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.