Proclamation 4252—National Forest Products Week, 1973

As a Nation, we have grown increasingly dependent upon the resources of our forest lands, especially wood and wood products. As the 1970's have brought record worldwide demands for housing, pulp, paper, building materials, and furniture, Americans have become more keenly aware of the need for careful management and development of our timber resources so as to ensure a continuous supply of timber and other forest products. As Theodore Roosevelt put it many years ago, forest protection does not limit our resources but "on the contrary, gives the assurance of larger and more certain supplies."

We have also come to recognize the importance of the forest products industry to the vitality of the Nation's economy and the maintenance of our high standard of living. For example, the thousands of products that are manufactured from wood each year represent one-fifth of the industrial raw materials in the Nation. Forest products industries provide five percent of the Nation's employment, and five percent of our gross national product originates in timber based activities.

Projections for future demands of wood and wood products, both at home and abroad, indicate that consumers will want and need even more forest products in the 1980's and beyond. This means that we must give even greater attention to the protection and renewal of our forest resources. We must find better and more efficient ways to use our timber supply, ways which are consistent with our environmental values. And we must improve the technology for reclaiming and recycling forest products.

In order to give further recognition and emphasis to the importance of forest resources and forest products to the Nation, the Congress has by joint resolution of September 13, 1960 (74 Stat. 898) designated the seven-day period beginning on the third Sunday of October in each year as National Forest Products Week and has requested the President to issue an annual proclamation calling for the observance of that week.

Now, Therefore, I, Richard Nixon, President of the United States of America, do hereby call upon the people of the United States to observe the week beginning October 21, 1973, as National Forest Products Week. I ask that public attention be directed through appropriate activities and ceremonies to the importance of forest products in American life and to the responsibility we have for protecting and using them in the most intelligent manner possible.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this eighteenth day of October, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred seventy-three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred ninety-eighth.

RICHARD NIXON