important,
and hardly less direct, is the injury to agricultural and industrial
productiveness which depends upon a sustained supply of wood and
water.

DOES IT PAY?

Practically all this loss is unnecessary. Other countries have
stopped the forest fire evil. Other countries have found a way
to make forest land continue to grow forest. Consequently we can.
It is clearly only a question of whether it is worth while. Let us
consider this question, not only in its relation to posterity or
to the lumberman, but from the standpoint of the average citizen
of the West today.

CHAPTER I

FORESTRY AND THE PUBLIC

TIMBER MEANS PAY CHECKS

_Forest wealth is community wealth._ The public's interest in it
is affected very little by the passage of timber lands into private
ownership, for all the owner can get out of them is the stumpage
value. The people get everything else. Our forests earn nothing
except by being cut and shipped to the markets of the world. Of the
price received for them usually much less than a fifth is received
by the owner. Nearly all goes to pay for labor and supplies here
at home.

_Even now, when the western lumber industry is insignificant compared
to what it will be soon, it brings over $125,000,000 a year into
these five states._ This immense revenue flows through every artery
of labor, commerce and agriculture; in the open farming countries as
well as in the timbered districts. It is shared alike by laborer,
farmer, merchant, artisan and professional man. It is their greatest
source of income, for lumber is the chief product which, being
sold elsewhere, actually brings in outside money.

That it is essential to the prosperity of every citizen to have
this contribution to his livelihood continue requires no argument.
From the manufacturing point of view alone, our forest resources
are as important to everyone of us as to the lumberman, and in many
ways more so, for if they are exhausted he can move or change his
business; while the dependent industries cannot. But our welfare
is at stake in a dozen other ways also.

OUR INTEREST AS CONSUMERS

Every person who uses wood, whether to build, fence, burn, box
his goods, or timber his mine, is directly interested in a cheap
and plentiful supply of timber. _Every acre burned, every cut-over
acre lying idle, raises the price for him without furnishing any
revenue with which to help pay it. Every acre saved from fire,
every acre of young grow