New Britain herald., 1917-01-24
FACING A SHORTAGE.


 forest wealth as is now taking place
 will tell inevitab ply in the future cost
 of lumber, paper, and other products manufa ctured from timber. This is the opinion of the United States Forest Service, under the Department of Agriculture, which has just completed an extensive study of timber owner ship and the lumber business and whose report is made public today. The stigation was undertaken in the interest of all the people in the United States. The millions of lumber users in every state in the Union, every city and town, will be interested in these findings The Federal Trade Commission, which co-operated with the Forest Service in the investiga- ton, will advance specific conclusions and remedies in a report of it's own to be published later. Tn the meantime the Forest Service calls attention to the fact that unstable and partly speculative ownership in the West and South is the cause of frequent over cutting of the market and waste of forest resources.
 Any man who contemplates building a home or making repairs that ncccs- sitate the use of lumber, must be deeply concerned in what is taking place in this great industry, the un- deriving instability of which is marked by too large stocks of timber acquired from the public domains and too | much timber speculation mixed with 1 the manufact of lumber. Uncle 1 Sam. as Clifford Pinchot has said, time 1 and time again, has been too generous 1 to those who sought his timber lands. 1 The individual states, too, have been
 .t fault. Connecticut is paying high
 prices for lumber today because US own timber is largely used up and 1 supplies from other states can De
 obtained only at high cost of transpor-
 tation. What is true here holds good
 in other states With little or nothing
 being done to grow new forests on
 cutover lands more widespread short
 age of forest products is threatened in the future. Pennsylvania is one of the states that recently awoke to the 1 situation and started a reforesting of it's timber lands.
 Although Uncle sam has been good
 to the lumbermen, the lumber in
 dustrv is not without it's troubles. The
 hundreds of billions of feet of timber
 acquired for almost nothing a few
 years ago results in lumbermen in
 the West carrying vast quantities of
 timberland beyond all possible needs
 of their present saWmills and logging
 camps. The value of timber lands
 were carried very high during the few
 wears of sudden development and 1 sDeculation, and many stumpage hold
 ings have been overcapitalized. Be-
 ca,1se mills were built beyond the de-
 mands for their prodcts, at least a
 third of the saws are now idle. While . all these things have been taking place In the realm of lumb making social and economic changes in the l United states have reduced the coun- , try's proportionate use of lumber | According to observations by the eX- perts in the Forest Service, uses l taken over by other structural ma 5 terals within the last ten years are estimated at ne-fifth of the present } yearly cut of lumber; and in the same 5 period the per capita consumption o1 3 lumber seems to have passed its peak and dropped nearly one-fourth. = Caught with it's burden of timber land ) on the one hand and these changes ir l the countrys use of wood on the } other, the lumber industry, the report ) points out, has been between an upper t and neither miIlstone. The result is
 an ill-adjustment to market require :, ments.
 } The rising cost of lumber to con- ] sumers is attributed by the Forest ? Service primarily to the exhaustion of 1 the supplies of timber nearest to the ! hulk af RastaxR consuuerA and ths