Gifford Pinchot and His Fight for Conservation

From Safopedia

International Society of Tropical Foresters

Contents

1 Gifford Pinchot and His Fight for Conservation

1.1 Controversies Emerge

1.2 Conservation Legacies

1.3 New Frontiers

1.4 Conclusion

1.5 Suggested Reading

Gifford Pinchot and His Fight for Conservation

Barry Walden Walsh

Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), first native-born forester in the United States and first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, had a warrior’s name and a fighting spirit. “Pinchot,” from the French, means “to wound”, and as a young forestry student in France, Gifford took up the sport of fencing. Throughout half a century of public service, he maintained a combative sprit and parried with many political opponents.

Pinchot was born into a prominent New York family headed by his multimillionaire grandfather, Amos Eno. Pinchot benefited from family connections that helped him win political allies and advise U.S. presidents from Grover Cleveland to Harry Truman. President Theodore Roosevelt (TR) called Pinchot his “conscience on forestry matters”; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) included Pinchot in his braintrust; and President John F. Kennedy honored Pinchot posthumously as the “father of American conservation.” Throughout his long life, Pinchot fought for Congressional support to secure the land base for the present day national forests and other public lands in the United States.

In 1898, Pinchot was appointed as Chief of the Division of Forestry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture under President William McKinley. Pinchot was a trusted confidante and became a member of TR’s ad hoc “Tennis Cabinet” and conservation leaders in the TR administration. Pinchot worked closely with Roosevelt as the President set aside millions of acres of forest reserves in the Department of Interior. In February of 1905, following years of Congressional debate, the Transfer Act authorized moving the 63 million acres of federal forest reserves from the General Land Office in the U.S. Department of the Interior to Pinchot’s Bureau of Forestry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The name of the reserves was changed to the National Forests, reflecting Pinchot’s intent that rather than being reserved, they would be used; and The Bureau of Forestry became the U.S. Forest Service.

As part of his dynamic vision for the National Forests and as a model for the nation, Pinchot introduced sustained-yield forestry—cutting no more in a year than the forests could produce in new growth annually. His goal was to show private landowners that they too could harvest trees without stripping the forest and graze livestock without denuding the range. Pinchot set out to establish forestry as a practical alternative between no development and land abuse.

In 1907, expanding on the principles of forestry, Pinchot and his team coined the phrase, “the conservation of natural resources” to recognize the interrelationships of forests, water, and minerals and the need for a unified approach to management. They defined the conservation policy as “the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time,” adapted from British philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Greatest Good principle, which Bentham, in turn, had credited to British scientist-theologian Joseph Priestley.

Controversies Emerge

Gifford Pinchot became a legend in his day as the man who saved U.S. forests, but at the same time wise-use management earned him the animosity of developers at one end of the political spectrum and preservationists at the other.

The Ballinger-Pinchot Controversy of 1910 epitomized Pinchot’s crusade against ruthless exploitation of the public lands. Congressional hearings followed his charge that Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger had approved fraudulent coal claims on the Chugach National Forest in Alaska. President William Howard Taft ultimately revoked the claims, but in the process, Pinchot and Ballinger lost their federal jobs. The Ballinger-Pinchot Controversy exemplified the high political stakes of conservation, which have endured.

Pinchot’s differences with the preservationists came to a head in Hetch Hetchy, a monumental early environmental debate. Hetch Hetchy was the adjacent valley to Yosemite in the Sierra Mountains of California. Hetch Hetchy was often praised by John Muir and others for its somewhat starker but beautiful terrain. After extended water supply problems and the great San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1908, political leaders proposed damming Hetch Hetchy.

In 1913, appearing as a star witness at Congressional hearings, Pinchot testified in favor of damming Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. Advocating the greatest good for the greatest number over the long run, he placed the benefits of the dam––public drinking water and hydropower for San Francisco––above the wilderness value of one remote valley. In doing so, Pinchot, a Sierra Club honorary vice president, broke with former his friend, the naturalist John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. Pinchot’s testimony contributed to the decision to construct the dam (a structure that remains controversial today) and resulted in the Pinchot-Muir Split, which had been simmering for years. The Hetch Hetchy debate tarnished Pinchot’s image as a conservation hero and created opposing camps within the forest movement, traces of which remain evident today, as utilitarian conservationists continue to cross swords with biocentric interest groups.

Conservation Legacies

Pinchot served as the first Chief of the Forest Service from 1905 to 1910, instilling in it utilitarian values and a superior professional land management ethic. Pinchot’s legacy includes the foresters he recruited, educated, and trained. In 1900, when America was in need of colleges to produce professional foresters, Pinchot persuaded his parents to endow the Yale Forest School (today the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies) at his alma mater. Pinchot served on the faculty and conducted summer sessions at Grey Towers, his family’s Pennsylvania estate. By recruiting to forestry a Yale student named Aldo Leopold, Pinchot provided the wildlife and wilderness movement with one of their most eloquent voices. The young foresters trained by Pinchot at Yale and at the U.S. Forest Service, became known as the Pinchot Boys; and Leopold, a founder of the modern wildlife profession and wilderness movement, would not be the only one of them to differ with their mentor on forest policy.

Inman Eldredge, whom Pinchot appointed in 1909 as first supervisor of Florida’s national forests, had the opportunity to observe the pros and cons of the woods burning practiced by cattlemen, especially in the South, to obtain fresh pasture. At the time, the U.S. Forest Service held firefighting a priority in keeping all fire out of the woods. Eldredge, whom Pinchot had trained to think on his feet, became an early advocate of “controlled burns” in opposition to the fire exclusion policy. Thus Eldredge laid the groundwork for today’s prescribed burns conducted periodically by foresters to prevent destructive wildfires.

New Frontiers

After being removed from office by President Taft, because of the Ballinger controversy, Pinchot was succeeded as Chief of the U.S. Forest Service by Henry Graves, a Yale friend he had recruited to forestry. Pinchot continued to influence the thinking of foresters and of U.S. presidents, especially both Roosevelts. Pinchot wrote the conservation plank in TR’s Bullmoose Progressive platform in 1912––a platform that FDR would adapt in the 1930s as the New Deal. During the Bullmoose campaign, Pinchot met Cornelia Bryce, the politically astute daughter of President Taft’s minister to the Netherlands. Her great-grandfather was the inventor-presidential candidate Peter Cooper. Gifford and “Leila” married in 1914, and she would prove an asset in Pinchot’s political campaigns.

In 1919, Pinchot led a Society of American Foresters Committee on the Application of Forestry, which eventually recommended federal regulation of all private forest lands and indeed almost caused the society to fracture along regulatory and market interests. In the 1920s and 1930s, Pinchot combined conservation and politics as a two-term Republican governor of Pennsylvania. His Giant Power proposal to provide low-cost electricity to farming communities later came to fruition in the Tennessee Valley Authority, and his make-work forestry program was a prototype of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Pinchot’s unrelenting campaign for federal regulation of private timberlands pitted him against private forest industries, but at the same time, motivated them to adopt conservation logging practices. Frederick Weyerhaeuser was an early convert. Pinchot’s long fight for federal regulation set the stage for state forest practice acts in the West, and forestry best management practices in force today.

Conclusion

From the beginning of his career and graduate studies abroad, Pinchot assumed a global view, and came to believe that the conservation of natural resources was the only lasting basis for world peace. In 1909, TR had appointed Pinchot chairman of the North American Conservation Conference, the first international meeting held on the subject, convening delegates from Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Next TR named Pinchot chairman of a World Conservation Conference, scheduled for The Hague but cancelled by President William Howard Taft. Pinchot never abandoned the idea, and in 1945 worked at the State Department to update his plans, which FDR carried with him to Yalta. Among Pinchot’s last public services was a White House meeting with President Harry Truman on the project. In 1949, three years after Pinchot’s death, the United Nations sponsored the Scientific Conference on Conservation and Utilization of Resources. Held at Lake Success, New York, with Pinchot’s widow as a delegate, the conference contributed to the birth of the global conservation movement.

U.S. sites named in honor of Pinchot include Mount Pinchot and Pinchot Pass in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, 1902; Camp Pinchot, Choctawhatchee National Forest, Florida, 1910; Gifford Pinchot Drive, Forest Products Laboratory, Wisconsin, 1910; Gifford Pinchot Redwood, Muir Woods National Monument, California, 1945; Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Washington State, 1949; Gifford Pinchot State Park, Pennsylvania, 1961; Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies at Grey Towers, Milford, Pennsylvania, 1963 (today the Pinchot Institute for Conservation with offices in Milford and Washington, D.C); Gifford Pinchot Forestry Building at Wild Acres, Society of American Foresters, Bethesda, Maryland, 1975.

Gifford Pinchot and His Fight for Conservation

From Safopedia

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