SUNY ESF: Where American Forestry Science Was Born

Tucked against the southern edge of the Syracuse University campus, sharing buildings and sidewalks with its much larger neighbor, sits one of the most quietly influential scientific institutions in American history. The State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, almost always called SUNY ESF, was founded in nineteen eleven as the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, and it became one of the country's leading schools of professional forest management.

The school's founding came out of a crisis. New York State had tried to establish a forestry college at Cornell in the eighteen nineties, but that program collapsed after the state withdrew funding in nineteen oh three. The legislature tried again, and in nineteen eleven Governor John Alden Dix signed the bill creating the new forestry college in partnership with Syracuse. The mission was urgent: the United States had already deforested enormous swaths of its eastern landscape, and there were almost no trained professionals who knew how to manage what was left, let alone restore what had been lost.

From those first classes, SUNY ESF trained the foresters, wildlife biologists, landscape architects, and environmental engineers who would go on to manage national forests, shape conservation policy, and develop the science of ecology as a professional discipline. The school joined the State University of New York system in nineteen forty-eight and took its modern name in nineteen seventy-two, expanding from pure forestry into the full range of environmental sciences.

Today the campus covers hundreds of acres and operates research forests across the state. Its students study in a place where the idea that human beings have a responsibility to manage and restore natural systems was not a slogan, but a founding principle, established more than a century ago when the trees were still disappearing and someone had to learn how to bring them back.