(1) To use the trees in the most careful and conservative way without the great wastes now common.
(2) To save the vast areas of forests that are now burned each year.
(3) To prevent loss from insects.
(4) To use subst.i.tutes: that is, to use other and cheaper materials to take the place of wood whenever possible.
(5) To plant trees and to replant where old ones have been cut, until all land that is not fitted for agriculture is covered with forests.
These are only the rules that good sense and good business would teach us to follow, but we have not followed any of them in the past, and now it will be necessary to do all these things if we are to continue to have enough wood to use to keep pace with our progress in other directions.
As an example of the rapid rate at which we are consuming our forests, we use nine times as much lumber for every man, woman and child as the people of Germany use, and twenty-five times as much as the people of England use. This is due to several causes, many of which we would not wish changed.
To begin with, this was a new and undeveloped country, a large part of which had never been inhabited, and all the land, as fast as it was occupied, must be built up with entirely new homes; and because wood is the cheapest building material it is the one generally used.
The growth of all European countries is mostly by the increase of their own people, while this is only a small percentage of our growth, which comes largely from immigration from other countries, so the increase of population is much greater here and the proportion of new homes needed is far greater. Improvements of all kinds, public buildings, churches and bridges were built in almost every European community long ago, while in this country these things are being done each year in thousands of places.
Wages are higher in this country, and more people are able to afford the luxuries of life, vehicles, musical instruments, and the large variety of small conveniences to be found in almost every American home but seen in few homes of the poorer cla.s.s in Europe.
These are a few of the reasons why we use such a large amount of lumber each year. They are all conditions that mean a larger, better nation than we could otherwise have, with a higher standard of living, and while in some particulars, as we shall show, there should be changes that would conserve our forests, the great wastes do not lie in the _use_, but in the _abuse_ of the forests.
Now let us see what use is made of all the wood that is cut every year.
The greatest use of all is for firewood, but this is largely the decaying or faulty trees from farmers" wood-lots, or the waste product of a lumber region, so this does not const.i.tute so heavy a drain on the forests as the fact that 100,000,000 cords a year are used, would indicate.
Twenty times as much of the salable timber is sawed into lumber as is used in any other way. Nearly 40,000,000,000 board feet are thus used, but lumber is used in a variety of ways, while the other cuts are confined to a single use.
The first and greatest use of lumber is for building purposes, for houses, barns, sheds, out-buildings, fences, and for window-sashes, doors and inside finishings of all buildings, even those made of other materials.
Next comes furniture of all kinds,--chairs, tables, beds, and all other house, office, and school furniture; musical instruments, pianos, etc., vehicles of all kinds,--farm wagons, delivery wagons, carriages and other pleasure vehicles, including parts of automobile bodies, agricultural implements, plows, harrows, harvesters, threshing machines and other farm implements. Though these are built largely of iron, yet one-fourth of the implement factories report a use of 215,000,000 feet of lumber a year, so the entire output of these factories calls for a large amount of wood from our forests.
Car building is the other really great use for lumber. Freight cars, pa.s.senger cars, and trolley cars use each year an increasingly large proportion of the product of our saw-mills.
After these come the various smaller articles, which, though themselves small, are used in every home and are turned out in such vast quant.i.ties as to require a very large amount of lumber each year.
An empty spool seems a trifle, but the making of all the spools requires the cutting of hundreds of acres of New England"s best birch woods.
b.u.t.ter dishes, fruit crates, baskets, wooden boxes of all kinds, tools and handles, kitchen utensils, toys and sporting goods, picture molding and frames, grille and fretwork, excelsior, clothes-pins, matches, tooth-picks,--all these are mowing down our forests by the thousands of acres.
The lumber cut includes all kinds of both hard and soft woods. A very large percentage of this is of yellow or southern hard pine, of which several billion feet a year are used.
An almost equal amount is used for hewn cross-ties for railroads and trolley lines. Many sawed cross-ties are included in the item of lumber.
The hewed cross-ties are made from young oak-trees, or from hard-pine, cedar and chestnut. Without them no more railroad or trolley lines could be built, and the present systems could not be kept in repair. Many other materials have been tried, but wood is the only one that has ever proved satisfactory and safe for this purpose.
The next largest use of lumber is the grinding of it into pulp to be used in making paper for our books, magazines and newspapers, wrapping papers, etc. The woods used for this purpose are mostly spruce and hemlock. The great sources of supply of pulp-wood are Maine and Wisconsin, and large amounts are imported from Canada, which greatly lessens the drain on our own forests.
Next in importance comes cooperage stock for the making of barrels. When we consider the many uses of barrels,--that vinegar, oil, and liquors are all shipped in tight barrels, which are mostly made of the best white oak, and that flour, starch, sugar, crackers, fruits and vegetables, gla.s.sware, chemicals, and cement are shipped in what are called slack barrels, made of various hardwoods, the hoops being always of soft elm, a wood which is rapidly disappearing, we can see the size and necessity of this industry.
Round mine timbers, largely made of young hardwood trees, are used to support the mines underground. Mining engineers say that on an average three feet of lumber are used in mining every ton of coal taken out.
a.s.suming that 450,000,000 tons of coal are mined each year, this would mean that almost a billion and a half feet a year are used in the coal mines, and this is about the amount shown by the government report.
After this comes wood for lath used in building. This product is usually taken from lower cla.s.s wood or logging camp waste. Then comes the wood for distillation into wood-alcohol for use in manufacture and to furnish power in engines.
Next in quant.i.ty used comes veneer, which has two entirely different uses. The highest grade woods are cut to about one-twentieth of an inch and glued to cheaper woods as an outside finish in the making of furniture. The other use is for veneer used alone, when a very thin wood is desired. This is employed for b.u.t.ter dishes, berry baskets, crates, boxes and barrels.
Next on the list come poles--electric railway, electric light, telegraph, and telephone poles. Every pole that is erected for any of these purposes, every extension of the service, and all replacing caused by wind or decay, means the cutting of a tall, straight, perfect tree, usually cedar or chestnut. If we think of each pole of the network that covers the entire continent, as a tree, we shall better realize what our forests have done in binding the nation together.
Leather is stained by soaking the hides in a solution containing the bark of oak or hemlock. Sometimes an extract is made from chestnut wood. This has caused one of the most criminal wastes of trees, for a great deal of timber was cut down solely for the bark, and the wood left to decay in the forest. But now, as the price of lumber advances, more of it is used each year and less left to waste.
The bark and extract of the quebracho, a South American tree, are being imported for use in tanning, and are still further reducing the drain on our own forests.
Turpentine and rosin do not in themselves destroy the forests any more than does tapping the maple trees for their sap, but in the making of turpentine trees that are too small are often "boxed" and the trees are easily blown down by heavy winds or are attacked by insects and fungi.
Many destructive fires also follow turpentining, so that on the whole the turpentine industry is responsible for the destruction each year of large areas of the southern pine forests. The methods of turpentining introduced by the government result in the saving of thirty per cent.
more turpentine, and also protect the trees so that they may be used fifteen or twenty years and still be almost as valuable as ever for timber.
Twenty millions of posts are cut each year in the Lake States alone, and the entire number used is probably two or three times as great.
These const.i.tute the greater uses of wood, not a full and detailed list; but it plainly shows that all the uses are not only desirable, but necessary for our comfort and happiness, and that we would not willingly sacrifice one of them, and in order that this shall not become necessary, let us see what abuses we can find in the management of our forests. And here we find the most startling figures of all.
Great and important as is our list of products made from wood, we are surprised to learn that of all wood cut fully two-thirds is wasted in the forests, left to decay or burned. The largest forests are now all located far from the great manufacturing regions, and that means far from the lumber market. The cost of transportation must be added to every car of lumber sold. The freight on a car-load of lumber from the South to Chicago or other points in the middle West is not less than a hundred dollars, and from the Pacific coast it is very much higher.
It does not pay to send low-grade lumber when the cost is so great, and as there is no local market a large part of each tree is burned. All the upper end of the trunk and all branches are thus destroyed, although much valuable timber is contained in them.
At one mill in Alabama a pile of waste wood and branches as high as a two-story house burns night and day throughout the year, and that is probably true of all the larger mills.
If the timber could be conservatively managed as are live-stock products, so that all the waste could be utilized, all the small articles, shingles, lath, posts, tan-bark and extract, pulp-wood, wood for distillation and small manufactured articles would be made by-products of the larger cuts.
Much has been said of the greed of large lumber companies in causing wholesale and reckless destruction of the forests, and much of it is doubtless true, but the lumber companies cite the fact that no farmer will gather a crop of corn which will not pay for the labor cost of gathering, and say that at the present prices of lumber they can not pay the present freight rates to the factories. It seems therefore that a certain amount of waste is unavoidable unless wood-working plants are established near the forest regions.
The first great step in conserving our forests is to stop the unnecessary wastes in use. The next step is to take measures to prevent the great destruction of our forests by fire.
Those who have never lived in a great forest region can have little idea of the extent of the damage caused by these great forest fires. The loss of life of both man and animals, the sweeping away of houses and crops, the homelessness and misery of those who have lost everything they had saved, are not to be taken into account here, but only the loss of the forests themselves.
It is estimated that the loss by fire is as great as the entire amount cut for use in the entire United States. The National Conservation Committee reports that 50,000,000 acres of woodland are burned over yearly. This probably includes all burned-over lands, in much of which the standing timber is not destroyed, but the saplings and seedlings are killed as well as the gra.s.s for grazing and for the protection of the roots. Much land is burned over in this way year after year until hope of future growth is gone, though the damage to the large trees has not been great. In one way this loss is even more serious, as it shuts off the hope of future forests, but the loss of our full-grown standing forests is grave.
In 1891 this loss amounted to 15,000,000 acres, or nearly forty thousand acres every day in the year. Since then the work of the Forest Service in fighting fires and the great clearing of the forests, has reduced this somewhat, but it still amounts to no less than 30,000 acres of our best salable timber a day. This is the really great and serious loss of the forests.
All the wood that is used goes to make our country a better place to live in, to make its people more comfortable and happy, but all that is lost by fire is a loss to all the nation in comforts for the future, and in the present it means high prices for lumber because our forests are disappearing so rapidly.
And we are letting them burn at the rate of thirty thousand acres every day! More than enough to supply all our needs. If any one could gather together in one vast pile our houses and barns, our furniture, our wagons and carriages, our farm implements, all our home conveniences, our railroad cross-ties, our trolley and telephone poles, our papers and magazines, and burn them all, the whole world would be roused by the fearfulness of the loss. But we sit idly by and see the materials of which all these things are made and must be made in the future, and with them our shade, our water-sheds, the soil of the forest-lands itself destroyed, with never a word of protest.
In a paper prepared for the National Conservation Congress, it was stated that in some years government survey parties were unable to work in the Rocky Mountains for whole seasons on account of the dense smoke, and the fires were allowed to burn till the snows of winter put them out. The writer further stated that he believed from observation that the Forest Service, by checking fires in their beginning, has in the last few years saved more timber than has been used for commercial purposes.
Private owners of large tracts should be compelled to use the same care in preventing fires that is exercised by the government. This care, and the breaking up of the forests into smaller tracts by clearing the land in alternate sections would soon reduce the fire loss so greatly as almost to save us from anxiety for the future of our timber lands.
The next great loss to the forests is from insects. When insects have bored into wood it becomes honey-combed by the ca.n.a.ls cut by the little insects and is utterly valueless. The loss to fruit and forest trees will be taken up more fully in the chapter on insects. At present it is only necessary, in order to show how much our forests suffer in this way, to state that the yearly loss from this cause is placed at no less than $100,000,000 a year, and the loss to fruits is counted at one-fifth of the entire crop. Some slight idea of the danger to our forests will be seen by the simple statement that forty-one different species of insects infest the locust tree, eighty the elm, one hundred and five the birch, one hundred and sixty-five the pine, one hundred and seventy the hickory, one hundred and eighty-six the willow, while oak trees are attacked by over five hundred!
This is exceedingly difficult to control and can perhaps never be entirely checked. Some remedies will be suggested later, and by having smaller forests, more carefully watched, some personal care can be given to the trees. In Germany the trees are as closely watched as are other crops, and the saving in value well repays this extra care and expense.
A much smaller loss comes from the winds that sometimes level all the trees over many square miles. This can not, of course, be prevented, except possibly in the turpentine forests, but care should be taken to use all the wood, never allowing it to decay where it fell, and also to replant the land with trees, unless it is fitted for agriculture.