Forest for the Trees: How Humans Shaped the North Woods

6 Conservation Gains Traction

6 Conservation Gains Traction It is our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self government entrusted to us. john l. o’sullivan, editor, New York Post, 18451 the industrial phase of land use drew to a close as the large timber companies pulled out of the northland, leaving in their wake collapsed tax rolls, shuttered mills, widespread unemployment, and ravaging wildfire. The next phase, conservation, was an attempt to mitigate these many evils. The seeds of conservation had been planted years earlier, in the East, where forests were long gone. Conservation was a reaction to perceived dearth, to impending timber famine. This movement marked the end of a unique American belief in the continent ’s boundless resources. On July 12, 1893, University of Wisconsin history professor Frederick Jackson Turner read a paper at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In the newly erected marbled halls of a faux Grecian monument , what would later become the Art Institute, Turner declared the great American frontier closed: What the Mediterranean . . . was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions 101 and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States. . . . And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. Turner’s first major paper made a dramatic impression, describing as it did a nameless angst that many of his American contemporaries shared. While the concept of an actual frontier—a line of settlement that began in the east and progressed across the continent from the Atlantic toward the Pacific—was far too simplistic, Americans had long responded to the notion as if it were fact. With the central organizing principle of American society, namely, the settlement of the continent, dissolved, the nation cast about without direction.2 Fundamental ideas wrapped up in the American notion of frontier —the divine right to expand and overtake new territory, the inexhaustibility of natural resources, the rightness of American progress, the opportunity afforded any rugged individual—all of these and more were proving increasingly untenable. While the geographic premise of Turner’s thesis was strained, he managed to touch upon a real truth: the frontier as he and other Americans had understood it was indeed defunct. Mounting numbers of citizens looked to the future with dread, not hope. The availability of seemingly endless, unknown, unexplored , and unclaimed tracts had almost guaranteed liberty for the colonists. Horace Greeley’s siren song, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the land,” described a broad social safety net. This net had been unraveling for some time before Turner called people’s attention to it. Twenty years before the Columbian Exposition some of the nation’s most influential thinkers began predicting a timber famine; by the time Turner read his paper their concerns were gaining traction. At the turn of the century, the conversion of natural resources had been industrialized , the rate of exploitation growing exponentially. The government hemorrhaged land during the nineteenth century, transferring almost one-half from federal ownership to state or private hands but seeing much of it returned via tax forfeiture within decades. Worse, by 1893 conservation gains traction 102 four-fifths of the nation’s timber had been consumed by the highly integrated , well-capitalized, and mechanically industrialized corporations that devoured the enormous forests of the Great Lakes. For the first time, the environmental consequences of Manifest Destiny weighed heavily on the collective American consciousness.3 One possible solution to the dwindling resource base was also on display at the 1893 World’s Fair, as described in the fair guide: The forest resources of the world are exhibited in the Forestry Building, which is one of the most interesting and unique structures on the grounds. It is made of wood and has a colonnade composed of tree trunks sent from almost every state in the Union. For instance, California sent sugar pine, redwood and trunks of the young sequoia; Minnesota, white pine, sugar maple, ash, oak, cottonwood, spruce, box cedar, tamarack and elm.4 While many of the milling and tree displays were sponsored by companies set on glorifying...