the present rate of consumption, will soon be accomplished. They can not, however, serve as the source of