The development of forestry as an independent discipline in the US is intertwined with the early years of the environmental conservation movement - and many, if not most, of its key figures are represented in the Collection.
In many ways, the progressive deforestation of the US drove the genesis of the EC movement, while the development of forestry management techniques and practices, and the philosophical and practical debates about how to implement them (or not), defined the movement during the last decades of the 19th century into the early 20th.
It makes sense that deforestation - and the concomitant impact on water sources - would be the first major human environmental impact to be generally recognized as an existential issue. Forests are, after all, big and visible. But also, the importance of trees and timber to the European resettlement of North America cannot be understated. Trees provided energy/fuel/heat, shelter, furniture, tools, ships, railroad ties, tannins for leather-making, berries for dying cloth, barrels and boxes, nuts, etc. Further, in much of the eastern US, forests had to be cleared for agriculture.
Relatedly, and as described elsewhere herein, a significant impetus for conservation measures was provided by sportsmen (and some women) dismayed over diminishing game stocks due to market hunting and, critically, habitat destructions. These concerns were shared by birdwatchers, a pursuit which became extraordinarily popular approaching the turn of the 20th century.
George Perkins Marsh first identified deforestation as a critical issue in Man and Nature (1864) - "the fountainhead of the environmental movement." Marsh had the benefit of living and traveling for many years in Italy and the Middle East and recognized the long-term impact deforestation had on those areas. George Emerson's Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts (1846) anticipates some of Marsh's thesis.
A brief, early chronology of Federal forestry initiatives:
1876 - Appropriation of $2,000 to hire federal forestry expert - Franklin Hough.
1877 - Hough through the USDA publishes his Report on Forestry (1878), a document so impressive that Congress ordered the printing of 25,000 copies.
1881 - A Forestry Division is temporarily established in the Agriculture Dept - Hough is named chief.
1886 - Bernhard Fernow becomes chief of the Forestry Division, which becomes a permanent division.
1891 - Passage of the Forest Reserve Act, permitting President to set aside forest reserves.
1892 - Frederick Law Olmsted, who had been hired to design the 125,000-acre grounds of the Biltmore estate, hires Gifford Pinchot to implement the first forestry management plan of its kind in America.
1896 - Funding of a National Forest Commission, chaired by Charles Sprague Sargent. William Brewer, Pinchot and Henry Graves, among others, serve on the commission. John Muir travels with it at various times and consults with it. The Commission concluded that forest reserves should be free from commercial activities, a conclusion with which Pinchot formally disagreed.
1897 - President Grover Cleveland proclaims 13 new reserves in the West - the "Washington's Birthday Reserves". The Organic Act provides structure for managing reserves - forest and watershed protection, and timber production. Gifford Pinchot is hired as forestry agent, perhaps the first employee of the Interior Department's General Land Office.
1898 - Fernow resigns as head of the Forestry Division to become director of Cornell's new forestry school. Pinchot takes over. At the time, the Division had 12 employees - seven years later it had over 700 employees.
1899 - First law providing for recreational use of the forest reserves.
1901 - Pinchot succeeds in having the Division of Forestry elevated to bureau status within the Dept of Agriculture.
1905 - All federal forest administration consolidated into the US Forest Service under Pinchot. Previously, administration was primarily handed by the GLO and USGS, both part of the Interior Department. At the time, there were 60 reserves totaling some 56 million acres.
1907 - President Theodore Roosevelt and Pinchot establish 17 new or combined reserves over 16 million acres in two days, ahead of pending legislation to limit presidential authority to establish reserves in six Western states - the "Midnight Reserves." In all, TR created 132 million net acres of new forest reserves over his two terms.
1910 - Henry S. Graves takes over as Forest Service head after Taft fires Pinchot. The Forest Products Laboratory is established - early employees include Eloise Gerry and Aldo Leopold.
1911 - The Weeks Act is passed, authorizing the federal government to purchase forest reserves, thus allowing creation of reserves east of the Mississippi River.
1916 - Creation of the National Park Service.
1919 - Forest Service hires Arthur Carhart as a "recreation engineer" - in part so the Service can compete with the new NPS in recreation.
1924 - Approval of Aldo Leopold's plan for the first Forest Service wilderness, in New Mexico's Gila National Forest - a concept to which Carhart made substantial contributions. Passage of Clarke-McNary Act substantially increased federal-state cooperation around forest management.
1927 - NPS establishes a forestry division. Interagency Forest Protection Board created, primarily to coordinate forest fire prevention and suppression.
1933 - Civilian Conservation Corps established by FDR. Over 3 million men worked for 6+ months each, most at National Forests or Parks, developing improvements such as trails.
1937 - Robert (Bob) Marshall becomes the Forest Services' Chief of the Division of Recreation and Lands. Recreation becomes a national administrative priority of the Forest Service. Marshall writes regs giving greater protection to primitive areas and wilderness.
Every single person named in the chronology (except Presidents Taft and FDR, and Congressman Weeks) is represented in the Collection as an author, except Eloise Gerry, who worked many years at the Forest Products Laboratory as its first female scientist, and owned one of the Pinchot books in the Collection, with a TLS from him to her.
Given the importance of forests and forestry during this period, most authors represented during the period had some connection or reference to forest conservation/resources. Others who directly addressed forestry and deforestation issues include Thoreau (1854), Susan Fenimore Cooper (1850), Flagg (1857), Olmstead (1865) and Gardner (1880), Powell (1875), Hayden (883), Steel (1890), Bruncken (1902), Mills (1905) and Price (1911), among others.
The following history of the US Forest Service, from which much of the preceding is drawn, is a nicely organized, informative and undemanding read: https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/2015/06/The_USDA_Forest_Service_TheFirstCentury.pdf
A longer, more comprehensive history/chronology of the history of forestry in the US from the Forest History Association:
Comments