The purpose of the Forest Service is to secure the use of the forests “in such a way that they will yield all their resources to the fullest extent without exhausting them, for the benefit primarily of the home builder.  The controlling policy is serving the public while conserving the forests.” [Footnote:  “The Status of Forestry in the United States,” Forest Service Circular 167, 1909, p. 5.] Timber is cut and sold, but always with a view to developing future growth.  The forests are protected against fire.  Burned-over areas are reforested by planting.  Water power sites are protected.  The freest possible use of forest pasture land is permitted, but under such regulations as to prevent injury to the forests and the denudation of the land by overgrazing.  In 1915, nine million cattle, horses, sheep, and goats were pastured in the forests.  In 1916 it was said that “more than 20 million dollars will probably be spent in the next ten years in building good roads in the National Forests.” [Footnote 2:  “Opening up the National Forests by Road Building,” Year book of the Department of Agriculture, 1916.  Also reprinted in separate Leaflet No. 696.]

WASTE OF TIMBER RESOURCES

But our timber resources are not all in the National Forests, and the waste continues to an appalling extent.

With a total annual cut of 40,000,000,000 feet, board-measure, of merchantable lumber, another 70,000,000,000 feet are wasted in the field and at the mill.  In the yellow-pine belt the values in rosin, turpentine, ethyl alcohol, pine oil, tar, charcoal, and paper stock lost in the waste are three or four times the value of the lumber produced.  Enough yellow-pine pulp-wood is consumed in burners, or left to rot, to make double the total tonnage of paper produced in the United States.

But the wastes in lumbering, colossal though they are in absolute amount, are trivial compared to the losses which our estate has suffered, and still endures, from forest fires.  The French properly regard as a national calamity the destruction of perhaps a thousand square miles of their fine forests by German shells.  And yet the photographs that they show of this wreck and utter demolition may be reproduced indefinitely on 10,000,000 acres of our forest lands swept each year by equally devastating fire for which our own people are responsible.  You have doubtless already forgotten that forest fire which last autumn, in Minnesota, burned over an area half as large again as Massachusetts, destroying more than twenty-five towns, killing 400 people, and leaving 13,000 homeless. [Footnote:  “Developing the Estate,” Atlantic monthly, March, 1919, pp. 384-385.]

The nation has been defrauded of a great deal of wealth in timber by speculators who have taken advantage of the homestead laws.