The City Natural: Garden and Forest Magazine and the Rise of American Environmentalism

6. Distant Forests

152 T oday, when one looks at a map of the United States, one can see extensive patches of green, from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific, that represent the many national and state parks and national forests. Most of these green areas are located far away from such big cities as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago. These green areas are sharply different from major urban areas and express what may seem very different values from those of cities. These seemingly remote and wild areas, however, exist in an interdependent relationship with those big cities. To a great extent, they were established because of the lobbying efforts of the same late-nineteenth-century environmental reformers who were living in cities and designing cityscapes. Garden and Forest magazine, and particularly its editor and publisher Charles Sprague Sargent, played an important role in creating America’s impressive system of forests and parks. Why was this magazine, based in the metropolises of Boston and New York and concerned mainly with urban environmental reform, so concerned about distant forests and wild lands? The answer is that the magazine editors believed that no matter how remotely located the natural hinterlands were, their fate was tied to that of the cities.1 In 1888, about the time that Garden and Forest was getting off the ground, 6 distant forests   DISTANT FORESTS 153 Sargent proposed a scheme for the management of forests in the American West. He recommended that the federal government withdraw all the public lands from entry and sale until a thorough survey had been made. He also wanted the US Army to become the guardians of those western forests and to begin preventing forest fires, livestock invasions, and illegal cutting and mining . He then urged Congress to organize a forest commission of experts to investigate the forests of the West; in his Adirondack forest commission report of 1885, he had proposed something similar for that eastern woodland area. In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison established the first national forest reserves, covering about thirteen million acres, and Sargent and Garden and Forest rejoiced. Sargent thought that those reserves and their legislative mandate could substantially change American attitudes toward forests, but he was to be disappointed because no government agency would actively protect the newly established forest reserves. This outcome deepened his distrust of politics and further confirmed his view that only the army, an agency isolated from political pressures, could protect the nation’s forests from all sorts of dangers. The successful stewardship of Yellowstone National Park by a small force of troops from the army provided a useful precedent. Meanwhile, Sargent and other conservation advocates, such as Gifford Pinchot and Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century magazine, intensified pressure on the government to make a thorough investigation of the condition of the western forests.2 Finally, their call penetrated the apathy of Washington, and, in 1896, Secretary of the Interior Michael Hoke Smith charged the National Academy of Science (NAS) with organizing a forest commission to survey the forests on the public domain of the West. The president of the academy thought immediately of Sargent and asked him to chair the commission. Other members included academy president Wolcott Gibbs (ex officio); William H. Brewer, a Yale botanist; Gen. Henry Abbott of the Army Corps of Engineers; Alexander Agassiz, a Harvard zoologist; Arnold Hague from the US Geological Survey; and Gifford Pinchot, who listed himself as a “practical forester.” Later, Sargent invited John Muir to join them as an unofficial adviser. Sargent had first become acquainted with Muir in 1893, when the California nature writer called on him at Holm Lea. The first mention of Muir’s name in Garden and Forest was in 1889, when it appeared in a brief report on a group of outdoor enthusiasts who had climbed Mount Rainier; Muir was introduced 154 DISTANT FORESTS as a “well-known student of the Cordilleran glaciers.” In the following years, as Garden and Forest began paying more attention to national parks, Muir’s name and views often appeared in its pages. When Stiles wrote an editorial on national parks, he referred to Muir’s essay in Century magazine as being authoritative on the subject. Muir’s visit to Sargent’s home left a good impression on both men, and a friendship developed between the two.3 Muir might have been even more different from Sargent than Stiles was, for his enthusiasm...