|
A Wilderness Career
Their prescription for the return of his health and academic prospects was to pack him off to the Adirondack Mountains, where he was to seek restoration through a wilderness cure. Arriving in the middle of winter, Pinchot spent the vast bulk of his time in the Adirondacks outdoors, hiking and snowshoeing across a frozen landscape. "I find that I can with perfect ease stand a day in the woods, even with the mercury very near zero," he boasted in a letter to his father. By the fall of 1885, Pinchot had recovered sufficiently to earn admittance to Yale, whereupon he threw himself into the academic and social whirl of the New Haven campus just as he had at Exeter. Once more, he found himself drawn to the natural sciences, including a research internship with Yale botanist Daniel Eaton. "I have gotten well started with [him] on the trees of New Haven, and the work promises to be extraordinarily interesting," he wrote his parents. "I only wish I had more time to give it. As it is I shall spend all my leisure in the woods after specimens." So enamored of this work did he become that, with his parents' urging, Pinchot decided to become a professional forester. Forestry-then an all but unknown science in the United States-sought to manage wooded landscapes scientifically. Its goal was to maintain forest cover while carefully harvesting timber, thus balancing ecological concerns and economic ends. In 1889-90, Pinchot spent a year at the L'Ecole Nationale Forestièrre in Nancy, France, and upon his return, his career took off. Pinchot's first job was as managing forester for George W. Vanderbilt's vast Biltmore estate in western North Carolina, where he worked with architect Richard Morris Hunt and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted. He maintained a brisk forest-consulting business with other large property holders, and on one of his surveys met the famed naturalist John Muir. His friendship with Muir would deepen when, in 1896, they took part in a National Academy of Sciences-sponsored trip throughout the America West surveying the nation's forest reserves. From Montana's Bitterroot Mountains to the Cascades of Washington, from the Sierra mountain range to Pike's Peak, the scientists assessed the current state of the reserved lands and their possible expansion. Muir and Pinchot gamboled in the woods and did handstands on the edge of the Grand Canyon, "with [our] heads level + hearts level + eyes upside down," as Muir later described the experience. But they also began to sense that their interpretation of conservation was not the same-that when they looked at trees, they did so with different eyes. Muir, who believed that forests should be utilized, nonetheless stressed their preservation; Pinchot, who recognized the need to preserve arboreal beauty, also championed the commercial value of forest products. These differences would magnify in time, leading to a sharp break in their relationship. In this and in other ways, the epic journey through the western wilderness gave Pinchot much-needed insight into the natural and political landscapes he would work within as head of the Agriculture Department's tiny Bureau of Forestry, a job he accepted in 1898. The Political Landscape
It would not remain small. A skilled bureaucrat, Pinchot secured increased appropriations, boosted staff salaries and expanded the agency's work force. To augment the number of available professional foresters, he and his family established the Yale School of Forestry in 1900, and that year he also helped inaugurate the Society of American Foresters and its Journal of Forestry. And in 1905, he shrewdly maneuvered the transfer of the nation's forests from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture so that he and his colleagues in the newly named Forest Service could at last manage the public's woods, which grew almost fivefold during his tenure. Pinchot "has done more than any man in this country for the preservation of the forests," extolled President Roosevelt. "He is gifted with the utmost energy and the zeal that only comes to one who is wrapped up in his work; and in addition to these qualities he has . . . excellent judgment and common sense." To ensure the new agency's success, Pinchot, ever the energetic missionary, crisscrossed the nation touting its commitment to public service. "National Forests exist today because the people want them," he wrote in 1907. "To make them accomplish the most good, the people themselves must make clear how they want them run." But this message required an audience well attuned to the need for conservative management of western public lands. Many Americans were receptive to his pleas, Pinchot discovered, because they understood just how destructive unrestricted lumbering and grazing had become in the Industrial Age. To help educate those not yet converted, he organized (and helped fund) two national conferences on conservation; long before the advent of modern public relations campaigns, he also maintained a mailing list of over 650,000 names! When Pinchot repeatedly assured the citizenry that the Forest Service stood for the "greatest good for the greatest number in the long run," his words soothed those anxious about the nation's future, and cheered those who shared his faith in the capacity of humanity to repair the damage it caused. Pinchot was dismissed from the Forest Service by President Taft in 1910, but he remained a force to be reckoned with. In 1910, he founded the National Conservation Association, and served as its president until 1925. In 1914, at age 49, he made his first bid for public office, running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania. That same year, he married Cornelia Bryce, who shared both his privileged background and his fascination with progressive politics (she campaigned for women's suffrage and later ran for U.S. Congress); their son, Gifford Bryce Pinchot, was born the following year. As governor of Pennsylvania in the 1920s and the 1930s, Gifford Pinchot championed the rights of workers in the mills, mines and lumber camps; well before the late-20th-century environmental justice movement, he identified the links between politics, class and the environment, arguing that political equity and economic rights went hand-in-hand. In 1940, he expanded these claims. Certain that World War II had erupted because of the industrialized nations' hunger for natural resources, he advocated the creation of a United Nations-like agency to regulate resource exploitation, protect threatened species and secure an enduring prosperity for all. He died in 1946, after the war's end but before the birth of the modern environmental movement. It is striking that his vision of an international organization, founded on conservation principles and devoted to the establishment of a just and permanent peace, has yet to be realized. Nonetheless, Pinchot's influence can be seen in contemporary environmental organizations from the Natural Resources Defense Council (founded in 1970), which uses the legal system to foster tighter regulation of the environment, to Greenpeace (1971), whose very name evokes Pinchot's conviction that world peace and conservation are inextricably bound together. More than a century after he first explored the woods, bogs and meadows of Exeter, Gifford Pinchot continues to speak to a new generation trying to understand the tangled relationship between humanity and the natural world
Char Miller is chair of the history department at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, and author of Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Island Press). |
|
Home | On Campus
| Exonians in Review | From Every Quarter
| Finis Origine Pendet |
