The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [214]
Grinnell believed that for all his Rough Rider’s machismo, in private Governor Roosevelt wasn’t a know-it-all. Constantly, as his own correspondence bears out, Roosevelt would seek advice from acclaimed zoologists and foresters. Which herpetologist was the expert on snapping turtles? Which forester knew about a new strain of invasive fungi? Shouldn’t George Perkins Marsh’s The Earth as Modified by Human Action be carefully studied before the state allowed a paper company access to Bear Mountain? Basically, Governor Roosevelt wanted the state bureaucracy reduced and cronyism purged from natural resource management. One good silviculturist or pisiculturist, he believed, was worth more than any number of politicians looking to have their palms greased. Governor Roosevelt, in fact, advocated changing the commission altogether: from having five members to having only one scientific forestry leader—an idea also enthusiastically promoted by Gifford Pinchot.9
Pinchot was only thirty-four years old in 1899 but had established himself as an independent progressive of some note. Although he had been born in Connecticut, he was uncommonly proud of his French ancestry.10 His father, James Wallace Pinchot, a broad-ranging intellectual, had been an intimate friend of the elder Theodore Roosevelt.11 A graduate of Yale University (class of 1889, summa cum laude), Pinchot played on its football team as a reserve and was a member of the campus-based YMCA and a regular volunteer at the Y’s Grand Street Mission in New Haven.12 Strong, handsome, and notable for his porcelain-blue eyes, Pinchot was in such fine pulmonary shape that he could read from The Compleat Angler while doing a one-armed push-up. After college Pinchot spent more than a year at the École Nationale Forestière in Nancy, France, studying forest conservation. As part of his education he toured the most ably managed ancient woodlands of France and Germany. Meteorology, botany, and even astronomy came easily to Pinchot; he took up anything that could help him decode the mysterious forests of the world. Pinchot’s father had been a mainstay of the American Forestry Association, strongly advocating conservation management. Inspired by his father, Pinchot decided in his early twenties to dedicate his life to forest conservation. As proof of his pro-forestry convictions, he helped transform the family estate, Grey Towers in Milford, Pennsylvania, into a tree nursery, “the first forest experiment station in the nation to encourage the reforestation of denuded lands.”13
At the time Pinchot began foresting at Grey Towers, the United States had no university or college forestry program. He wanted to change that unfortunate situation. In 1892 he began the first serious systematic forestry work in American history at the timberlands of George Vanderbilt’s mansion, Biltmore, outside of Asheville, North Carolina.14 At the start nobody knew whether it was an advanced pilot program against catastrophism or a hillbilly boondoggle. Before long, however, this wasn’t a question: Pinchot’s forestry methods helped Biltmore prosper. In 1892 he opened an office in New York City, marketing himself as a forestry consultant. Pinchot wanted Americans to avoid the kind of horrific deforestation that had taken place in Europe ever since the industrial revolution oversaw the reckless wholesale destruction of the continent’s natural resources. Pinchot was a devotee of George Perkins Marsh, the pioneering Vermont conservationist