highest, 2,500 billion. The present annual consumption is approximately
100 billion feet, while the annual growth is but a third of the
consumption, or from 30 to 40 billion feet. If we accept the larger
estimate of the standing timber, 2,500 billion feet, and the larger
estimate of the annual growth, 40 billion feet, and apply the present
rate of consumption, the result shows a probable duration of our
supplies of timber of little more than a single generation.

Estimates of this kind are almost inevitably misleading. For example,
it is certain that the rate of consumption of timber will increase
enormously in the future, as it has in the past, so long as supplies
remain to draw upon. Exact knowledge of many other factors is needed
before closely accurate results can be obtained. The figures cited are,
however, sufficiently reliable to make it certain that the United States
has already crossed the verge of a timber famine so severe that its
blighting effects will be felt in every household in the land. The rise
in the price of lumber which marked the opening of the present century
is the beginning of a vastly greater and more rapid rise which is to
come. We must necessarily begin to suffer from the scarcity of timber
long before our supplies are completely exhausted.

It is well to remember that there is no foreign source from which we can
draw cheap and abundant supplies of timber to meet a demand per capita
so large as to be without parallel in the world, and that the suffering
which will result from the progressive failure of our timber has been
but faintly foreshadowed by temporary scarcities of coal.

What will happen when the forests fail? In the first place, the business
of lumbering will disappear. It is now the fourth greatest industry in
the United States. All forms of building industries will suffer with it,
and the occupants of houses, offices, and stores must pay the added
cost. Mining will become vastly more expensive; and with the rise in the
cost of mining there must follow a corresponding rise in the price of
coal, iron, and other minerals. The railways, which have as yet failed
entirely to develop a satisfactory substitute for the wooden tie (and
must, in the opinion of their best engineers, continue to fail), will be
profoundly affected, and the cost of transportation will suffer a
corresponding increase. Water power for lighting, manufacturing, and
transportation, and the movement of freight and p