And the moment they made the deal to create the Yale Forest School, he asked Graves to go be its first dean. One of the crucial things he did was that he paid his close friend at Yale, Henry Graves, to go to Europe to get his graduate education, and brought him into the early Bureau of Forestry. He did it here, and there is the logic of course that he went to Yale as an undergraduate, so why would he not do it here? But he was actually talking with Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton as potential sites, too - though I suspect that was not going to ever happen. But to get that knowledge you needed people who could train and teach you.
One of the reasons, as he always argued, was that American conditions required American knowledge. MILLER: Part of what he was trying to do was to build upon the capacity for Americans to become foresters, so that they would not have to go over to Europe as he had to. How did it come to be that he founded the Yale Forest School? Q: Others saw the importance of having a forestry school in the United States at the time. Which is probably Pinchot’s greatest legacy. Which is another one of his legacies: The notion that forestry, and now environmental studies, is something that must be taught. “So you’ll go there, and you’ll study and then we’ll think about how we’ll use our political connections in the United States to build up your brand…” - they don’t use that language but it’s effectively what he’s doing - “…and you’ll work here and there, and then this will happen…” And by God it did! Including their plans to create a forestry school in the 1890s. And 40 years later he was still a missionary, the prophetic voice on the mountaintop, bellowing away about why this stuff matters.Īs for his career path, read his letters to his parents when he went to Europe to study forestry and you see just how much he and his parents were plotting out the next 10 years. It was true when he was an undergraduate. His letters to her early in his childhood are deeply spiritual, although framed in a sort of institutionalized religious way: What is our job here? What are we doing in the short lifetimes that we have? And I think those two things - the outdoor piece and the sort of quest - really drove him by the time he was at Yale… There was a missionary feel about him.
#FORESTERS QUICK QUOTES PROFESSIONAL#
MILLER: When he was a child his parents watched what Pinchot loved to do, and what he liked to do as a 4-year-old was to be outdoors He liked to fish, he liked to camp, he liked to do all that stuff that was possible for someone who came from a life of leisure as he did… So for his parents, the question was, “Well, how you can we figure out a professional path by which you can maintain that happiness?”Ī part of it was also a religious or, in Pinchot’s case, a spiritual drive that came mostly through his mother. Yet by the time he left Yale, he seemed to have known that professionalizing forestry management was what he was going to do with his career. Q: Gifford Pinchot’s story is a complex one: This is a guy whose family wealth was built cutting timber, and yet the profession of “forester” didn’t really exist in the U.S. But I don’t think any of the larger issues have changed much at all. There have been a lot of fights about that, most recently this past year in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
As a consequence, they don’t belong to Utah, they don’t belong to Florida…He recognized that public lands are democratic, something that all of us are invested in, and I don’t think that’s changed at all. More importantly, he gave us the notion that these lands are public, that we own them as a body politic. These entities didn’t exist in his time, but he created the process by which those things could occur. CHAR MILLER: One of the things that he did was that he gave us what we now think of as “public lands.” The national forests in particular, in his case, but also the concept of the public lands in the whole breadth as we know it today: the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service.
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