LABOR LOOKS AT TREES AND CONSERVATION

PHILIP MURRAY.

Never before has labor been more acutely aware than it is today of how its welfare is tied to the Nation's resources of trees and forests.

Millions of worker families find that lumber for the houses they want to buy or build costs three times what it did before the Second World War and about six times what it cost before the First World War. The pinch of wood scarcity is felt, too, by many labor unions when they shop for newsprint on which to publish union papers.

No matter where a worker is employed, moreover, he sees parts of trees put to many vital uses. All too frequently in recent years, shortage of one kind or another of tree products has been a bottleneck or stumbling block to production and to employment.

Industrially, tree products are used and needed everywhere. Wood is basic, like steel.

As a result of their heightened awareness that something must be wrong with the Nation's tree and forest resources, numerous groups within organized labor have been studying the economics of basic wood and of forestry more intensively than ever before. Those studies are making labor conscious of certain key facts about trees and forests facts that demand action.

Labor sees that the basic wood and forest resource is renewable or exhaustible, depending wholly on how that resource is managed. It is renewable if the forests are protected from fire; if logging is done conservatively in accordance with sound forestry principles; if the wood is utilized efficiently; and if depleted and devastated areas are promptly reforested.

But the wood resource is exhaustible if forest fires are not controlled; if logging is heedless of future tree crops; if utilization is recklessly wasteful; and if depleted and devastated areas are left as idle stump and brush lands or as eroded deserts. Labor has found that the latter conditions have prevailed and still prevail on far too much of the Nation's forest land.

Today, moreover, as peacetime employment stands at the highest and fullest of any time in our history, labor is coming. to see another resource fact more clearly than ever before. This grows out of the wartime experience which proved that our Nation's factories can produce more than most people thought was possible. It grows also out of our postwar experience which has proved that an America fully employed with anything near a decent wage has a capacity to consume the products of farm and of factory at a rate much greater than most people ever believed. For even with excessive price inflation, cruelly cutting the value of the workers' pay check and restricting to bare essentials the purchases of millions of families, we are consuming vastly more consumer goods than many people thought we could.

These experiences point sharply to the fact that natural resources raw materials are the number-one long-range limiting factor in the ability of America to raise the standard of living of all its people to a decent and continually rising level. Our factory technology and the skill of our labor can boost production almost unbelievably, provided we can get enough raw material to work with. But shortages of raw materials can tragically defeat this high American purpose.

As the definitely exhaustible resources, such as metals and petroleum, become scarcer, industry obviously must turn more and more to renewable resources such as trees for its raw materials. The broadening frontiers of forest-products research are disclosing more and more how that can be done.

Thus the forest is crucially important to labor, and to the American interest as a whole. It is so important that America can afford no longer to temporize with the excessive forest-fire losses, the destructive logging, the wasteful wood utilization, and the extremely laggard reforestation of fire-and-ax-idled forest acres.

The groups in labor who have been studying this problem are aware that its solution is not a simple one. And they want the solution to be in the progressive American way, rather than totalitarian methods. They believe that a large part of a typically American solution to the problem lies in providing technical and economic aids to the millions of farmers and other owners and operators of small forest tracts, who control a huge proportion of the Nation's forests, and account for the bulk of its production of sawlogs, veneer logs, pulpwood, chemical wood, railway ties, mine props, poles, piling, posts, fuel wood, rough lumber, and other forest products.

Practical, effective ways of providing such assistance have been developed and proved through many years of fruitful and richly rewarding experience with the Nation's comprehensive farm program. There has been far too much delay already in putting that experience to work in the forests.

Labor is interested, too, in the multiple-use principle of forest management, whereby forests are developed and managed for all the many benefits which well-managed forests can yield : Wildlife, recreation, watershed protection, livestock grazing, and minor forest products as well as wood production. For that is the way to make forests contribute in fullest measure to the abundant and secure life which is labor's goal. The multiple-use principle has been splendidly demonstrated and applied on Government forests. It is time to develop ways and means of applying the same principle to private forest lands.

Labor, especially the workers in communities which depend directly on wood industries for jobs and income, is vitally interested in sustained-yield forest management for community stability and lasting prosperity. All of us, however, have a stake in that to keep woodworking communities self-supporting instead of letting them become impoverished by cut-out-and-get-out logging, and then requiring heavy expenditures for relief and rehabilitation. This is one of the many reasons why labor has called for national regulation of cutting practices on private land, for the extension of the national forest system, and for the more intensive management of public forests.

A vast majority of workers who have expressed themselves on sustained-yield forestry insist, however, that it be sought by means other than those which strengthen and spread the grip of monopoly, whether it be national monopoly or local monopolization by a few over the resources on which a community depends for jobs, income, and opportunity for its citizens. Therefore, we are opposed to sustained-yield plans that entail monopolistic control over local forest resources.

Labor is also interested in safety in the wood industry, and deplores the fact that sawmilling and logging have by far the worst accident record of any industry. Conservation of logging and lumber workers calls for action just as much as does conservation of forests.

Wilderness preservation is also desired by many people in labor, so that there may always be areas where one may find recreation and inspiration where nature is unspoiled and untouched by industrialization and commercialization. That problem calls for special attention to save remaining areas of our country that are suited and can be spared for such use and that need to be reserved in perpetuity and guarded against all encroachment.

Beyond trees and forestry as such, and overshadowing even that great movement, labor and all people of good will are deeply indebted to the men who pioneered in the practical application of forestry science in America's timberlands. It was their devotion to the public interest and their practical vision of the outdoors as a whole that gave America the conservation policy.

Under the broad conservation policy that was given to America by its pioneer foresters, the farmer's fight for security and well-being on the land, the drives for social security and liberties, the great works of conservation and development of rivers and land, and, of course, the labor movement itself, all come together as parts of one vast, inspiring panorama. It has given men a new vision of their relations with the earth, and of how science and democracy working together can and must develop fruitful harmonious relations of people with the earth and with each other. Neither can be achieved without the other.

PHILIP MURRAY is president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.