Column by George Sibley
Forest Service – April 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
IN AMERICA we often find ourselves surrounded by Big Ideas that may or may not be helpful in the daily running of our local lives. Democracy, Freedom, Markets, Social Safety Nets, Big Ideas are getting worked out in the cultural environment around us, the way big things like glaciers or global climate get worked out in the natural environment around us.
But the Big Idea that literally surrounds most of us here in Central Colorado is the National Forest Idea. There’s no way into the Upper Gunnison Valley that doesn’t involve crossing through or over public lands, mostly National Forest land. Gunnison National Forest is 55 percent of Gunnison County; Curecanti National Recreation Area and Bureau of Land Management land make up another 30 percent, which means that, here in the heart of the individualistic West, where private property – another Big Idea – is all but worshipped, only about 15 percent of the county is in private hands. We’re probably in the upper end of that public-to-private land ratio, but there’s not a county in Central Colorado that is less than half public land.
This is a good year to examine this National Forest Idea over on the Gunnison side of Central Colorado, because it’s the centennial of the creation of the Gunnison National Forest. In May of 1905, Theodore Roosevelt withdrew the greater part of the Gunnison National Forest from further “privatization.” And 2005 is also the centennial of the United States Forest Service, the professional management corps for all of the National Forests.
The “National Forest Idea” came into being mostly in reaction to the more disturbing consequences of the “privatization” idea that had prevailed through the 19th century. Giving away the public domain, in accord with Jefferson’s vision of millions of yeoman farmers creating thousands of decentralized democratic communities, had worked to some extent in some places. But much of that free land had simply fed the growth of the Euro-American urban-industrial behemoth that the Jeffersonians had come West, all the way from Europe, to escape.
A burgeoning timber industry used the land to get free trees, after which the land was just abandoned. Open-range cattlemen grew rich off the grasslands without even bothering to file on what they used and ultimately abused. Miners who lucked into rich strikes got access to their millions for five bucks an acre, and took no responsibility for the leaking shafts they eventually abandoned.
We saw the heritage of this legacy of unconsidered privatization in Central Colorado when the Arkansas ran orange. We see it still in former grasslands that are now mostly sage and cheatgrass. We can even see it in our beautiful aspen stands, which are — at least partially — the result of heavy logging and also burning to expose rock outcrops.
The National Forest Idea began late in the 19th century (mostly driven by Easterners) with a Congressional decision to simply stop giving everything away. In 1891, after timidly creating a couple of National Parks, Congress began its 20th-century tradition of giving away its power in order to avoid having to accept responsibility, and thus it gave the President authority to reserve from settlement parts of the public domain that were important to either timber or water production.
Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley and Roosevelt set aside 151 million acres of Forest Reserves, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Roosevelt was the most enthusiastic by far, setting aside more than two-thirds of that. Roosevelt withdrew so much of the public domain from settlement that even the easterners were persuaded that this National Forest Idea was going too far, and in 1907 Congress took that power away from the president.
SO WHAT IS THE National Forest Idea? It is something that – like democracy, freedom, free markets, and all of the other Big Ideas – is still evolving. In 1891, the idea was vague but urgent: Stop the devastation by limiting access to vulnerable areas.
No one, however, really had a concept of what should be done with these “Forest Reserves.” So in 1897 Congress passed a Forest Management Act (the “Organic Act”) that expanded the idea, saying the forest reserves were to be “used” rather than just “preserved,” but not used so wantonly, and it authorized the hiring of “forest rangers” – with no criteria for training or experience – to begin working out what that meant.
The process, however, was still under the General Land Office, whose whole institutional mentality was oriented toward giving land away. So the next step was crafted by Theodore Roosevelt and his great friend and influence, Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot was a forester of the European school; basically such foresters were hired by European nobles to devise ways to protect and extend the private forests and forest resources (to provide for good hunting and some income from timber on their lands).
In 1905, under the aegis of a very utilitarian conception of “conservation,” Roosevelt and Pinchot got Congress to move the forest reserves, from the General Land Office to Pinchot’s Forestry Division in the Department of Agriculture — tree farming, anyone? — where Pinchot created a trained professional U.S. Forest Service.
Although the National Forests (the official designation for the Forest Reserves after 1908) were established to save the forests for the people, the aristocratic Pinchot was no populist when it came to managing the forests. Alfred Runte, in The National Forest Idea (published in 1991 for the centennial of the first Forest Reserves), said it well:
“Pinchot’s challenge … was to convince the American people that their historical allowances of self-determination in the exploitation of natural resources now had to give way to the opinion of government ‘experts.’ Put another way, conservation was to be imposed on the population at large.”
AN OPPONENT AT the Gunnison News-Champion thought he knew what was coming down on the valley. Under a banner head, “Immense Forest Reserve, Half of county set aside,” he fulminated against the “theorists in league with railroad attorneys and sheepmen” who had inspired this deed. “The practical effect of these reserves,” he said on the editorial page, “is always to seriously retard if not absolutely to kill the industrial advancement of the country. It looks like a plain case of graft married to stupidity.”
But then (as now) it was hard to argue against expertise (or at least education), professional jargon, et cetera. And as conceived and executed by Pinchot and Roosevelt, the National Forest Idea was at least “present at the creation” of the technocratic government-military-industrial complex that gradually came to dominate American society in the 20th century.
But a funny thing happened on the way to that imperial vision. Mid-century, the Forest Service responded a little too enthusiastically to the national mandate to provide timber for the house that every American would own by – oh, the year 2000, when we would also all have personal helicopters. “Timber beasts,” hand in pocket with the timber industry, started to dominate the Service, and by the 1960s and ’70s the people began to ask embarrassing questions about the Big Idea of conservation. “Trust the experts” ceased to be an acceptable answer.
When the Forest Service was charged with developing long-range resource plans for the National Forests in 1976, it tried to “impose on the population at large” the professional articulation of the desires of the powerful. And to it’s somewhat surprised dismay, the Forest Service discovered that the communities surrounded by National Forests had begun to fill up with a lot of relatively knowledgeable “treehuggers” and misfits in retreat from the mainstream culture who weren’t about to have anything imposed on them by experts in thrall to industry. Thus subsequent discussions about the Big Idea slipped out of the control of the mighty and landed a lot closer to the people.
Which more or less brings us to today. Where does the National Forest Idea go from here?
We’re actually going to explore that at Western State College in Gunnison at a symposium on the occasion of the centennials of Gunnison National Forest and the Forest Service, April 20-21. We’ll hear from Jack Ward Thomas, former Forest Service Chief, who in the 1990s started to edge toward the idea that healthy forests had to be managed as ecosystems in which humans were a big — but not ultimately dominant — part. And there will be other Forest Service people who have had to adopt to changes in the concept of what makes Healthy Forests, and a variety of other people who will have to adapt to whatever the Big Idea brings next. For more information about this, see the symposium website at www.western.edu/envs, or email or call me at gsibley@western.edu, 970-943-2055. It’s all free and open to the public.
I basically like the Forest Service – especially the men and women I’ve known who work “down on the ground,” closer perhaps to specific forest realities than to the Big Idea, and certainly closer to local community realities. There was a time when the Service moved people around more than they do now, to keep them from getting too close to local realities — or to keep them from “going native,” as the saying was. But there is less of that now, and as the local communities become both more environmentally aware and balanced in their varied uses, the Big Idea and what’s down on the ground might be growing closer together.
George Sibley writes from Gunnison, where he teaches at Western State College, organizes conferences, and patronizes the local brew-pub. Sibley is also the author of Dragons in Paradise, a collection of essays now available in local bookstores.