Ghosts in the Lumber Pile

Bv R. T. Titus \(est Coast Lumbermen's Association

Lumber and other forest products have enlisted for the duration. War requirements are such that substantial quantities of lumber will be available for only the most essential civilian uses until cessation of activities in at least the European Theater. It is natural to assume that for West Coast woods there will be continued military demand for a major portion of the production until victory has been won in the Pacific as well. Nevertheless, distributors and consumers as well as manufacturers are commencing to look ahead in an effort to see what the situation will be in regard to lumber supply and demand in the postwar years.

would be so far gone that we would fall considerably short of our home requirements. Would he be surprised to see the cargoes of lumber leaving American ports today for Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific ?

In 1908, Gifford Pinchot, then United States Forester, declared: "We have in store timber enough for only twenty or thirty years." According to this prophecy we ran out of timber at least six years ago. What then is that stuff which American lumbermen have been sawing by the millions of feet for airplanes, barracks, 'ship decking, truck bodies, pontoon bridges, and the boxes and crates in which are shipped the vast quantities of equipment and supplies required by our fighting men in all parts of the world?

R. T. Titus

Many of those who are not informed, and some who should know better, are presently expressing fears that there will be a shortage of well-manufactured lumber of good quality when peace comes. Knowing that the enormous war demands for lumber have been met almost entirely from the western hemisphere it is commonly thought that our timber supply has been severely depleted -that our forests have been overcut and that as a consequence we shall be starved for wood in the postwar years. The fact is that while the industry has produced all the lumber it could, in none of the war years have we cut as much timber as in any one of the normal peacetime construction years of the 1920's. There has actually been no lumber shortage. Rather lumber has been diverted from normal purposes to war uses. Civilian consumers have not had all the lumber they would like but military needs have been met.

Predictions that our timber supply is practically exhausted are not new. As early as 1832, J. D. Brown, writing in "Sylva Americano," asked "Where shall we procure supplies of timber 50 years hence for the continuance of our Navy?" Mr. Brown would be amazed to know that more than 100 years after the expression of his fears we produced three times as many wood ships as were turned out in the peak year of sailing-ship construction.

In 1875, Carl Schurz, Secretary of the fnterior, declared in his annual report that within twenty years the timber

Those familiar with the past should not be surprised nor unduly alarmed at predictions now of an impending shortage of wood in the near future. These claims in the past have proved ridiculous. They are equally unsound today. Scratch that ghost off the list.

What most of these discredited prophets overlooked is the simple fact that trees grow. Timber is the nation's greatest renewable resource, the extent of which is usually underestimated. According to the 193G1938 revised statistics of the U. S. Forest Service, there are presently in the United States 630 million acres of forest land nearly three-fourths of which is capable of producing timber for commercial use. The total stand of saw timber, excluding trees smaller than nine to fifteen inches in diameter,. depending on regional cutting practice, is more than 1700 billion board feet. The West Coast woods (Douglas fir, West Coast hemlock, Sitka spruce and Western red cedar) make up nearly fifty per cent of this total. It may come as a shock to those who forecast a shortage of postwar construction lumber to face the fact that west of the Cascade Mountains in Washington and Oregon alone there is sufficient standing timber today to rebuild, of wood, every home in the United States.

It is true that in recent years the rate oI drain has slightly exceeded the rate of growth, the ratio for saw timber and cordwood combined being estimated at 1.2. However, there are at work many factors which tend to bring a balance in the near future. There is little or dro net growth in virgin forests like those of the Douglas fir region. Some trees are growing but more are rotting and dying. Forestry here begins when old timber is cut. Actual growth increases as more old timber is harvested and more acres of young trees appear. Assuming that the rate

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