Document Type
Article
Department
Environmental Analysis (Pomona)
Publication Date
2005
Keywords
forestry, Gifford Pinchot, U.S. Forest Service, forest history, Theodore Roosevelt
Abstract
The U.S. Forest Service celebrated its centennial in 2005, an event that depended on a set of individuals who in the years immediately prior to the agency’s creation in 1905 labored quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, to defuse opposition to the idea of it within the executive and legislative branches. Surely the most crucial of these figures was Gifford Pinchot, then head of the Bureau of Forestry, and President Theodore Roosevelt: animating their activism was a shared conviction that conservation of the nation’s natural resources would save the United States from economic ruin and a collective faith that a national forest service was best suited to regulate the public lands.
Rights Information
© 2005 Forest History Society
Terms of Use & License Information
Recommended Citation
Miller, Char. "Deep Roots: The Late Nineteenth Century Origins of American Forestry,” Forest History Today, Spring/Fall 2005, 2-3.
