Early roles Pinchot landed his first professional forestry position in early 1892, when he became the manager of the forests at
George Washington Vanderbilt II's
Biltmore Estate in
Asheville, North Carolina. The following year, Pinchot met
John Muir, a naturalist who founded the
Sierra Club and would become Pinchot's mentor and, later, his rival. Pinchot worked at Biltmore until 1895, when he fell out with
Carl Alwin Schenck and opened a consulting office in New York City. In 1896, he embarked on a tour of the American West with the National Forest Commission. Pinchot disagreed with the commission's final report, which advocated preventing U.S. forest reserves from being used for any commercial purpose; Pinchot instead favored the development of a professional forestry service which would preside over limited commercial activities in forest reserves. In 1897, Pinchot became a special forest agent for the
United States Department of the Interior.
Lead forester Head of the Division of Forestry In 1898, Pinchot became the head of the Division of Forestry, which was part of the
United States Department of Agriculture. Pinchot is known for reforming the management and development of forests in the United States and for advocating the conservation of the nation's reserves by planned use and renewal. His approach set him apart from some other leading forestry experts, especially
Bernhard E. Fernow and
Carl A. Schenck. In contrast to Pinchot's national vision, Fernow advocated a regional approach, while Schenck favored private enterprise effort. Pinchot's main contribution was his leadership in promoting scientific forestry and emphasizing the controlled, profitable use of forests and other natural resources so they would be of maximum benefit to mankind. He coined the term
conservation ethic as applied to natural resources. The Division of Forestry did not have direct control over the national forest reserves, which were instead assigned to the
U.S. Department of Interior, but Pinchot reached an arrangement with the Department of Interior and state agencies to work on reserves. In 1900, Pinchot established the
Society of American Foresters, an organization that helped bring credibility to the new profession of forestry, and was part of the broader
professionalization movement underway in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Pursuant to the goal of professionalization, the Pinchot family endowed a 2-year graduate-level School of Forestry at Yale University, which is now known as the
Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment. It became the third school in the U.S. that trained professional foresters, after the
New York State College of Forestry at Cornell and the
Biltmore Forest School. Central to his publicity work was his creation of news for magazines and newspapers.
Chief of the United States Forest Service Pinchot's friend,
Theodore Roosevelt, became president in 1901, and Pinchot became part of the latter's informal "Tennis Cabinet". Pinchot and Roosevelt shared the view that the federal government must act to regulate public lands and provide for the scientific management of public resources. In 1905, Roosevelt and Pinchot convinced Congress to establish the
United States Forest Service, an agency charged with overseeing the country's forest reserves. As the first head of the Forest Service, Pinchot implemented a decentralized structure that empowered local civil servants to make decisions about conservation and forestry. Pinchot's conservation philosophy was influenced by ethnologist
William John McGee and
utilitarian philosopher
Jeremy Bentham, as well as the ethos of the
Progressive Era. Like many other Progressive Era reformers, Pinchot emphasized that his field was important primarily for its social utility and could be best understood through scientific methods. He was generally opposed to preservation for the sake of wilderness or scenery, a fact perhaps best illustrated by the important support he offered to the damming of
Hetch Hetchy Valley in
Yosemite National Park. Pinchot used the rhetoric of the market economy to disarm critics of efforts to expand the role of government: scientific management of forests and natural resources was profitable. While most of his battles were with timber companies that he thought had too narrow a time horizon, he also battled the forest preservationists like John Muir, who were deeply opposed to commercializing nature. Pinchot's policies also aroused opposition from ranchers, who opposed regulation of livestock grazing in public lands. The Roosevelt administration's efforts to regulate public land led to blowback in Congress, which moved to combat "Pinchotism" and reassert control over the Forest Service. In 1907, Congress passed an act prohibiting the president from creating more forest reserves. With Pinchot's help, President Roosevelt responded by creating 16 million acres (65,000 km²) of new National Forests (which became known as "
midnight forests") just minutes before he lost the legal power to do so. Despite congressional opposition, Roosevelt, Pinchot, and Secretary of the Interior
James R. Garfield continued to find ways to protect public land from private development during Roosevelt's last two years in office. Pinchot hand-picked
William Greeley, the son of a Congregational minister, who finished at the top of that first Yale forestry graduating class of 1904, to be the Forest Service's Region 1 forester, with responsibility over 41 million acres (170,000 km2) in 22 National Forests in four western states (all of Montana, much of Idaho, Washington, and a corner of South Dakota).[3]
Fire Storm of 1910 and the descent of the Forest Service , 1909 One year after the
Great Fire of 1910, the religious Greeley succeeded in receiving a promotion to a high administration job in Washington. In 1920, he became Chief of the Forest Service. The fire of 1910 convinced him that Satan was at work, the fire converted him into a fire extinguishing partisan who elevated firefighting to the raison d'être — the overriding mission — of the Forest Service.[3] Under Greeley, the Service became the fire engine company, protecting trees at government expense so the timber industry could cut them down later. Pinchot was appalled. The timber industry successfully oriented the Forestry Service toward policies favorable to large-scale harvesting via regulatory capture, and the timber industry was seen as the fox in the chicken coop.[25] Pinchot and Roosevelt had envisioned, at the least, that public timber should be sold only to small, family-run logging outfits, not to big syndicates. Pinchot had always preached of a "working forest" for working people and small-scale logging at the edge, preservation at the core. In 1928 Bill Greeley left the Forest Service for a position in the timber industry, becoming an executive with the West Coast Lumberman's Association.[26] When Pinchot traveled west in 1937, to view those forests with Henry S. Graves, what they saw "tore his heart out". Greeley's legacy, combining modern chain saws and government-built forest roads, had allowed industrial-scale clear-cuts to become the norm in the western national forests of Montana and Oregon. Entire mountainsides, mountain after mountain, were treeless. "So this is what saving the trees was all about." "Absolute devastation", Pinchot wrote in his diary. "The Forest Service should absolutely declare against
clear-cutting in Washington and Oregon as a defensive measure", Pinchot wrote.[27]
Pinchot–Ballinger controversy Pinchot continued to lead the Forest Service after Republican
William Howard Taft succeeded Roosevelt in 1909, but did not retain the level of influence he had held under Roosevelt. Taft mistrusted Pinchot and did not have patience for Pinchot operating with more authority than what Taft thought was appropriate. Taft once stated, "Pinchot is a socialist and a spiritualist, a strange combination and one that is capable of any extreme act." After taking office, Taft replaced Secretary of the Interior
James Rudolph Garfield with
Richard Ballinger. The tension between Ballinger and Taft on the one hand and their predecessors Pinchot and Roosevelt on the other lay less in any differing level of commitment to conservation than in differing scruples over legality, a contrast summed up by Senator
Francis G. Newlands of
Nevada:There is no real difference of opinion between those who believe with Mr. Ballinger and those who believe with Mr. Pinchot regarding the legislation which should be enacted as to the conservation of our natural resources. The difference which exists between them is as to the authority of law. Mr. Garfield... and Mr. Pinchot have both taken the view that the Executive Department, as the custodian of the great public domain,
can do anything that is necessary for the protection and conservation of that domain which is not forbidden by law. ... I propose now to state the position of Mr. Ballinger — it is that in the protection and conservation of the public domain the Interior Department, or the Executive Department,
has only those powers expressly authorized by law. When Ballinger approved of long-disputed mining claims to coal deposits in Alaska in 1909, Land Office agent
Louis Glavis broke governmental protocol by going outside the Interior Department to seek help from Pinchot. Concerned about the possibility of fraud in the claim, and skeptical of Ballinger's commitment to conservation, Pinchot intervened in the dispute on behalf of Glavis. In the midst of a budding controversy, Taft came down in favor of Ballinger, who was authorized to dismiss Glavis. Though Taft hoped to avoid further controversy, Pinchot became determined to dramatize the issue by forcing his own dismissal. After Pinchot publicly criticized Ballinger for several months, Taft dismissed Pinchot in January 1910. Pinchot maneuvered behind the scenes to ensure the appointment of his ally,
Henry S. Graves, as the new head of the Forest Service. An investigation two decades later by
Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior under
Franklin Roosevelt, led Ickes to conclude that Pinchot's allegations against Ballinger were unfounded and that Pinchot's motive for making them was an appetite for publicity. ==Political career, 1910–1935==