THE
VOL. LXXVII. No. 24 P.blisbed Every Satuday. Edward Lyman Bill, Inc., 383 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. Dec. IS, 1923
Slng~to~o~:: ~~~ento
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Doing Something About Our Wood Supply
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OR twenty yeai-s pUblic-spirited men have told the wood-using industries that the timber supply of the
nation is being used up with a rapidity that threatens its depletion at a date to be set with reasonable
.
accuracy not later than the mid<;lle of the present century.
For twenty years, for fiye years longer than has elapsed since President Roosevelt called his first
conference of Governors of the States to discuss the preservation of our natural resources, the coming exhaus
tion of the national lumber supplies has been talked about, argued about, made the subject of lectures to busi
ness men and of debates in the Congress-all without any very effective result. It has appeared to many men
that the nation will not wake up, and especially that the industries will remain asleep, until a situation, which
already to-day is in the highest degree grave and anxioiJs, has become positively intolerable, until the industries
of the land are threatened with disaster and the well-being of the people menaced so greatly as to provoke a
national uprising of sentiment and of action.
~ow, however, it begins to seem that something may occur somewhat sooner than this.
The last se~sion
of Congress saw legislation proposed which would probably have been enacted if it had not been for an unfor
tunate difference of opinion between the lumber men and the Government's foresters as to principles and methods.
This difference has in past years confused the mind of Congress to an extent sufficient to bar any effectual
legislative action . on a policy of reforestation of old and preservation of new timber lands. At last, however,
.
light is to be glimpsed at the end of the tunnel.
For many years the tremendously influential engineering societies of the country treated the wood-using
industries as outside their pale. To them wood-working was wood-working, and no more. They could not see
that wood-working is also engineering, in its own way, and that the piano industry for instance, most complex
and splendid of the wood-working industries, represents one of the most complex of engineering problems in its
construction and production work.
Three years ago the American Society of Mechanical Engineers saw the light, and organized a Forest
Products Division, to embrace the wood-using industries, including ours. A member of the staff of The
Review is a member of the Society attached to that Division. It is perhaps unfortunate that the piano in
dustry is otherwise unrepresented in the Society.
This Forest Products Division succeeded in passing resolutions at the annual meeting held last week in
New York pledging the influence and resources of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to the
furtherance of the grand project of restoring our natural resources in standing timber by a general policy of
reforestation, to be undertaken by the general Government, and of preventing the spread of the present con
ditions of the headwaters of our navigable streams, which have been denuded of their forest coverings and
which, in consequence, not only give rise to alternate disastrous floods and equally disastrous droughts in all parts
of the country every year, but interpose a bar to the further development of hydro-electric power, than which
nothing is more important for the future well-being of the nation.
Every piano manufacturer should rejoice to hear that a new era in the reforestation policy is about to
open. The wood-using industries have justly been in a state of alarm over the impending depletion of domestic
timber resources. What happily is now likely to happen will not of course restore at once what has been
wasted but it may prevent further waste, and begin at once to build up for the future. This is something
definite and tangible. The earnest support of the Music Industries Chamber of Commerce should be given to
the project when it appears before the Congress in the form of proposed legislation.
It is a matter of gratification to The Review that it has been able in some degree to contribute to the
successful placement of this vital policy before the vastly important and influential engineering profession. It
looks now as if something will move.
F