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Chapter 5 JNF and the Rise of National Conservation While early industrialism and spreading farm acreage continued to alter southwestern Virginia’s environment, Romanticism was to some extent morphing into national events that were coalescing around a new environmental conservation ethic.1 After the 1860s, preservation and conservation of public lands began to gain greater public appeal. A significant fear of timber shortages preoccupied certain conservation circles. Related to timber shortage fears, but even more captivating in regard to human loss, were catastrophic forest fires that helped draw national attention to the need of some kind of public intervention in industrial logging practices.2 Nebraska held the first Arbor Day in 1872, the same year Congress established America’s first national park, the Yellowstone. In 1876 Congress passed an appropriation act that initiated examination of the nation’s forests, with plans for reforestation and conservative harvesting. In 1881 Franklin B. Hough became chief of a new agency, the Division of Forestry (later called the Forest Service), established in the Department of Agriculture. By 1886 scientifically trained German forester Bernhard E. Fernow operated the young Division of Forestry. Continuing along the dual paths of preservation and conservation, Congress created the Yosemite National Park in 1890 and passed the Forest Reserve Act in 1891. The Forest Reserve Act enabled the president to retain forest lands from the public domain , and thus the infrastructure for designating national forests began. Further federal conservation legislation followed in 1897 with the Organic Act, which specified that the new federal reserves were “for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.”3 In 1898 Gifford Pinchot became the Division of Forestry’s chief, and in 1905 the Department of Agriculture took control of the forest reserves. By 1907 the Department called them national forests.4 Gifford Pinchot advocated several tenets that remain essentially unchanged in the Forest Service today: a certain amount of permanent public forest ownership, forest fire control, and professional and scientific 58 j JNF and the Rise of National Conservation management of public forests that would, theoretically, influence private forests along similar conservation guidelines.5 German forestry practices very much influenced Pinchot, with their emphasis on state involvement and scientific management. Pinchot himself originally sought to emulate such an approach to American forestry in something of a dictatorial mode, where a scientific elite would operate free of congressional (or public) interference. However, the 1908–10 political conflict that arose between the executive and legislative branches over federal forestry eventually forced Pinchot and his supporters to compromise their exclusive approach by appealing to the public sentiment of the Progressive era. In something of a contradiction, public sentiment operated largely around the misconception that industrial forestry practices of the time were all destructive and irresponsible, and therefore salvation awaited in federal forestry practiced on public woodlands. In reality, many industrial foresters of the time, for purely economic reasons, originally supported Pinchot and other advocates of a scientific approach to forestry. The Germans, after all, were at the vanguard of the day’s most sophisticated forestry practices, and thus the American wood products industries were highly interested in those trained in the German school.6 Ironically, the southern Appalachian region where Pinchot and the “cradle of American forestry” began was about to witness precisely the kind of uncontrolled industrial cutting against which scientific forestry reacted. Early Legislation Much of the early legislation pertaining to the nation’s forests specifically concerned lands in the Appalachian Region. Even before the 1890–1920 southern Appalachian industrial timbering era had run its course, eastern groups such as the Appalachian Mountain Club and larger organizations like the National Academy of Science supported protecting or preserving Appalachian land.7 In 1885 two doctors, Henry O. Marcy and Chase P. Ambler, also began promoting Appalachian forest preservation. In 1899 they helped form the Appalachian National Park Association (later called the Appalachian National Forest Reserve Association) in Asheville, North Carolina. They advocated preserving a large forested region for economic reasons, aesthetic values, and what they believed were the region’s natural health-inducing qualities. North Carolina Senator Jeter C. Pritchard supported their effort and persuaded Congress to investigate. By 1901, with congressional backing, President William McKinley agreed to the need for Appalachian forest reserves . The next year, Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson submitted a report concerning the Appalachian region. Among his conclusions, he stated: The...

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