by Greg Thomas
Gifford Pinchot spent a life outdoors, rehabilitating forests and protecting wildlands … whether anyone wanted him to do so or not.
When one of America’s national forests carries your name, and your moniker reads “The Father of Forestry,” it’s safe to say you nailed it in life…leaving proud parents, slightly jealous siblings, cautious peers and a conservation legacy that strikes at the very foundations of our country.
Gifford Pinchot’s name carries that weight and his lifetime achievements, to an extent, drive our recreational opportunities across this country today—from hunting ruffed grouse in the eastern hardwoods to single-track mountain biking across the grasslands to alpine backpacking in the Pacific Northwest to hunting elk in the Rockies’ designated wilderness areas. For nearly each step we take outdoors, Pinchot has a stamp on it. Maybe Vibram should have etched his name onto its soles.
“The most important thing Pinchot brought to the table was the way he thought about the environment because the way he thought about the environment was, first of all, the conservation of resources,” said Char Miller, director of environmental analysis at Pomona College and author of “Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism.”“But here’s the gist: Human beings use resources and always have done so to manage and sustain economies. When the industrial revolution was going on we were doing more than using them. We were devastating the natural landscapes, cutting more timber than could be replaced and fouling waters by over-farming and over-grazing.”
“Pinchot said we can manage the economy if we can manage our resources,” Miller added. “Use more efficient and effective methods so that future generations will have grass to graze cattle, trees that we can cut for a wood-fiber industry, water we can drink and healthy air we can breathe.”
Pinchot, who was born in Simsbury, Connecticut in 1865, rose to prominence with the assistance of a well off and connected Eastern family. He was homeschooled until 16 before attending the Phillips Exeter Academy. He attended college at Yale and later studied sustainable resource management at the esteemed French National School of Forestry. When he returned from overseas, he managed the Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estates, after which he embarked on a survey of the American West. Later, Pinchot worked with the US Department of the Interior and then headed the Division of Forestry. In seven years, he quickly grew the division’s ranks from 60 employees to 500. In 1900, Pinchot founded the Society of American Foresters, which brought stability and standardization to the profession. That same year the Pinchot family created and endowed the School of Forestry at Yale. In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt, the new president who shared Pinchot’s progressive mentality and conservation mindset, named Pinchot as the first chief of the newly minted U.S. Forest Service. Suddenly, Pinchot was managing thousands of acres of national forest lands with the mantra, “The greatest good for the greatest number of people…for the long run.” That belief equated to sustained yield, second growth and multiple use about a hundred years prior those terms becoming common verbiage.
Also, in 1905, Pinchot released the “Use Book,” a 142-page Forest Service manifesto outlining how to manage forests for productivity and sustainability. Pinchot did not direct future generations to manage their forests as he might have in 1910. The manual was expected to be updated by future generations and represent all advances in forestry, as it does today. By the time Pinchot’s five-year run at the helm of the Forest Service ended, he’d built forest reserves from 56 million acres in 1905 to 150 national forests, covering 145 million acres in 1910.
None of those accomplishments came easy. In fact, when Pinchot chose a career in forestry, there wasn’t a single forester in the country nor an acre of public land where he could practice the craft. Further, in the late 1800s, there were two distinct camps: those wanting immaculate landscapes and those who saw fortunes to be gained by stripping the land of every tree in their paths.
For a young country, most people were firmly situated in that second camp, seeing trees as tools towards economic growth—the raw materials to build homes, railroads, bridges, furniture and, yes, fast fortunes. Public opinion, in fact, followed a unique anthem: the resource was inexhaustible and the people who claimed otherwise were called “denudatics.”
Ironically, Pinchot’s family was located squarely in the mix. His grandfather and his father, James Pinchot, stripped their Pennsylvania lands of irreplaceable old-growth hardwoods and, in the process, displaced its wildlife and wrecked its once trout-filled streams.
Despite that legacy, Pinchot, who was earmarked by his maternal grandfather for a cushy career in real estate, chose a career in forestry, which was considered an odd choice at that time. In many ways, however, it made sense—a young Pinchot loved nothing more than fishing and hunting and needed healthy forests and clear, cold streams to do just that. His father, James, was in the midst of an aha moment, realizing his scar on the Pennsylvania landscape left his son without a place to pursue his passions.
“In addition to building a grand country home on family property at Grey Towers, James committed to repairing the landscape that he and his father devastated,” said Miller. “There’s a moment, on Pinchot’s 21st birthday, while celebrating the opening of Grey Towers, when his parents gifted him a gilt-edged copy of ‘Man And Nature.’ That is the seminal text of stewardship and conservation, and it was offered when their son was already starting to talk about forest conservation. Simultaneously, his father was talking about rebuilding their own forests. It showed how generations can think differently from their predecessors. And it made the statement: if you cut it down, you better restore it.”
Pinchot took that stance to heart and moved forward with a progressive vision, one based on science and leaving something for future generations. If he had not chosen that path, it’s safe to say our forests, grasslands and waterways would look markedly different today. As would our cities. Because, in the end, Pinchot was as much an expansionist as a conservationist, always seeing the health of nature and human welfare as indelibly tied.
“Pinchot and the Forest Service figured out that high country watersheds, wherever they are found, protect downstream communities,” said Miller. “So, they weren’t just focused on regrowing forestlands. They understood that saving watersheds meant you could naturally slow down spring runoff and flooding, build communities and provide recreation. His actions in the 20th century are responsible for Seattle and L.A. and other cities having water supplies today, and also for their citizens having places to hunt, hike, fish and just laze about.”
Pinchot’s outspoken and progressive stance on conservation didn’t sit well with everyone. All came to a head in 1910 when working as chief of the Forest Service under President William Taft. That rift would be known as the “Ballinger Affair” and capture front page headlines across the country.
There were no shenanigans nor love-lost in this “affair.” Instead, Pinchot brought Taft’s slashing of public lands for private profit and the administration’s slimy track record on conservation into the spotlight. After Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger was accused of shady coal deals in Alaska, Pinchot and Roosevelt huddled, knowing that their gains in conservation were being undermined. They couldn’t stop the coal sale, but they could derail Taft’s bid for a second term. With Pinchot at his side, Roosevelt formed the Bull Moose Party, effectively splitting the Republican Party, garnishing 25% of the popular vote and, essentially, replacing Taft in the White House with a more conservation minded democrat, Woodrow Wilson.
It was a ballsy move, but it cost Pinchot his coveted Forest Service leadership role when Taft summarily fired him for insubordination. That change, however, afforded Pinchot a spotlight, which, in 1923, he parlayed into his first of two governorships of Pennsylvania, charging forward with his first lady on a platform of protecting healthy environments for people to work and live in.
“Pinchot’s willingness to challenge President Taft is astonishing,” Miller said. “Prior to going public with his disagreements Pinchot told Taft he would oppose the president and Taft would have to fire him for insubordination.
“Pinchot was insubordinate! And he got fired,” Miller added. “But he used his power and privilege to good ends. While governor of Pennsylvania, his understanding of conservation widened, which was remarkable for his generation. Pennsylvania passed the first clean water legislation, and he and his wife advocated for better housing, education and regrowing the state’s forests. He believed if you protected the landscape, you could restore the human beings who live there. That brought people into the heart of the equation.”
While Pinchot’s legacy is undeniable, more than a hundred years later people still debate the merit of his fire policies. Those policies might be understandable after the Big Burn of 1910 decimated western forests and towns in a single week. Unfortunately, Pinchot’s fire policies contribute heavily to our current forest fire issues. How so? After those damaging western fires, a series of Yale-trained Forest Service chiefs would follow in his wake, believing in the no-fire is a good fire mentality as they instituted and followed the “10 a.m. rule,” wherein every natural fire—not to mention those sparked by the human hand—had to be extinguished on national forest lands by 10 a.m. the following day.
As time passed, the fuels amassed – a miscalculation first coming to the front when Yellowstone burned in 1988. Perhaps Pinchot understood this would happen. Perhaps his political aspirations were too great to say, “let it burn.” Either way, he rejected his own intuition, turned his back on science and the advice of Native Americans who understood the value of controlled burns as a restoration process. Instead of doing just that, Pinchot’s successors tried to tame every flame that popped up from here to Timbuktu.
“Pinchot was aware of the role fire played in the regeneration of particular species,” Miller said. “But he allowed the politics of fire management to overrule his scientific understanding of the biological role that fire played. The Forest Service was dead set against burning even though it was advocated by indigenous people and ranchers and loggers. In the end, that has posed problems for our ability now to manage the nation’s forested estate.”
In May 2010, speaking at a Big Burn centennial celebration in Boise, Idaho, Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell said Pinchot was “wrong” in suppressing fires and used the Big Burn to spread a narrative of fire representing death and destruction.
“In 1910, fire was widely used all over the country, from the sugar pines of the Sierra Nevada to the piney woods of the South,” Tidwell said. “From simple homesteaders, to lumber producers, to academics who studied longleaf pine and lodgepole pine, people knew that fire played a useful role and a necessary role in many forest types. The Forest Service challenged that view and … told a compelling story of firefighting as good versus evil, the moral equivalent of war.”
Whether he was right or wrong, Pinchot’s storytelling got the Forest Service fully funded in a time when its very existence was being questioned. However, winning that debate built fuel reserves on the forest floors, and left Pinchot with an asterisk on his legacy.
Still, Pinchot’s work has stood the test of time. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy took the podium at Grey Towers National Historic Site and dedicated the Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies. In that address, he said, “(Pinchot) was more than a forester. He was the father of American conservation. He believed that the riches of this continent should be used for all the people to provide a more abundant life. And he believed that the waste of these resources, or the exploitation by a few, was a threat to our national democratic life. His career marked the beginning of a professional approach, in preserving our national resources.”
If you ever have reason to question whether Pinchot had American sportsmen and women at heart in his lifelong efforts—ruffed grouse hunters included—Miller said this: “His love of hunting and fishing allowed him to think about conservation issues. He was a crack shot and a self-proclaimed great angler and he is buried with his favorite shotgun and fishing rod. That tells you his dedication to the tools that allowed him to fish and hunt, and they lay at the origins of his actions.”
Greg Thomas is the former editor-in-chief of Fly Rod & Reel and American Angler magazines. His byline appears in numerous outlets, including The New York Times, Forbes, WSJ, Alaska, and Gray’s Sporting Journal. He’s the author of five books on fly fishing, including Fly Fisher’s Guide to Washington and Fly Fisher’s Guide to Montana. He lives in Missoula, Montana with his Labrador retriever, Rye.
