The American People and the National Forests: The First Century of the U.S. Forest Service

Chapter 2: The Silvicultural Imperative, 1891–1920

` 2 THE SILVICULTURAL IMPERATIVE, 1891–1920 TRADITIONAL accountsoftheearlyhistoryoftheU.S.ForestService have emphasized its legislative and administrative development in a legal context.₁ The customary historical benchmarks have long been the reserve authorization of 1891,the Forest Management Act of 1897,and the Transfer Act of 1905, which lodged the management agency permanently in the Department of Agriculture.Other critical events in Forest Service history are court decisions such as Light v. United States and United States v. Grimaud, both decided in 1911 by the Supreme Court, which upheld not only the agency’s grazing permit decision-making authority but also its rule-making authority under the 1897 act. Within this overall framework, historians recount the steady evolution of the agency’s management system as shaped by Gifford Pinchot, the nation ’s most influential forester at the time; the emphasis on expertise for agency staff; the development of effective working relationships between the central office in Washington and the field; and the development of an employee esprit de corps that was unusual for government agencies at that time.² 25 Hays CH2:Layout 1 12/14/08 1:32 PM Page 25 Gifford Pinchot, however, did far more than foster the development of an effective administrative system; he chose to shape the specific direction of the agency’s program.In doing so,he greatly narrowed the agency’s forest management objectives, going from the wider context of the 1890s debate over the reserves to the narrower context of a comprehensive program for the national forests, which evolved after 1905. In 1891 and in the decade that followed,various management objectives were expressed, and they revealed different views of the purposes of the emergingforestreserves.Somelookedupontheforestsasahabitatforwildlife and,in the midst of declining wildlife populations,thought of them as refuges where animals could be protected and their numbers increased.³ Others thought of the forests as cover to protect their sources of water for irrigation and urban and industrial use and as stream habitats for fish.⁴ Still others thought of them as sources of timber to offset an impending “timber famine,” while some looked to the forests for their natural beauty and as lands to be designated as national parks.₅ In the late 1880s and early 1890s,those interested in forest affairs formed their ideas based on the context of the Adirondack region of upstate New York. This region was the center of the nation’s wood production industry in the mid-1800s. It had been heavily cut over, and by the 1880s, it was the model of just what should be avoided because it was fast becoming,accordingtoanAdirondackstudycommissionheadedbyHarvardprofessorCharles Sargent, an “unproductive and dangerous desert.”₆ In 1885,the New York state legislature reserved from sale all tax-reverted lands and declared them to be a forest reserve “to be kept as wild forest land.”⁷ By 1892,these lands had been designated the Adirondack Park,the territory of which was bounded by the “Blue Line,” within which about 20 percent of the 2.8 million acres was owned by the state,which anticipated acquiring even more land. How would this land, the nation’s first major forest reserve, be managed ? To the New York legislature,the reserve was primarily a watershed to protect the sources of the state’s rivers and a “pleasuring ground,” so the state had only minimal interest in the timber supply. Thus, the legislation stated that the new park would “be forever reserved,maintained,and cared 26 THE SILVICULTURAL IMPERATIVE Hays CH2:Layout 1 12/14/08 1:32 PM Page 26 for as ground open for the free use of all the people for their health and pleasure,and as forest lands necessary to the preservation of the headwaters of the chief rivers of the State,and a future timber supply.”⁸ The fact that the Blue Line was drawn to encompass the headwaters of Adirondack rivers made clear that a primary objective of the park was watershed protection. Both Bernhard Fernow, the head of the federal Bureau of Forestry in the last years of the nineteenth century,and Gifford Pinchot,who succeeded him in 1898, followed the developments in the Adirondacks with great interest and intense opposition,almost contempt.They recognized that policies governing the use of Adirondack Park focused on watershed protection and aesthetics and seemed not even to acknowledge their version of scienti fic forest management, which placed...