• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4089 0

who wrote Man and Nature, and he took seriously Marsh’s concern that parts of Asia Minor, North Africa, Greece, and Alpine Europe had been deforested to the die-off point of being as barren as a moonscape. “The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence, and of like duration with that through which traces of that crime and that improvidence extend, would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness,” Marsh had written, “of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.”15

The label applied to Pinchot time and again, borrowed from the Scottish philosopher John Stuart Mill, was “utilitarian.” In conservationist terms, this meant a believer in wise use of natural resources. But the label also unfairly minimized (and at times maligned) Pinchot’s lifetime effort to preserve and expand many of America’s most magnificent forestlands. He was a tireless crusader for both utilitarian forest preserves and wildlife protection. “The eyes do not look as if they read books,” Owen Wister wrote of Pinchot, “but as if they gazed upon a Cause.”16

Pinchot first came to Governor Roosevelt’s serious attention in 1896, when President Cleveland appointed the Yalie chief forester; however, they had dined together once, in May 1894. (Roosevelt, in fact, wrote Pinchot a quick note following the meal: “I did not begin to ask you all the questions I wanted to.”) 17 By 1897, Roosevelt thought enough of Pinchot to nominate him for the Boone and Crockett Club.18 And in 1898, when Pinchot became President McKinley’s head of the Division of Forestry (renamed in 1905 the United States Forest Service), Roosevelt roared his approval. Independently wealthy, using the family fortune to help promote western reserves, almost British in demeanor, Pinchot saw himself as the Exeter-and Yale-trained advocate, press agent, and spokesperson of a new forestry movement. His nickname was: “the Chief” (or “G.P.”) and his forestry associates were “Little G.P.s.” In his 1936 book Just Fishing Talk, Pinchot said that when he was a teenager, the Adirondacks had been his touchstone place, the woodlands where he learned to catch brook trout and painted turtles. As with Roosevelt, the Adirondacks had given Pinchot, a world-class fly-fisherman, “a new and lasting conception of the wilderness.”19

In early February 1899 Pinchot finally spent significant time with his idol and family friend. The governor had invited him to spend an evening in the Eagle Street mansion. Roosevelt had become something of a roadside attraction in Albany since inauguration day, with everybody wanting a moment of his time. Cognizant of Roosevelt’s new Rough Riders fame, Pinchot was grateful to have been included in Roosevelt’s frenetically full calendar. Accompanying Pinchot to the meeting was the architect Grant La Farge, the son of the famous painter and draftsman John La Farge (whose closest friend was Henry Adams).20 Roosevelt not only liked Grant La Farge—a fellow member of the Boone and Crockett Club whose face had a scrubbed Bostonian intellectual look—but named him the New York state architect during his first year as governor. The firm of Heins and La Farge, in fact, was commissioned by Roosevelt to build the Bronx Zoo. At Roosevelt’s recommendation La Farge also received the contract to design the first buildings at the State University of New York–Albany.21

As Pinchot and La Farge waited to be called into the governor’s office, they grew slightly nervous. Understanding that the wildly popular Governor Roosevelt was the most celebrated outdoorsman alive, they hoped to form a united front with him on the pressing forestry issues of the era. Pinchot’s principal concern was that every hour, the United States had fewer trees than an hour before. Deforestation in such places as the Olympics, the Cascades, and the Front Range of the Rockies was now widespread in land tracts not protected by the Cleveland Reserves. (And it