. Bulletin (Pennsylvania Department of Forestry), no. 31-33. Forests and forestry. 12 Pennsylvania uses great quantities of wood each year. Expressed in simple terms the Commonwealth's annual consumption of wood amounts to the equivalent of about five billion board feet. So much lumber, stretched end to end would mak a wooden belt for Mother Earth, with plenty of room for buckling and overlapping, an inch thick and forty feet wide. Not all of this lumber is used in building operations and manufac- turing. It includes also railroad ties, fencing, mine timbers, pulp- wood, shingles, slack cooper
. Bulletin (Pennsylvania Department of Forestry), no. 31-33. Forests and forestry. 12 Pennsylvania uses great quantities of wood each year. Expressed in simple terms the Commonwealth's annual consumption of wood amounts to the equivalent of about five billion board feet. So much lumber, stretched end to end would mak a wooden belt for Mother Earth, with plenty of room for buckling and overlapping, an inch thick and forty feet wide. Not all of this lumber is used in building operations and manufac- turing. It includes also railroad ties, fencing, mine timbers, pulp- wood, shingles, slack cooperage, tight cooperage, wood for distilla- tion, veneer logs, telegraph poles, and firewood. Nearly the whole of it could and should be produced in Pennsyl- -vania, with a great deal left over for export as well. In 1890 Pennsylvania's lumber cut was in excess of the State's consumption. A few years later we started to import lumber. To- day our lumber users must go outside the State—and in most cases pay for freight hauls of thousands of miles—for more than half the lumber necessary in the industrial life of the Commonwealth. To maintain Pennsylvania's normal level of forest production, it is, however, necessary first to get back to it. Before all else, the reclamation of our forest lands is what we need. First, we must keep down the fires; second, we must put an end to forest devastation. In other words, we must see that young trees are permitted to grow where mature ones have been removed. The penalties the Commonwealth must pay for not maintaining its timber level make themselves felt in the loss to the consumers of wood in every form, in the high prices they must pay, including freight charges; with corresponding increase in the cost of living; in the loss caused by floods, the loss in soil values, the loss of wages, and many other losses acutely felt by all of the people. The mere statement of the fact that from a lumber-exporting State we have fallen to a lumber import
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