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PINCHOT, GIFFORD. A primer of forestry. Part I -- the forest. By Gifford Pinchot, Forester [with] A primer of forestry. Part II -- practical forestry. By Gifford Pinchot, Forester. Wahington: Government Printing Office, 1899; 1905. 17.8x12.7 (12mo), two volumes: pp. [1-2] [1-2] 3-88 [89-90]; [1-2] [1-2] 3 [4] 5-88, illustrations, original green cloth, front panels stamped in gold and blind, spine panels stamped in gold, rear panels stamped in blind. First edition. At head of title: "Bulletin No. 24. / U. S. Department of Agriculture. / Division of Forestry" and "Bulletin No. 24, Part II. / U. S. Department of Agriculture. / Division of Forestry." Considerable coverage of forests and logging on the Pacific Coast, including the Sequoia gigantea in California's Sierra Nevada. "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. That same 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 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. 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. Under his leadership, the number of individuals employed by the Division of Forestry grew from 60 in 1898 to 500 in 1905; he also hired numerous part-time employees who worked only during the summer. 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. ... 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 km) 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 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. After taking office, Taft replaced Secretary of the Interior James Rudolph Garfield with Richard Ballinger. 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. 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 km) in 22 National Forests in four western states (all of Montana, much of Idaho, Washington, and a corner of South Dakota). 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. Under Greeley, the Service became the fire engine company, protecting trees so the timber industry could cut them down later at government expense. Pinchot was appalled. The timber industry successfully oriented the Forestry Service toward policies favorable to large-scale harvesting via regulatory capture, and metaphorically, the timber industry was now the fox in the chicken coop. 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. 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. At Roosevelt's request, Pinchot met Roosevelt in Europe in 1910, where they discussed Pinchot's dismissal by Taft. Roosevelt subsequently expressed disappointment with Taft's policies and began to publicly distance himself from Taft. Along with Amos Pinchot and several other individuals, Pinchot helped establish the Progressive Party, which nominated Roosevelt for president in the 1912 United States presidential election ... Though Pinchot campaigned extensively for Roosevelt, Roosevelt and Taft were both defeated by Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Pinchot continued to affiliate with the Progressives after the 1912 election, working to build the party in Pennsylvania. He ran as the Progressive nominee in the 1914 U.S. Senate election, but was defeated by incumbent Republican Senator Boies Penrose.[56] The Progressive Party collapsed after Roosevelt refused to run in the 1916 presidential election, and Pinchot subsequently rejoined the Republican Party. He supported Republican Warren G. Harding's successful campaign in the 1920 presidential election, but, despite some speculation that he would be appointed as Secretary of Agriculture, did not receive a position in Harding's administration. After leaving office in 1910, Pinchot took up leadership of the National Conservation Association (NCA), a conservationist non-governmental organization that he had helped found the previous year. The organization, which ceased operations in 1923, never attracted as many members as Pinchot had initially hoped, but its efforts affected conservation-related legislation" (Wikipedia). Cloth rubbed at edges, several small abrasions to cloth on rear cover of part two, a very good copy. (#166546).