Book notices

The Outlook for the Canadian Forest Industries. The Forestry Study Group, Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects. 261 pp. 1867.

The Outlook for the Canadian Forest Industries reports the analyses and findings of a Forestry Study Group specially appointed by the Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects. It estimates that the overall consumption of timber in Canada by 1980 will have increased by 57 percent over 1954.

Canada's vast forest area of 1.5 million square miles (3.9 million square kilometers), extending westward and northwestward from Newfoundland on the Atlantic coast to British Columbia and the Yukon Territory on the Pacific, covers more than two fifths of the total land area of the country. Of the commercially productive forest area, which alone makes up almost one quarter of the total, softwood species comprise about four fifths.

Estimates of "allowable cut" in the various forest areas, provided to the Commission from government sources, indicated a potential available supply in 1980 of 9.5 thousand million cubic feet (270 million cubic meters) 7.3 thousand million cubic feet (210 million cubic meters) from accessible forest lands, with another 2.2 thousand million cubic feet (60 million cubic meters) from potentially accessible areas.

The Table below shows estimated demands of Canada's wood-using industries in 1980 compared with actual utilization in 1954.

Pulp and paper production, the study group believes, may more than double over the next quarter century. Increased wood requirements of Canadian mills are likely to result in a leveling off or even a decline in pulpwood exports. The products structure of the industry, however, is expected to change little: newsprint and market woodpulp, which together accounted for some 83 percent of the 1964 industry output, are expected by 1980 to make up 81 percent of output. Dealing with newsprint, the report estimates that world newsprint requirements, 13 million tons in 1955, will double to 26 million tons by 1980. Canada, which supplied 59 percent of world requirements in 1960 and 47 percent in 1955, is expected to contribute about 44 percent of total newsprint needs in 1980.

ESTIMATED DEMAND, 1980 Versus UTILIZATION, 1954 (in millions of cubic feet)

Type of demand	1954	1980	Percentage change
Wood for domestic pulp and paper industry	1 100	120	+93
Logs for lumber and other sawn products	400	2 220	+59
Logs for softwood plywood and veneer	40	130	+225
Logs for hardwood plywood and veneer	20	90	+50
Pulpwood exports	160	150	-6
Fuelwood	310	160	-48
Miscellaneous roundwood
Domestic	50	55	+10
Export	25	25	Nil
TOTAL	3 105	4 890	+57

If the forecasts put forward in the report are realized, the Canadian forest industries, as a group, will more than double in size over the next 25 years. An average annual outlay of from $300 million to $400 million will have to be maintained, compared with an average of $165 million invested by all of the forest industries there in regent years. By 1980, exports of forest products, the report expects, will approximately have doubled to reach a value of perhaps $2.9 thousand million while output, also measured in constant dollar terms, may reach $4 thousand million approximately 120 percent above 1866 levels. This, however, is a lesser rate than that envisaged (in the Commission's other staff studies) for the Canadian economy as a whole. As the latter may rise by approximately 200 percent, the forest industries contribution (as measured in terms of gross domestic product) may fall from around 6.6 percent to approximately 4 percent between now and 1980.

For more than a century Canada's forest industries have constituted a major sector of the national economy. That they will continue to play a leading role over the next twenty to thirty years there can be no doubt. Canada is in a favored position for industrial wood production because of its predominantly coniferous forests, its proximity to densely populated and prosperous industrial and agricultural areas to the south, and its supply of clear water and water power.

Forest Terminology. The Society of American Foresters. 3rd Edition, 97 pp., Washington 1958.

Earlier editions being exhausted, the Society of American Foresters has just published a third and further revised edition of Forest Terminology.

The United States Department of Agriculture issued its first publications on forest terminology in 1905 under the title Terms used in Forestry and Logging. The first edition of Forest Terminology dates only from 1944. It was compiled by 10 subcommittees, reporting to a general collating committee which made final decisions. A revised edition, containing more terms and improved definitions, was published in 1950.

The present edition has been felt necessary "to keep pace with new terms added to the professional literature by continuing expansion and intensification in forestry." It has been compiled by the editorial staff of the Society, aided by special subject-matter consultants and a great number of voluntary helpers.

For certain terms the new terminology gives the different regions of the United States where they are used. A term which has a particular usage for instance in the United Kingdom is indicated by the abbreviation "U.K. "

Thanks to the co-operation of the Commonwealth Forestry Bureau, progress has been made in bringing into line American and British Commonwealth definitions. This is an important step towards establishing the Multilingual Forest Terminology on which the Joint FAO/IUFRO Committee on Terminology has been working for some years, and which will be a long and exacting task.

Feast and Famine. Lord Boyd Orr. 69 pp., illustrated. Rathbone Books. London 1957. 17s 6d.

The problem of getting food has changed and directed the whole history of peoples. For the earliest men, finding just enough food to keep alive was a full-time job. They followed the moving herds which themselves followed the moving seasons. When winter came in the north and the green stuff of life disappeared, quarry and hunter together moved south where plants still grew. Only when man learned how to sow and reap and so produce more than enough for his own needs did civilization become possible. Only then could he pay another man, with food, to devote time and energy to devising better tools. With better tools, the land was made more productive; more people were released from farming and could turn their minds to building houses, designing boats, making laws, learning to write, understanding the world they lived in.

In Feast and Famine, Lord Boyd Orr, first Director-General of FAO and Nobel Peace Prize winner, traces the development of man from early Neolithic times to the twentieth century, wholly in terms of his quest for food. He shows how the discovery of the New World was a by-product of the search for a shorter route to the Eastern spices, needed to disguise the taste of bad meat. He shows how in the last century a stimulating redistribution of the earth's population was brought about when famine in Europe drove millions to America, Australia, and Africa.

The author is also concerned with food itself: how plants make food and how man's body uses it; how science has improved the quality and quantity of food: with pests and irrigation, storage and distribution: with the problem of feeding the earth's rapidly growing population. Over 200 colorful illustrations document this chronicle of man's concern with the basic fact of all life - food.

Guide to the we of Forestry Abstracts. Revised and enlarged edition in English, French, German, Spanish. 78 pp. The Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, Farnham Royal, Bucks. 1958. 10s.

The main function of the Commonwealth Forestry Bureau at Oxford, one of the three international forestry bibliography centers of the world, is to act as an effective clearinghouse of information for scientists and research workers in forestry throughout the Commonwealth and, increasingly, throughout the world. To this end the Bureau is organized to scrutinize and abstract from all literature, in whatsoever language it may be published, that carries material of interest to forestry. The information is distributed in two ways, one of which is through its quarterly journal, Forestry Abstracts, which presents the essence of current world literature extracted from over 650 periodicals, 700 serials and innumerable miscellaneous papers; books, etc., and now (in its 19th volume) totals some 4,500 abstracts each year.

Abstracting journals, so essential in enabling those interested in the widening field of forestry to keep abreast of the rapidly increasing volume of literature on the subject cover a specialized field in which the need for compression develops a high degree of abbreviations and conventions, notably in the details of documentation. As stated in the introduction to the first edition of the guide, which appeared in 1950, "they are high-precision tools and those who handle them need some instruction before they can use them to full advantage".

The revised and enlarged edition prepared by the Commonwealth Forestry Bureau has, as the title indicates and in line with the policy adopted in translation of the Oxford System of Decimal Classification for Forestry, added a German text to its contents. Its various sections have been considerably enlarged, notably that on the key to titles of publications noticed, on abbreviations indicating the library source, and especially on transliteration, which has been expanded from Russian and Bulgarian to include notes on Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Persian and Urdu. Finally, a section has been added listing some useful equivalents and local measures.