Why National Forest Products Week Exists — and Why the Reason Still Matters

In 1960, Congress — with overwhelming bipartisan support — passed Public Law 86-73 establishing National Forest Products Week, not as pageantry but as a public reminder that forests are productive, renewable, and essential to national welfare.

The law directed the President to re-center public attention each year on the contribution forests make to “the Nation’s economy and welfare.”

President Dwight Eisenhower’s proclamation that same year made the point plainly: the bounty of America’s forests is a “source of strength and pride,” and wood — supported by the science of modern forestry — is a major renewable resource when forests are actively managed.

National Forest Products Week was created for education, because a nation that forgets how forests work will eventually lose them.

At its core, Public Law 86-73 assumed something we no longer say out loud: markets, mills, and stewardship rise or fall together — and using wood and conserving forests are not opposing goals, but the same project.

More than 5,000 products come from wood fiber.
Some are visible — lumber, packaging, books, tissue, furniture, cross-laminated timber.

Many are invisible but indispensable:
• textiles — rayon, lyocell, acetate
• pharmaceutical & medical — dialysis filters, pill binders, wound dressings
• foods — vanilla extract, cellulose stabilizers
• cosmetics & personal care — nail polish, creams, toothpaste
• industrial & automotive — tire fillers, lubricants, filters, explosives
• energy & soil health — biochar, wood pellets, lignin-based fuels
• technology & advanced materials — cellulose films and composites in batteries, electronics, and insulation foams
• currency, instruments & archival goods — bank notes, violins, cellos, museum paper

Take wood products away and you do not just lose paper and lumber — you lose medical supplies, textiles, filters, insulation, soil amendments, engineered building materials, and the economic backbone that funds the care of the forest itself.

Pull wood out of the system and the change is not cosmetic — it is structural. We lose the materials that keep hospitals supplied, homes built, soils replenished, and land in trees instead of in asphalt.

The loss of wood products is not a "lifestyle inconvenience" — it is the dismantling of the very mechanism that keeps forests alive.

Using wood and conserving forests are not competing goals — they are the same practice.

Public Law 86-73 assumed what the public no longer holds in common: markets for wood fiber are what keep land in trees rather than in concrete — and what fund the thinning, planting, and regeneration work that prevent collapse.

Healthy forests are not accidental — they are stewarded.

They require:
• active reduction of excess fuel to curb disease, insect-kill, and the severity of fire before it starts
• regeneration and replanting to ensure continuity of forest cover and the ecological functions it carries — shade, water regulation, wildlife habitat, carbon storage
• mills and markets that keep land in working forests instead of being converted to pavement, subdivisions, or uses that erase entire ecosystems

When this chain breaks, we do not just lose trees — we lose whole systems: clean water, wildlife structure, soil stability, cultural uses, and the climatic buffering that living forests provide.

This was the intent in 1960: forests endure when they are used in ways that pay for their care — and they are lost when they are not.

The consequences are not theoretical.

Where markets vanish, fuels and stressors accumulate — and forests fail by disease, by insects, by conversion, or by megafire.

Catastrophic fire is not merely a climate story; it is also the predictable result of forests with no outlet for material removal and no economic engine to sustain stewardship.

Forest products are not the problem — they are one of the few mechanisms that make large-scale forest health possible.

The cost of forgetting this is visible in forests choked by fuel and disease, in insect-kill and overcrowding, in water-stressed stands and in the acres we now lose — not just to fire, but to failure.

That was the logic in 1960. It remains the logic now — and the stakes for forgetting it are higher.

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