Copyright 2006 Investor’s Business Daily, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
By ALAN ELLIOTT
Investor’s Business Daily
Gifford Pinchot was flummoxed.
The 26-year-old had been tasked by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead with restoring the vast forests of the George W. Vanderbilt estate in Asheville, N.C.
The new estate sprawled over 125,000 acres, much of which had been burned, overgrazed or shaved bare of timber.
The year was 1892, and the science of forestry remained largely a European discipline.
Pinchot (1865-1946) had preached the need for such a science in the U.S. since before graduating from Yale three years earlier. He had toured Europe, studying, talking with trained foresters and seeking forest management programs that might translate to the U.S. landscape and political system.
Now he faced his first chance to apply those lessons. Pinchot -- who would go on to become architect and first chief of the U.S. Forest Service and a two-term governor of Pennsylvania -- was overwhelmed.
“He made mistakes,” said Trinity University historian Char Miller, author of “Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism.” “Ultimately, I think he decided then and there that forestry as science was not his best field.”
Pinchot quickly faced up to his weaknesses. He hired a replacement, German forester Carl Schenck, to design and nurture a harvestable, profitable forest.
Pinchot then acted as a consultant, helping guide Schenck toward Olmstead’s vision of an aesthetically managed wilderness.
Vanderbilt’s forests eventually recovered and turned profitable. Pinchot’s stumble led him to his strengths.
Making Forestry Work
Over the next decade, he learned to balance the competing needs for exploitation, preservation and management of U.S. forests. Forestry as politics was his defining strength. He used that strength to create a national forest service, to fund and found the first U.S. forestry school at Yale University and launch forestry as a profession in the U.S.
Decades later, Pinchot would sketch the blueprint for President Franklin Roosevelt’s federal Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression.
In the early days, Pinchot’s views were tempered through a series of discussions and debates with naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir. Those contests placed Pinchot as conservationist and Muir as preservationist at the headwaters of the environmental movement.
They solidified Pinchot’s views of managing federal lands for immediate, eventual and aesthetic needs.
After stepping aside at the Vanderbilt estate, Pinchot threw himself into a campaign to frame himself as the nation’s top forestry advocate. He went straight to the court of public opinion: the press. Articles encouraged or written by the young forestry consultant during the period filled reams of scrapbooks. Those scrapbooks today consume 26 rolls of microfilm.
The campaign led to his appointment, in 1898, to chief of the Agriculture Department’s tiny Forestry Division.
Pinchot developed a passion for forestry as a child. The family of his father, James Pinchot, had amassed wealth by harvesting forests in and around its Milford, Pa., homestead.
His mother, Mary Pinchot, grew up in a family of New York City real estate developers and politicians. Pinchot traveled regularly to Milford, where the family timber business left a landscape barren almost to every horizon. Family journeys north from New York gave Pinchot a taste of the dark mountains and deep lakes of the Adirondacks.
While Pinchot lived in the city, he, like his eventual ally Theodore Roosevelt, loved the open countryside. Both were voracious hunters and fishermen. Both foresaw a time when the continent’s lands, wildlife habitat and watersheds would come under increasing pressure as the U.S. population grew and expanded to the West.
In a sense, Muir and Pinchot each held one of Roosevelt’s ears in the search for a way to protect those concerns. Muir’s preservationist philosophy was largely embodied in Roosevelt’s vast expansion of the National Park System.
Pinchot’s view of conservation provided the operating system for the National Forest Service, established in 1905. It also applied much more broadly. The U.S. government had its first framework to guide public land managers in weighing current and future needs of commercial timber, mining and agricultural interests on one hand, and local communities on the other.
“Among the many, many public officials who under my administration rendered literally invaluable service to the people of the United States,” Roosevelt wrote in his 1913 autobiography, “Gifford Pinchot on the whole stood first.”
Pinchot didn’t dream up the idea of a U.S. forestry movement. The idea of forest management had risen for decades, as timber firms and towns hungry for fuel and lumber ran through their available forests. Pinchot provided a structure to manage the growing problem.
He modeled his forest management programs on successful ones that he’d studied in Switzerland during his 1889-90 trip abroad. Unlike programs in England, Germany and France, the Swiss didn’t impose top-down management policy on local communities. They integrated broad policies with local needs.
The Forest Service nevertheless faced challenges, as businesses and local communities resisted the idea of taking forests out of local hands and restricting or altering their use.
“This was a period in which Roosevelt was creating national forests, it seemed, almost every day,” Miller said. “And the West was becoming more and more hostile to what it saw as executive privilege.”
So Pinchot created Forest Service ranger districts.
He knew that respect gets people further than force.
Pinchot stated facts honestly and sincerely; if someone disagreed with him, he listened carefully and tried to answer every argument calmly and respectfully.
Pinchot would apply the same approach during his terms as Pennsylvania’s governor, from 1923 to 1927 and from 1931 to 1935.
His first administration eliminated the state’s $23 million budget deficit. His second term faced a population devastated by the Great Depression. The best way to combat the problem? Pinchot bought thousands of acres of denuded forests and started creating jobs.
He established a statewide works program in which unemployed workers restored the forests and built 20,000 miles of roads to “get the farmers out of the mud.”
The program’s success quickly caught the eye of Franklin Roosevelt, then governor of neighboring New York. After being elected president in 1932, Roosevelt asked Pinchot to propose a similar national program.
Finding Pros
Pinchot wanted to make sure he got it right, so once again he enlisted professional help: Raphael Zon and Bob Marshall, trained foresters and wilderness advocates. They drew up a draft plan, and Pinchot polished the final version.
The president used it as a framework for his Civilian Conservation Corps.
Pinchot held tightly to his beliefs. By the early 1940 s, he’d stepped away from the Forest Service because he believed it had cast off its local roots.
A man who believed that careful management could protect U.S. resources and make money over the long term, he lost no opportunity to lambaste the forest industry’s adoption of forestry science to produce short-term profits.