FORESTRY

FORESTRY. Forestry is the scientific management of forests for the production of lumber and other resources. Although concern about the depletion of forest resources dates back to the colonial period, it was not until the 1890s that forestry came into its own in the United States. The development of the science of silviculture (tree growing) in Europe, widespread fears of unsustainable cutting of forests, and the expansion of the powers of the federal government allowed for professional foresters to seek, and in some ways to gain, significant influence over the nation's woodlands.

Gifford Pinchot exercised enormous influence over the early development of American forestry. Born into a prosperous Connecticut family and educated at Yale, Pinchot attended forestry school in Nancy, France, because there were no such institutions in the United States. He had difficulty securing employment as a professional forester upon his return in the 1890s, and took a job managing the forests of Biltmore, the Vanderbilt family's large estate in North Carolina. Soon enough, however, the federal government had need of Pinchot's expertise. In the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, Congress authorized presidents to set aside forested lands for protection from over-grazing and logging. In 1891–1892, President Benjamin Harrison set aside 16 million acres, and President Grover Cleveland added 21 million acres to the reserves. The National Forest Management Act of 1897 charged the government to "protect and preserve" forests to ensure predictable supplies of timber and water. A year later the Cornell and Biltmore forestry schools were established, and Pinchot became head of the Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture. His influence only grew during the presidency of his friend Theodore Roosevelt. In 1905, Roosevelt replaced the Division of Forestry with the United States Forest Service, also located in the Agriculture Department. Pinchot served as its head until 1910, overseeing its dramatic expansion to some 175 million acres from only 51 million at the opening of the decade.

For Pinchot and his fellow conservationists, forestry was the centerpiece of conservation, the development of natural resources to bring, as Pinchot famously put it, "greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time." Professionally trained foresters, backed by the power of the federal government, would ensure that the nation's timber and watersheds were protected from rapacious, wasteful, and monopolistic private industry as well as from corrupt political interests. Nationalism suffused this marriage of scientific expertise and federal power. As Pinchot wrote in 1900 when he persuaded his family to found the Yale School of Forestry, "What we wanted was American foresters trained by Americans in American ways for the work ahead in American forests." Forestry was as much a crusade as a scientific discipline.

Early Conservationists

If the establishment of forestry schools and the federal public lands bureaucracies signaled that forestry had come into its own, then at the same time Progressives such as Pinchot built on an older legacy of concern with forested lands. As the rapid cutting of eastern forests that began in the colonial period continued in the early Republic,

some began to forecast a national timber shortage. In James Fenimore Cooper's 1823 novel, The Pioneers, for example, one character warns of "felling the forests as if no end could be found to their treasures, nor any limits to their extent. If we go on this way, twenty years hence we shall want fuel." Foreign travelers and some domestic journalists reported exceptionally high firewood prices and the difficulty of locating timber for building construction in the urbanized Northeast. Such warnings began to influence policymakers. The 1865 annual report of the federal agriculture commissioner cast deforestation as "an impending national danger, beyond the power of figures to estimate, and beyond the province of words to express." In 1877 the secretary of the interior Carl Schurz presaged later conservation measures by calling for the establishment of federally owned forests to relieve what he thought was an impending wood shortage. Three years later, the census surveyed national forest resources for the first time.

George Perkins Marsh catalyzed this growing concern, helping to pave the way for the subsequent rise of a conservation movement. A peripatetic schoolteacher, newspaperman, and lawyer early in life, Marsh served as a Whig U.S. representative from Vermont. In 1849, President Zachary Taylor appointed him minister to Turkey and twelve years later President Abraham Lincoln chose him as minister to Italy. Struck by the contrast between classical accounts of a heavily wooded and very fertile Mediterranean and the unproductive and scrubby grasslands that he encountered, Marsh became convinced that the region was heir to an environmental catastrophe. In 1864 he published Man and Nature, where he used the story of Mediterranean deforestation to warn that what happened in Europe could happen in the United States as well.

Marsh deeply shaped the creation of American forestry not only because he made already familiar predictions of timber shortage, but also because he gave them an apocalyptic cast and offered a well-articulated solution. Deforestation, he warned, was not a simple matter of resource scarcity, but risked causing the collapse and disappearance of entire civilizations, as had happened with classical Greece and Rome. "The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant," he wrote, and "another era of equal human improvidence would reduce it to such a condition of shattered surface as to threaten barbarism and perhaps even the extinction of the species." Man and Nature presented the state control of forests as a solution to this prospective disaster. While individual owners were motivated by short-term gain, as Marsh insisted in long passages detailing the "improvident habits of the backwoodsman," the government could deploy scientific knowledge in the best long-term interests of the nation. Although the existence of large tracts of federal

and state-owned lands came to seem commonplace in the twentieth century, at the time Marsh's proposal was truly radical. American land policy, epitomized in the Homestead Act of 1862, was still designed to convert all of the public domain into private property holdings for the burgeoning nation and its land-hungry farmers.

Early Twentieth-Century Foresters

The first generation of American foresters responded to these early nineteenth-century warnings and embodied Marsh's call for the deployment of scientific expertise to regulate the chaos of the private sector. Progressive Era foresters, however, operated with much greater confidence and ambition than did their predecessors. Where Marsh warned, for example, that "Man is everywhere a disturbing agent… wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords," Pinchot breezily asserted that "the first duty of the human race …is to control the use of the earth and all that therein is." Where the earlier writers had hoped to avoid crippling timber shortages and the catastrophe of mass deforestation, early twentieth-century foresters saw themselves as contributing to the United States's position as an industrial power of global proportions.

The outlook of Pinchot and his peers had important and lasting practical implications for subsequent forestry and federal lands management. Above all, they insisted that economic productivity was the leading purpose of foresters and the national forests. The forests were an essential part of a modern economy in which each segment of society performed a specialized role. As one typical forest administrator stated in 1911:

The radiating influence of the standing forests is repeated when they are cut and utilized. The producers of the raw materials which supply the factories, which sell to the wholesalers, distributing to the retailers, who sell their wares to the wage-earners in forest and mill—are, with their employees, and the lumber companies and their employees, all more or less dependent upon the forests.

Accordingly, although more romantic thinkers such as the naturalist and author John Muir hoped that the expanding federal land system would protect distinctive landscapes as scenic refuges from an increasingly artificial urban life, Pinchot and his peers subordinated such goals to the provision of timber and reliable water supplies. Thus, in the early 1900s, Pinchot sided with the city of San Francisco in its fight to make a reservoir of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, previously part of YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK. Early forest managers also sought to curtail the extensive subsistence practices of those who lived near federal lands, devoting significant resources to ending illegal hunting and "timber poaching" for fear that they interfered with their mission to make the forests pay.

The foresters' belief in state-led economic modernization led them to practice a highly interventionist form of land management. They sought to increase dramatically the rate of timber harvest, not only because the nation needed more wood products, but also because scientific forestry seemed to demand younger forests. Older forests, which dominated the heavily timbered West, lost more wood to tree death, insect infestation, and fires than they gained from new growth. Extensive cutting of old growth would thus replace "decadent" or "overmature" forests with younger woods, ensuring that they created more new annual growth than they lost. The net growth could be harvested each year without diminishing the total amount of forest resources. If done properly, heavy cutting could thus best serve Pinchot's dictum that natural resources must produce "the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time."

Fighting fire was another important part of securing maximum forest productivity. Just as the federal government gave professional foresters substantial control over the nation's forested lands for the first time, a series of tremendous fires swept through them. Increased Euro-American settlement of the heavily forested portions of the West and Midwest and extensive logging, which left behind large amounts of extremely flammable downed trees, caused a rapid increase in forest fires in the early twentieth century. In 1910, the worse year, fire consumed more than five million acres of national forest, killing seventy-eight firefighters in the process. These fires not only took lives, destroyed entire towns, and reduced millions of potentially valuable trees, but they also seemed to threaten the Forest Service itself. What good did it do to turn over the nation's woods to professional foresters if they were just going to go up in smoke? Suppressing fires thus became one of the Forest Service's primary goals, and indeed many of the early reports of national forest supervisors were devoted almost entirely to fire control. Foresters' insistence that fires were unnatural events caused by human carelessness seemed to be borne out by their remarkable achievements in reducing the instance of forest fires. By 1935 fewer than 300,000 acres burned annually, and by 1980 the territory that regularly burned had been reduced by 95 percent. The Forest Service extended its fire fighting to most of the nation's private lands as well, beginning with a 1927 decision to withhold funds from states that failed to cooperate with the service's measures.

The Depression, World War II, and the Postwar Era

Just as the Progressive Era provided the opportunity for the creation of professional forestry, the New Deal created public works programs that expanded the reach of forestry. Nearly half of those employed by the CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS, created in 1933 to provide jobs in conservation projects, worked in reforestation and forest protection projects. Some programs of other New Deal agencies, such as the Soil Conservation Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the National Recovery Administration, also stressed reforestation as part of the nation's recovery effort. In response to the DUST BOWL, nearly 217 million trees were planted under the auspices of the Prairie States Forestry Project. Foresters also intensified their fire fighting program and enjoyed greater success in extending it to lands not encompassed by the national forests. In 1935 the head of the Forest Service felt confident enough to promulgate the "10 A.M. Policy," which declared that all fires should be brought under control by ten in the morning of the day following their initial discovery. Smokey Bear, the government's ubiquitous antifire mascot, was introduced to the public in 1945.

The production demands of World War II and the postwar economic boom led to a much more vigorous implementation of foresters' long-standing management goals. Declining timber yields from private forest lands in the face of the nation's incredible economic growth prompted the Forest Service to increase massively its cutting levels. In 1944 the service contracted for 3.3 billion board feet (the standard measure of timber harvest, one square foot of wood an inch thick) to be cut from its lands, a more than threefold increase over traditional levels. By 1966 the annual cut had reached 12.1 billion board feet. From 1950 to 1966 twice as much timber was cut from national forests as had been from 1905 to 1949. Clear-cutting, the cutting of all trees in a given area, replaced more selective harvesting techniques, despite the Forest Service's previous vehement criticism of the practice. The roads built to enable high harvest levels—some 310,000 miles of actively maintained roadways by the end of the twentieth century—made the United States Forest Service the owner and manager of the largest road system in the world.

At the same time, however, important changes in postwar America created deep conflicts over the meaning and purposes of forestry. The construction of the inter-state highway system and economic prosperity allowed for the development of a truly mass outdoor tourism. Drawn by lures as diverse as skiing, car camping, wilderness backpacking, hunting, and fishing, millions of tourists flocked to the national forests. By 1976, recreational visits to the forests had increased nearly twentyfold from prewar levels. For the first time, millions of ordinary Americans had direct experiences with the nation's forests and felt that they had a personal stake in their future management. Many of these tourists were displeased by what they considered unsightly roads and clear-cuts. The Forest Service acknowledged these changes and cooperated in the passage of the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960, which gave official sanction to outdoor recreation as a management goal for the first time. But growing public environmental sentiment still conflicted with intensive timber harvesting.

The Late Twentieth Century: Ecological Forestry

Other problems challenged the traditional emphasis of foresters on intensive management. In some forests, fire suppression and extensive harvesting led to dramatic shifts in the relative abundance of tree species. Often the large expanses of even-aged trees produced by clear-cutting were more vulnerable to disease and insect infestation than were the previous multi-aged stands. After decades of relative success, fire suppression struck its critics as not only ecologically suspect but also as ineffective in preventing fires. Before the full implementation of fire suppression, wildfires were frequent but generally smaller affairs that left many of the older trees alive. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, the heavy accumulations of highly flammable dead and down woods helped to create massive conflagrations that killed almost all plants in their paths. Even enormous efforts to stop and put out fires, as in a large 1988 blaze in Yellowstone National Park, could fail. In 1992 the federal government spent nearly $11 billion to suppress forest fires across the country, losing thirty-two firefighters in the process. Gifford Pinchot's confidence that "forest fires are wholly within the control of men" was in shambles.

By the 1980s, some foresters responded to these developments by articulating a different vision of the purposes

and techniques of their discipline. As articulated by the ecologist Jerry F. Franklin, the New Forestry asserted the need to manage land to preserve biodiversity and complex ecosystems rather than to maximize timber production. From this perspective, forestry was more the respectful emulation of natural patterns than the application of scientific expertise to ensure economic efficiency. The training of foresters began to incorporate these new views. By the 1990s, the science of ecology had come to replace silviculture as the bedrock of the profession at many forestry schools. Within the Forest Service, advocates of this shift in management formed the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics in 1989. Although the organization remained a dissident group within the bureaucracy, the Forest Service as a whole responded to the ecological critique of traditional forestry, shifting some of its resources away from timber production and toward recreation and habitat protection. In 1995, in a clear reversal of the thrust of a century of policy, the Department of Agriculture and the Interior Department announced their intention to let more wild-fires burn and even actively to restore small-scale fires to some regions.

At the end of the twentieth century, the forests covered nearly one-third of the nation's land area. Dominant tree species varied significantly by region. Douglas fir dominated the western portions of Washington and Oregon, joined by redwoods and mixed coniferous forests in California. East of these coastal woods, ponderosa pine, white pine, larch, lodgepole pine, fir, and spruce were the most heavily represented species. Hardwoods and pine are the most common trees in the generally open Plains states. The pine-dominated South was separated from the maple, birch, and beech forests of the Northeast by a large belt of oak and hickory. Alaska contained huge expanses of birch and coniferous woods.

In the year 2000, the national forests comprised 191 million acres, about one-tenth of the nation's surface. These forests never produced more than one-fifth of the nation's timber production. Some 393 million acres of forests were owned by the private sector, fully 232 million of them in individual hands. Corporations owned just over 100 million acres of forests. Although professional forestry has been closely associated with the public lands systems, private forest lands may become the object of similar debates over the purposes and techniques of the discipline.

FORESTRY

Early Conservationists

Early Twentieth-Century Foresters

The Depression, World War II, and the Postwar Era

The Late Twentieth Century: Ecological Forestry

BIBLIOGRAPHY