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FOREST FIRES: THEIR COST, CAUSE AND 
PREVENTION: BY FORBES LINDSAY 
E ARE annually cutting more than a billion board-feet 
of timber out of our standing supply. We are consum- 
ing three times as much wood each year as our forests 
produce. In less than a quarter of a century, if the 
present conditions are maintained, this most valuable 
of our natural resources will be exhausted. These are 
striking facts, but add to them the astounding truth 
that we have lost by fire many times the amount of timber we have 
used, and we stand convicted of the grossest negligence and the most 
selfish disregard of the welfare of succeeding generations. 
No phase of the conservation question touches the people so 
widely and intimately as that under consideration. We are depend- 
ent for our prosperity, comfort and convenience upon wood more than 
upon any other material. Directly or indirectly, it enters into the 
manufacture of almost every article of daily use. The loss by the 
destruction of this material in its raw state falls upon every individual
of our population. It is already severely felt in the enhanced value 
Of lumber, in the increased price of wood-pulp and in numberless 
minor directions, and, failing the enforcement of immediate measures 
for the amelioration of this condition, wood and all its products will 
become so expensive within a comparatively few years as to entail 
actual hardship upon the people. 
We cannot look for any diminution in the consumption of wood 
in our industries; for, while substitutes for it are constantly being 
devised, increasing demands for established purposes and new re- 
quirements keep the aggregate of its use fully up to former figures. 
We must depend for the conservation of our forest resource upon 
more economical methods of lumbering and manufacturing, upon 
reforestation and the prevention of fires. The loss from this last 
agency is very much greater than is generally supposed, and by far 
the larger proportion of it is easily avoidable. We have gone on year 
by year suffering millions of dollars' worth of property to be destroyed
without regard to the ultimate consequences, until they have been 
brought home to us in such a manner as to demand immediate atten- 
tion and remedy. 
Within the past thirty years some two thousand persons have 
perished as a result of forest fires, and these figures do not include 
the hundreds of lives lost during the recent months of drought. 
The census of eighteen hundred and eighty gives the area burned 
over per year as two million acres, and the value of the timber con- 
sumed as from twenty-five millions to fifty millions. In the past 
twenty years the administration of the Forest Service has resulted