Gifford Pinchot

                An individual’s life experiences personal relationships can shape and define who they are as a person. To understand the decisions someone makes, it is important to first understand the backgrounds and personal information that lead them to such a decision. Looking back into people’s past provides a wealth of insight as to their current state of being. Gifford Pinchot was an avid supporter of wise use methods of environmentalism. In his life he was a student, nature lover, and a politician (Miller 20-45). He saw both sides of the environmental movements through his own family, school, and later his job. Pinchot wanted to mend the gap that had formed between the preservationist, conservationist, and private land owners with the rights to clear cut of the purposes of profit and industry (Pinchot 73). Pinchot sought to find common ground and pave the way for other future foresters. During his life he worked to protect nature and utilize it for industrial purposes, wisely.  Pinchot’s knowledge and experiences allowed him to devise rational solutions to forestry problems.  He took these solutions to the public and expressed them in a fashion that could evoke real political change.

                Gifford Pinchot was born on August 11^th, 1865 in Simsbury, Connecticut.  He was born into a life of privilege and wealth.  As a child his life was micro-managed to ensure that “he could have a brilliant and eminent career whatever the focus” (Miller 57-58). His parents knew he was a bright boy and Pinchot’s biographer Char Miller found that his parents would push him and do anything to ensure he was successful in life, even to the detriment of Pinchot’s childhood (Miller 55-58).  During this period in his life Gifford’s parent constantly moved him from his grandparent’s home in Simsbury, Connecticut and a Fifth Avenue Hotel in New Hotel in New York City. When Gifford was around five the Pinchot’s went abroad for three years to Italy, Germany, France and England (Miller 58). Spontaneous trips such as these became a fixture in his life.  The lack of stability took a toll on young Gifford’s formal education. Gifford’s parents resolved this problem by replacing traditional academia with cultural experiences, privet tutors, or enrolling him in a local school wherever they maybe at the time (Miller 59). During his childhood he lacked stability and consistency.  His parents seemed to disregard the needs of their child in replace of their own wants.  Being so young surrounded by wealth yet void of childhood jubilation and unconditional love must have taken a toll on Pinchot.  It was not that his parent did not love him, however the combination of his parents high expectations, and intense grooming for the future provided many opportunities for him to disappoint them.

                When Pinchot was thirteen-years-old, he had his first encounter with true wilderness. Pinchot later said in retrospect that that experience was critical to his life’s course. He father took him to Keene Valley to see undomesticated landscape. To Pinchot it was like nothing he had seen before.  This valley contained no over population, disease, industry, or cultivated land. All he saw there was wild land in nestled in the Adirondacks. (Miller 16-17) During a stay in England in 1880 a fifteen-year-old Gifford started showing a real interest in the natural word. He voiced his delight in England’s bucolic landscape, fishing, and showed disdain for London’s noise, filth, and chaos (Miller 59).  A year later the Pinchot’s enrolled Gifford in New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy. This was Gifford first, most sustained period of time away from his parents and he thrived there. It was a settled, consistent environment. He graduated four years later in 1865 (Miller 60). After Phillips Exeter Academy, Gifford continued his studies at Yale University. During his time at Yale he studied the sciences, anything from meteorology, geology, and astronomy to biology and ecology (Miller 67). Gifford loved his time at Yale; he was always actively involved in Yale’s social and non-academic activities. He was often playing pranks, trying out for sport teams, and was even inducted into the famous Skull and Cross Bones secret society (Miller 68). Gifford Pinchot graduated from Yale with a degree in general sciences in 1889 (Miller 67-69). It was at Yale that he decided what he wanted to pursue in life. Gifford wanted to study forestry. Unfortunately, at that time none of the schools in the United States offered forestry programs for graduate students. Consequently, the Pinchot family used their means to send Gifford to the French National Forestry School in Nancy, France (Miller 70-75).  “As I learn more of Forestry,” Gifford wrote in Nancy “I see more the need of it in the U.S. and the great difficulty of carrying it into effect” (Miller 80). Pinchot describes the lack of organization and structure in the U.S.’s government agencies dealing in regards to the environment. During this period in time the U.S. government had three separate government organizations to oversee resources. Different branches dealt with minerals, streams, forests, wild life, soil, soil erosion, etc (Pinchot 73).  He wanted to unify these organizations and change how the U.S. thought about forestry. At Nancy he learned about land rent, interest rates, forest capital, the most effective methods of sustaining a forest’s yield of wood, new growth cycles, economic evaluation of a forest wood, and silviculture (Miller 83). I believe it was there that he learned to see forests as a commodity, and a resource to evaluated and then utilize. But it was his trip to Keene Valley that showed him that wilderness is something to appreciate and respect. He never received his postgraduate degree from Nancy, because he left after only a year to return to the United States (Miller 94-97).

                Pinchot work several job after returning to the U.S. but nothing like the job he was appointed to in 1898. Pinchot was promoted to the head of the Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture and retained this title when the name changed to the Forest Service (Miller 138). This is where Pinchot’s ideas were realized and where his talents shined. As a masterful publicist and now head of the Forest service Pinchot became the driving force behind the progressive conservation movement (Pinchot 73). Wise Use was originally an idea that Pinchot had about forestry that he brought to Theodore Roosevelt “who understood, accepted and adopted the idea without the smallest hesitation,” according to Pinchot (Pinchot 75). Pinchot was never a nature writer. He never spoke lyrically or invoked imagery through his descriptions of nature. What Pinchot did do was much different. He wrote about Wise Use. In Gifford Pinchot’s The Fight for Conservation he wrote that “the first principle of [wise use] is development, the use of the natural resources now existing on this continent for the benefit of the people who live here now” (Pinchot 76-77). Pinchot wanted to explain that progress and development was going to happen even within the confines of the wise use idea. He explains that wise use is for the people of today and not to protect resources for a theoretical future people.  He continued by explaining that

“[wise use] does mean provision for the future, but it means also first of all the recognition of the right of the present generation to the fullest necessary use of resources with which this country is so abundantly blessed. [wise use] demands the welfare of this generation first, and afterward the welfare of the generations to follow”(Pinchot 76)

This quotation provides further explanation that wise use will provide for the people who live in the present day but will also allow for peoples children and grandchildren to be provided for as well. It is an argument against complete destruction of natural resources and preservation which doesn’t allow for the use of any resources. Pinchot is displaying a middle ground. 

                Gifford Pinchot did everything he could in his life to change how the U.S. thought about sustainable forestry. He is credited with being the first American to choose forestry as a career. Pinchot has a passion for the natural world and a knack for the sciences.  His structured and conforming upbringing was instrumental in forming the man he became. His father and mother were very hard on him when it came to academics but they also showed him the world and different cultures that most would never get a chance to experience. He was able to see different environments, urban and rural and how each country dealt with sustaining it.  That allowed him to think about other approaches to sustainable forestry that were not being taught in the United States. Gifford Pinchot legacy is the Forest Service. Without his help it might have never been created.  He will always be remembered as America’s first forester.