Gifford Pinchot, right. Photo courtesy U.S. Forest Service Grey Towers National History Library
Contemporary historians have not been particularly kind to the U.S. Forest Service. Titles of books like Nancy Langston’s Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares and Paul Hirt’s A Conspiracy of Optimism indicate the rough treatment the agency has received at the hands of these authors. Samuel Hays’s latest book about the Forest Service is reserved in title and tone but no less biting in substance.
The American People and The National Forests: The First Century of the U.S. Forest Service (University of Pittsburg Press, 2009) commemorates the 100-year anniversary of the agency. Hays’s basic thesis is that the Forest Service is sort of like that brainy kid you remember from grade school who was too smart for his own good and didn’t make friends very well.
If, as Heraclitus suggested, character is fate, then the Forest Service’s fate was sealed a hundred years ago by its main character, Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the Forest Service, a zealous, progressive-era crusader, presidential confidante and acid-tongued technocrat.
Pinchot belonged to what Hays characterizes as a “scientific culture” (he could have said cult)—a rebellion against the corruption and cronyism that infected politics and policymaking at the turn of the century. “The new agency’s decisions,” Hays writes, “were to be made not in the response to public desires but according to the views of experts.” The downside of the new agency’s independence was isolation. The Forest Service, notes Hays dryly, “had little in the way of a visible and active public clientele.”
One by one, the Pinchot Forest Service’s potential constituencies “were either neglected or excluded in the new management schemes of things.” Forest Service leaders ignored conservationist Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, Arthur Carhart’s landscape architecture and even Teddy Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for wildlife.
The Forest Service was established in part to secure “favorable conditions of stream flow”—a goal near and dear to the heart of industrialists who depended on waterways to power their factories. Early forestry leaders like Bernard Fernow insisted long and loudly that the national forests were necessary to maintain healthy water supplies. Later he admitted that the connection between forest cover and water delivery was contrived largely as a rationalization for federal acquisition, that without the emphasis on watershed protection “we could not have committed the federal government to purchase lands for national forests.” Once the forests were acquired, agency leaders’ interest in water quickly faded.
From the beginning, the Forest Service had no institutional truck with grazing. It was not an activity contemplated by early legislation, and indeed the only aim of early rulemaking was to prohibit it. Grazing was allowed and became a pervasive use of the national forests only because western cattlemen insisted that their herds be allowed to graze on public lands as a quid pro quo for allowing the establishment of national forests. The nascent agency consented grudgingly to grazing management to save its own political hide.
The only friend the Forest Service ever made was the timber industry, and then only during the postwar period from approximately 1950 to 1990. At all other points the industry and the agency have feuded over land acquisition, replanting and, today, the lack of a substantial federal timber harvest.
Pinchot, a classically trained forester, worshipped the science of silviculture, and the able young foresters deployed throughout the West by Pinchot were interested in one thing and one thing only: “growing stock.” They cared about the species, age, condition and productivity of trees, and very little else.
Pinchot sold his idea for a Forest Service to Congress on the promise that he’d apply scientific methods to “make the forests pay.” But the forests stubbornly refused to make good on the promise. Timber sale contracts in remote locations, especially outside of the productive growing grounds of the Pacific Northwest, could only be planned and executed at a loss, leading to financial and bureaucratic gymnastics with the end goal of making red ink look black.
From 1897 to 1904, forest reserves had generated $203,100 in revenue and $1,605,700 in costs. Costs had risen to $5.5 million in 1910 with little corresponding increase in revenue. By 1920, costs exceeded receipts by $28.5 million. Pinchot frequently cooked the books, “carefully selecting from among cost data and juggling his authority to spend timber sale receipts,” Hays writes.
Financial boondoggles aside, the Forest Service was widely admired within government for its highly disciplined and effective technical bureaucracy. It was competent, not likeable.
Is the Forest Service becoming obsolete? The agency can no longer rely on its reputation for competent professionalism. Today it survives on a combination of massively expensive fire suppression efforts and a certain amount of bureaucratic inertia. Its fling with the timber industry peaked two decades ago; its relationships with the grazing industry, recreationists and other potential constituents are as rocky as ever. Schoolchildren are blessedly oblivious of Smokey Bear, and President Obama may not have had time to study the intricacies of the agency.
But the new president is said to be a quick study. If he reads Hays’s book, he’ll receive an excellent and succinct history lesson and probably immediately grasp its principal lesson: The Forest Service’s fixation on “scientific” (read, commercial) forestry has doomed it to irrelevance. A new Pinchot leading an entirely new mission for the agency and the land it oversees—to mitigate for climate change, encourage resilient ecosystems, guard the nation’s water supplies and promote biodiversity—is the only hope for the agency’s survival. Absent a bold new vision, the Forest Service’s misplaced fixation on making the forests pay will doom it to oblivion.