Breaking New Ground Already a confirmed naturalist during his student days, Gifford Pinchot, PEA class of 1884, went on to become the founding chief of the U.S. Forest Service as well as a pioneering conservationist. As a new biography makes clear, Pinchot's influence on the conservation movement continues to this day. — By Char Miller

"President Theodore Roosevelt (left) and his Forest Service chief, Gifford Pinchot (right), shared a love of the American wilderness and a commitment to conserving it. "He has done more than any man in this country for the preservation of the forests," Roosevelt said of Pinchot, under whose watch the number of national forests grew from 32 to 149, for a total of 172 million acres.

In the spring of 1912, Gifford Pinchot, Phillips Exeter Academy class of 1884, returned to the Academy, a trip whose timing was a bit of a surprise. After all, Pinchot-the founding chief of the U.S. Forest Service and a pioneer of the American conservation movement-was then embroiled in one of the great political controversies of the early 20th century.

Two years earlier, President William Howard Taft had fired Pinchot for insubordination. The Forest Service, which Pinchot had headed since 1898, had become the driving force behind the remarkable conservationist agenda of Taft's predecessor, President Theodore Roosevelt, who served from 1901 to 1909. In TR's estimation, "among the many, many public officials who under my administration rendered literally invaluable service to the people of the United States, [Pinchot], on the whole, stood first." As chief of the Forest Service, Pinchot expanded the regulatory authority of the federal government to control the exploitation of natural resources on public land. Under his watch, the number of national forests grew from 32 in 1898 to 149 in 1910, for a total of 172 million acres. And as he extended the reach of executive power, Pinchot emerged as one of the chief architects of the modern conservation movement.

The public's identification of Pinchot with conservationism only grew following Taft's ascension to the presidency in 1909. For many, the new president and his secretary of the interior, Richard A. Ballinger, seemed to be retreating from Roosevelt's environmentalist agenda. A glaring example of this, Pinchot believed, was the administration's decision to sell off Alaskan coal fields to a powerful mining syndicate. Hoping to stop this sale, Pinchot picked a very public fight with Ballinger, forcing Taft to get rid of the nation's forester. A bitter congressional investigation would exonerate Taft, but the political damage was immense. The president's ability to govern was severely weakened, Ballinger later resigned, and, prodded by Pinchot and others, Theodore Roosevelt leapt back into the political fray. In 1912, that bully ex-president launched a third-party campaign that would oust his hand- picked successor from the White House, and enable Woodrow Wilson to triumph at the polls. It was amid this intense political turbulence that Pinchot journeyed back to Exeter.

A Walk in the Woods
Perhaps Pinchot sought in the sylvan campus momentary respite from the brutal political arena. If so, he found what he was looking for. Along with Principal Harlan Page Amen, he spent the morning doing what he most loved-hiking through field and forest, most notably the large tract of land that alumnus George Plimpton, class of 1873, had given to the school. In a subsequent letter to the donor, Pinchot praised his "superb gift" and touted the landscape's unique qualities: "I cannot recall any part of the equipment of a school anywhere, which seems to me likely to contribute so much to the athletic and outdoor life of the boys as yours. Its educational value, it seems to me, will hardly be less."

To enhance its impact on future generations of students, Pinchot proposed that the Forest Service map the forested lands so that they could be "handled from the point of view of beauty rather than utility." Swept up in the moment, Pinchot offered to underwrite the posting "from place to place in the woods [of] low and inconspicuous sign boards, with somewhat detailed descriptions of the forest about them, as guides to any of the boys who might care to study the woodland." As an added inducement to get the students into the woods, he pledged to endow "a small annual prize for proficiency in wood-craft and forestry which I hope will have the effect of inciting the boys to use your gift even more than they otherwise would." A year later, he made good on his promise, sending a $500 check to launch the Gifford Pinchot Woodcraft Prize; first awarded in 1914, it continues to recognize students for significant achievement in environmental studies and activism.

Whatever its future consequence, Pinchot's gift was based on his past education: Exeter, he believed, had been crucial to the discovery of his life work. "As I grow older, and as my interest in the welfare and progress of our people broadens and deepens," he noted in early 1912, "I look back with steadily growing satisfaction [at] the time I spent at Exeter." Its pedagogical flexibility was paramount: "The most useful thing about the school in those days . . . was the fact that it made every student responsible to himself as well as to his teachers for what he did and how he did it, and yet gave each boy the best possible chance to follow his own bent." That seemed ideal for someone like Pinchot, who had had a "decidedly helter-skelter" education before arriving at the Academy in the autumn of 1881.

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