Redécouvrir Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946)

Abstract

Gifford Pinchot was born in 1865 to a family of French descent that made its fortune from mining in the forests of Pennsylvania. He graduated from Yale in 1889 and went to Europe to study forestry for 13 months under the advice of his father with the intention of making forestry his profession – something unheard at the time in the United States. He went on to become a paid forest manager and then a self-employed consultant before acquiring a reputation from his publications and being appointed in 1896 as the only non-scientific member of an ad hoc committee of the National Academy of Sciences where he met John Muir. He became special advisor to the United States Department of Agriculture’s Division of Forestry and then head of the US Forest Service that was established in 1905 at the USDA, where he efficiently organised the new service. He was a friend of President Theodore Roosevelt on whom he had a strong influence. He broadened the scope of his investigations and activities to all natural resources and promoted a new approach that he referred to as “conservation”, in particular through the Conference of Governors, which met in 1907, and then through an international conference that brought together Mexico, Canada and the United States. He was fired in 1910 for insubordination following his public conflict with Richard Ballinger, Secretary of the Interior for President Taft. Thereafter he spent some time on various forest lobbying activities before being appointed in 1920 to the position of State Commissioner of the Forestry Division, and then of the new Inland Waterways and Forestry Department of Pennsylvania. He then embarked on a political career, and became governor of Pennsylvania for two terms, but was unable to get himself elected as Senator, before unsuccessfully running for the presidency as the Republican candidate. In 1940, he came up with the idea of an international conference on conservation as a foundation of permanent peace, which eventually led in 1949 to the holding of a United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources. But Pinchot had died of leukaemia in 1946 soon after finishing his “forestry testament” called Breaking new Ground. In the history of ideas, he remains the father of “conservation” and one of the first theoreticians of multi-use forestry, i.e. the roots of modern day multi-functional forestry. He is now considered one of the forerunners of the concept of “sustainable development”. After falling into oblivion for a time he once again became source of inspiration for some very different movements in the United States. As a man, and especially as a forestry theorist, he is more complex and innovative than the cliched image of him that the US Forest Service presented for a long time.