The Greeneville daily sun. (Greeneville, Tenn.) 1918-1920, 1919-08-28
Wood Has a Part
in Living Cost
By CHARLES LATHRoP PACK

uring out your monthly grocer bills
you find "thatthings have gone up"
and in any mental battle with the
high cost of living you almost always
confine your struggle to food. Go
back of food a step and you will find
many things that increase the cost of
the food you eat, although you can
not eat those things. The chief item
of the list is wood
In fact, wood is one of the chief
reasons for the high cost of living
and the American Forestry associa-
ton calls attention to this with some
startling figures. For example the
box in which your berries or peaches
are displayed at market costs about
three times what it did in "the good
old days" The barrel in which your
flour found its way to the grocer has
gone up in price. The paper in
which your meat is wrapped is "away
up" None of these things can be
put through your digestive apparatus
withany degree of success but the
consumer pays his share in the price
of the berries, the flour, the peaches
or the meat.
There is scarcely a commodity that
is not shipped or handled in a wood
container of some sort. To say moth
ing OF home consumption, the United
States was exporting about three and
a half million board feet of lumber
every year before the war.
Then the war called for wood, It
vent into temporary. structures of ev-
cry description such as camps, hos
pitals, recreation huts, and the like.
We must come up with sharp turn
on the lumber question. A national
forest policy must be adopted in this
country or we face economic suicide.
The American Forestry Association
asks for the views of the lumbermen,
timberland owners and foresters on
this greatest of our reconstruction
problems in order that definite pol
icy may be arrived at.
We have just fought and won the
fight to save us from imperial ag-
gression, but the fight to save us
from economic ruin is just ahead of
us. Are we going to let the sacrifice
of our heroes go for naught? What
of the future in an economic sense?
The situation is just this:
The original forest area in the
United States was eight hundred
and fifty million acres.
There now remains in virgin
timber about two hundred and
thirty million acres, or one-fourth
of the original.
Our total acreage of forest and
cut over lands is about five hun
dred million acres. One hundred j
million acres of this is waste
land which produces nothing and /
one hundred an deighty million
acres more contain more or less
second growth. A large per-
centage of this second growth
timber is inferior quality.
THE NEW GROWTH OF
TIMBER is NOT MORE THAN
ONE THIRD OF THE AMOUNT
WHICH IS BEING USED OR
DESTROYED EVERY YEAR.
There is plenty of food in that
last paragraph but it is food for
thought. What of our home build
ing program when we realize that the
center of our lumber industry is fast
moving to the Pacific Coast? What
of our home building program when
we realize that New England is nc
longer self supporting in lumber and
that the Lake states, once our great
est producers of lumber, are now i'm
porters of it from other states? This
means long hauls and high freight
rates which the home builder must
pay. The time to build home is
now for without a national forest
policy I do not believe cheaper lum-
ber can be predicted
The forests of France, millions of
acres of which are now in ruins, kept
the Hun from reaching Paris. Other
vast acreages had to be cut down for
war purposes. Civilization can thank
France for having forest policy
of more than a hundred years stand
ing. Her forests answered the call
of war when war came. Had the war
come fifteen years later we would
have been pressed to meet the lum-
ber program. Let US heed the call
of the forests before it is too late.
IN LUCK