Money Trees: The Douglas Fir and American Forestry, 1900–1944 by Emily K. Brock

Abstract

Reviews MONEY TREES: THE DOUGLAS FIR AND AMERICAN FORESTRY, 1900–1944 by Emily K. Brock Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2015. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 256 pages. $27.95 paper. In her new book Money Trees, environmental historian Emily Brock traces the evolution of forestry as a scientific field of study and the outsized role that Douglas fir forests in the Pacific Northwest played in shaping the profession. Federal land managers and private timberland owners alike wanted to maximize profit on the Doug fir lands but avoid the damage caused by aggressive harvests that years earlier wrecked lands and economies across the Northeast, the Great Lakes, and the South. According to Brock, local imperatives from the Oregon and Washington coasts shaped national debates about the utility of forestry as a science and its role in forest management. American forestry at the turn of the century was primarily a prescriptive science, meaning it focused on how to efficiently grow trees. Ecology, on the other hand, was a descriptive science that studied the components of a forest and how they interacted. The heart of the book is Brock’s examination of the differences between these two fields as well as early foresters ’ efforts to direct the profession toward one approach or the other. The first Chief of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot — himself the first American trained as a forester — placed the agency at the cutting edge of this debate. He created a science and research branch within the Forest Service and placed Raphael Zon at its head. Together they advocated and set the agency on a course to examine and study how trees interacted with local environments using the descriptive pattern of inquiry from ecology. Money and politics, particularly in the Doug fir lands, soon changed the course of forestry and the management of the National Forests. In the 1930s, the Great Depression tightened its grip on the American economy. The enormous amount of potential capital in harvestable timber in Oregon and Washington promised relief and changed the political calculus of the timber industry, the federal government, and the debate within forestry about the purpose of the new profession. New Deal programs directed the Forest Service to employ Americans in forestry-related work and focus on sustainable harvests in the Pacific Northwest. Some professional foresters saw an opportunity to put their knowledge of silviculture to good use while Zon and Pinchot favored, in their minds, a purer scientific focus of analyzing the ecosystem and how it worked. This debate played out in the policy corridors of the Forest Service in Washington, D.C., as well as on the pages of profession’s leading journal, the Journal of Forestry. Zon and ecological foresters lost the war over the direction of forestry. The profession took a decided turn on federal and private lands in the 1940s toward maximizing harvests. Beginning in the Pacific Northwest, sustainable yield shaped the profession for decades to come. So thoroughly did the profession and the Forest Service adopt sustainable yield and maximizing harvests on the profession and the Forest Service that a number of influential foresters, including Aldo Leopold and Robert Marshall, left the agency and formed the Wilderness Society in part to advocate for a different focus within the forestry profession. The battles fought in the 1930s and 1940s over the direction of the forestry profession were re-fought in the 1970s when ecological forestry reappeared. By the 1990s, ecological forestry was the de facto policy — a transition that is chronicled in Samuel Hays’s book War in the Woods. Such was the impact of this shift within the profession and the management of federal lands as a whole. Brock’s book is a good primer to understanding that science is never static and is rarely the sole determiner in land management policy: culture, politics, economics, and capital all play parts in determining the course of federal forest policy. This book would be very appropriate for graduate classes in the history of science and environmental history, particularly for those interested in the history of public land management and in Oregon history. Lincoln Bramwell Washington, D.C. 103 ...