FOREST DEPLETION IN AMERICA.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXXVII, Issue 8417, 10 December 1920, Page 1 (Supplement)

FOREST DEPLETION IN AMERICA.

The forestry experts are getting very uneasy oyer the rapid depletion that is taking place in the forests of the United States. Of course, they recognise that the States are only suffering in the same manner as Canada, where the shortage is also having the serious attention of experts in arboriculture.

A movement is on foot throughout the States to perpetuate all existing forests, and in issuing an appeal for support of this most imperative project, the American Forestry Association says lumber is being procured, and that experts predict that saw log lumber will be gone in lifty years. The bulk of the original supplies of yellow pine in the south will be gone in ten years, and within seven years 3,000 manufacturing plants will be compelled to close. White pine in the lake States is nearing exhaustion, and these ’States are paying 6,000,000 dollars a year in freight bills to import timber. New England, self-supporting in lumber twenty years ago, now has to import one-third of the amount used. It has 300,000,000 dollars invested in wood and forest industries, employing over 90.000 workpeople. Ten years ago the United States porducec] its entire supply of pulpwood, but now two-thirds of 'it is imported. Indications are that, supplies of pulpwood timber in New England and New York will be exhausted in twenty years. In new York alone supplies will be gone in ten years. Half a score of years ago the United states produced its entire newsprint supply—now two-thirds of it is imported. Only one-third of the newspapers issued in 1919 were printed on the product of the American forests. In 1918 nearly 1,400,000 tons of pulpwood was imported from Canada.

The Forestry Association points out that within fifty years the present timber shortage will have become a blighting timber famine unless forest devastation is stopped, the lands now in forest kept continuously productive, and the forest lands now devasted by fire and lying idle put to work again.