In contrast with the BLM, the Forest Service was amazingly open and willing to work with the public. The BLM was sort of a made-up agency — a merger of something called the Grazing Service and the General Land Office. In contrast, the Forest Service had been founded by one charismatic man whose shadow continued to influence the agency for many decades after he left it.
Gifford Pinchot was raised in a wealthy family in Pennsylvania. Some of the family money came from logging forests in the Midwest, and perhaps out of a sense of guilt, Pinchot’s father encouraged him to study forestry. At the time, there were only a handful of professional foresters in the United States, so Pinchot went to France to study, then returned full of hopes and ambitions to prove that forest management — as opposed to simply cutting it and selling the land — could be made profitable.
In 1891, Congress authorized the president to set aside some of the vast federal lands in the West as forest reserves. These lands were managed by the Department of the Interior. Pinchot had gotten a job running the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Forestry, which was essentially an extension service encouraging farmers and other private land owners to manage forests rather than just convert them to other uses. Continue reading
