Gifford Pinchot: The Man Who Invented the Forest Service

Gifford Pinchot was born in eighteen sixty-five into a family that had made its fortune destroying forests. His grandfather and father were timber merchants who stripped hardwood land in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Pinchot looked at what his family had done to the land and decided to do something else.

He went to France to study forestry at the National School of Waters and Forests in Nancy because there was no American school that taught it. He came back in eighteen ninety-one and began a career that would reshape how the United States understood its public land. In eighteen ninety-eight, President McKinley appointed him chief of the Division of Forestry. In nineteen oh five, Theodore Roosevelt reorganized the Forest Reserves out of the Interior Department and into the new United States Forest Service inside the Department of Agriculture, with Pinchot as its first chief.

Pinchot's philosophy was utilitarian. Trees were a crop. Forests should be managed for the long-term benefit of people, which meant regulated harvesting, not no harvesting. This put him in direct conflict with John Muir, who believed some places should be left entirely alone. The two men had once been friends, but their friendship had already broken down years earlier, in the eighteen nineties, over Pinchot's support for sheep grazing in forest reserves. The Hetch Hetchy dispute, in which San Francisco sought to dam a valley inside Yosemite National Park to create a reservoir, became the public, permanent symbol of that divide. Pinchot supported the dam. Muir opposed it. Congress approved the dam in nineteen thirteen. Muir died the following year, in nineteen fourteen, having lost the fight he considered the central one of his life.

Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington state was renamed for him in nineteen forty-nine, three years after his death. He went on to serve two terms as governor of Pennsylvania, where he extended his conservation instincts into state government. He died in nineteen forty-six, having lived long enough to see the agency he built become the manager of one hundred ninety-three million acres of public land.

The forest named for him includes the wreckage of Mount St. Helens. It is, in its own way, a permanent reminder that some things resist management.