factories are east of the Great Plains. Because of reckless waste in our manufacturing centers most of the saw timber now available stands on the Pacific coast. Although there are in the East great stretches of natural forest lands not suitable for agriculture, they are lying useless until our educated public opinion brings about a sane policy of

DISTRIBUTION OF COAL AND PETROLEUM IN THE U. S.
Notice how many states have neither coal nor oil.

restoration. Right now we are using up our timber six times as fast as the timber is growing.

As the timber supply lessens and the need grows, lumber prices go up. The same quality of white pine lumber that cost fifty dollars a thousand board feet but thirty years ago now costs two hundred and fifty dollars. We are now paying in freight alone as much as the lumber cost thirty years ago. This increased cost gets into the cost of every

human need.

Gifford Pinchot, the great forester who has given the best of his life for conservation, has stated the relation between the forests and everyday things as follows:

Gifford Pinchot Tells of the Services of the Forests. "Few people realize just how intimately the products of the forest enter into their everyday lives. When they do realize this their personal interest in protecting the forest will surely increase and they will insist on maintaining a

A fine stand of yellow pine-note that the underbrush has been cleared away and the trees thinned to give them a chance to grow.

timber level high enough to keep forest products within reach of the public at reasonable prices.

"The clothes we wear, the things we eat, the houses in which we live, the materials we use in our work, whatever it may be, are dependent to a greater or less degree upon the forest. With prices of forest products high, the reflection

is felt in increased prices of everything necessary to your daily life and mine.

"Consider your shoes. They could not be made without the forest. Before you can buy them a calf must be born in a wooden barn; pastured in a field surrounded by a wooden fence; sold to a butcher and driven to slaughter in a wooden wagon, and the hide removed on a wooden slab. Then the hide must be shipped to the tannery in a wooden freight car; treated in a wooden vat with acids secured from wood and with bark from a tree. The leather must be cured on a wooden board; cut on a wooden board; and shaped over a wooden last. When the shoes are finished they must be packed in a pasteboard box which is made from woodpulp, shipped in a wooden packing case; and placed on a wooden shelf. Finally the shoes are sold over a wooden counter, and in your service spend most of the remainder of their days on floors made of wood.

"But you say, 'We don't eat wood.' True enough, but the ground that grew your bread was prepared by a plough with wooden handles, and a point of steel in the making of which charcoal was used; the grain was cut with some instrument, be it cradle or binder, partly made of wood; it was hauled to the barn in a wooden wagon; stored in a wooden mow; threshed in a wooden separator; hauled to the mill in a wooden wagon, or in a freight car with wheels made of woodpulp; and stored in a wooden bin. When it became flour it was mixed in a wooden tray, rolled on a wooden board, sold over a wooden counter, and eaten off a wooden table.

"Wood helps the housewife to do her shopping. If it is by telephone her message is carried over wires stretched on wooden poles, or encased in a wooden conduit. If she walks it is in shoes tanned with the bark of a tree and largely on wooden floors. If she rides she cannot escape the use of wood. If she carries a basket, this too, is a product of the forest.

"In the office, a man works on a wooden desk, sits in a wooden chair, uses wooden pencils and paper made from wood. Our pictures are framed in wood, our windows are cased in wood.

"When the doctor comes his prescriptions are written on paper that comes from wood, and his medicines are in a large measure derived from the forest.

"Look where we will in our everyday lives we cannot escape the importance of wood in everything around us. When the forests are despoiled, everything that is demanded by modern civilization is injured, and we who consume must pay.

"Next to a prosperous agriculture nothing is of greater importance to the public than a constant and dependable timber supply. Therefore every citizen is interested in the forests, whether he will or no. From the cradle to the grave he never lives a moment, never draws a breath, without owing his comfort, safety, and welfare to the things the forest gives him or which it helps to provide. From birth to death we live with the help of the forest."

Other Services of the Forests. If the wood we consume each year in this country were put into inch boards and placed end to end they would make a wooden belt around Mother Earth four hundred feet wide, over seas as well as over land. And yet the forests work for human beings in still other ways than those so aptly portrayed above by Governor Pinchot. When the timber is ruthlessly cut from a hillside, the soil and humus that it took the forest centuries to make goes down the streams to the sea. With the rich earth gone, it takes much longer to grow trees on that hillside again. Destructive lumbering has left in its wake enormous areas of idle land, useless for any other purpose. Whole communities have been wiped out as the forests on which they depended for their industries were so needlessly destroyed.

The forests conserve the rainfall, and distribute it as

needed throughout the year.

With such conservation, the

water supplies for our cities would be more constant.

Our

flood problems would be less if our timber lands were kept at work growing forests. We conquer the floods by saving

EFFECT OF DESTRUCTIVE LUMBERING
This once fine forest is completely ruined.

the forests. Forest conservation is of vital importance to every one of us.

What Conservation Means. Conservation does not mean the holding back of production. It does not mean hoarding. It means the wise use of resources in a way that will benefit the greatest number of people for the longest possible time. We are prosperous now. It is just as important that our descendants be prosperous in their time. By conservation