The Greatest Good is a video produced by the U.S Forest Service to honor its centennial. For more information about the centennial celebration, visit http://www.fs.fed.us/newcentury/. Photo courtesy U.S. Forest Service
For its fiftieth anniversary, the Bureau of Land Management published Beyond the National Parks, a recreation guide to public lands. Although panned by reviewers for duplicating information readily (and freely) accessible on the Internet, at least the book focused on the land, not the agency.
For its thirtieth birthday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration produced a thirty-minute infomercial, available on the Web, that doubles readily as a cure for insomnia. In 2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wanted to make an IMAX movie for the 100th anniversary of the first wildlife refuge. Thankfully for IMAX’s bottom line, the project died for lack of funds, and probably for lack of enthusiasm from newly elected President George W. Bush’s administration. The National Park Service is the Disney of federal agencies. The Park Service has created scores of documentary movies about its national parks. Called “ParkDocs,” these slick Discovery Channel–produced natural history videos have replaced interpretive specialists at park visitor centers. But when it came time to toot its own institutional horn, the Park Service celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary with an exhibit of twenty-five black-and-white photographs.
In the annals of self-congratulatory birthday hype, the U.S. Forest Service stands second to none, not even to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which produced an eighteen-minute video clip for its forty-fifth anniversary. At more than two hours, The Greatest Good is likely the longest documentary ever produced by a federal agency—and certainly the longest about a federal bureaucracy.
Make no mistake, The Greatest Good is about the Forest Service as an institution; the national forests provide only the scenic backdrop to this nostalgic romp through the agency’s highs and lows. Although founder Gifford Pinchot gets star billing, Lassie steals the show by growling at a local rancher when he protests Forest Service clear-cutting practices.
That’s the charm of this introspective history. The Greatest Good admits some mistakes were made. Former Forest Service chiefs acknowledge that the agency has lost touch with a public increasingly concerned with environmental quality. But there are no bad guys in this story; only conscientious civil servants trying to figure out what’s best for the citizens they serve.
The story line is familiar. Gifford Pinchot returned from his forestry studies in Europe to use his political connections—and his friendship with Teddy Roosevelt—to protect the national forests from settlement. He created an agency of professionally trained public servants to guard the forests from timber theft and fire. Pinchot’s keen use of the media and the courts ran roughshod over local commercial interests as his agency imposed grazing regulations on the open range. (Ironically, seventy years later, environmentalists used the very same media and courts to defeat the Forest Service’s addiction to logging.)
The Forest Ranger became the Progressive Era’s iconic figure: the selfless protector of the public interest. During the 1950s, the agency’s Beaver Cleaver families worked, played and picnicked in the woods, while providing lumber for a growing nation. These were the good years, remembered fondly by a generation of now-retired Forest Service workers.
Then came the 1960s. The Forest Service’s cozy little world was broken apart by flower children, Vietnam protests and reactionary social forces beyond its control. But, the documentary admits, it wasn’t all the fault of outsiders. Former Forest Supervisor Orville Daniels chillingly confesses that the Forest Service “went to the dark side” as it overcut the national forests to fuel its budget, but The Greatest Good adroitly points the finger at Reagan-era political appointees.
To its credit, The Greatest Good doesn’t sweep all the Forest Service’s missteps under the rug. Instead, it turns them into history, and promotes the unofficial motto: We don’t do it that way anymore. Protecting more wilderness? That’s yesterday’s battle. Clear-cutting? That’s so passé—news which may surprise folks trying to save Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, where clear-cutting continues to dominate. According to the film, it’s all behind us now.
The Greatest Good gives cameo roles to some of the Forest Service’s harshest critics. Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics founder Jeff DeBonis appears, as does EarthFirst!’s Dave Foreman—their inclusion surely a first for the government.
One thing hasn’t changed for the agency—the war against wildfire. The Forest Service was born a firefighting agency, and although fire took a back seat to logging during the timber boom—and coincidentally wet—years, the agency has now returned to its fire roots. For those who think that fire is a not-so-subtle Forest Service excuse to resume logging, The Greatest Good will not disabuse them of that notion.
The Greatest Good is a beautiful flick, filmed in high-definition digital resolution. At a cost of a million bucks, it’s comparable in price to a PBS documentary, and finer than all but the best. Whether the Forest Service should have given itself a million-dollar pat on the back while it closes campgrounds for lack of funds can be a subject for the next retrospective.