"…where conflicting interests must be reconciled, the question will always be decided from the standpoint of the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run."
Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot's oft-quoted exhortation to the agency he created is the bedrock on which the agency's "multiple use" mission was founded. One hundred years after its founding, the service reflects on the past century in a new documentary entitled "The Greatest Good."
Two Forest Service administrators and one of the filmmakers were on hand April 13 for a screening of the film on the University of Colorado's Boulder campus. Not merely a celebration of the agency's accomplishments, the film is illuminated by the bitter conflicts of the past century over forest fires, the impacts of recreation and—perhaps most contentious of all—logging in the national forests. Without offering any neat answers, the film asks its audience, What really is the greatest good? And for whom?
"We didn't want to make a film that just said, 'Oh boy, Forest Service, aren't you great,'" filmmaker Dave Steinke said during the panel discussion following the film. "Because we wouldn't want to watch that, and I'd assume you [would] not either."
"Multiple use" means that public lands should satisfy a variety of needs of the American people, from conserving open space to generating income. To that end, the 1960 Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act directed the Forest Service to manage the lands for recreation, grazing, timber, water and fish and wildlife—a tall order, and one that has probably never been met to anyone's satisfaction. But even if the act codified the concept of multiple use, the roots of the ideal go back to the agency's founding document, a letter ostensibly written by Agriculture Secretary James Wilson to Gifford Pinchot, but which was most likely authored by Pinchot himself. It was in that letter, written in February 1905 at the founding of the modern Forest Service, that Pinchot's famous "greatest good" quote was recorded.
It was not an idea that came out of nowhere for the man the film called "America's first homegrown forester."
Pinchot came from money, with a family that sent him to study forestry in Europe and later bankrolled the first forestry school in the United States at Yale University. He also had connections, one of his best-known friends being Theodore Roosevelt. Both Pinchot and Roosevelt chafed at the actions of the "robber barons" who were, in their eyes, raping the land of its natural resources for their own financial gain. At the same time, the Interior Department's General Land Office couldn't give federally owned land away fast enough. In response to the two pressures of privatization and exploitation of the public lands, Roosevelt and Pinchot began setting aside forest reserves.
While two previous presidents—Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland—had created some forest reserves, Teddy Roosevelt outdid them many times over. In his second term alone, he set aside upwards of 80 million acres. In 1907 Congress responded to his zeal with the Fulton Amendment, an appropriations rider that took away the presidential power to reserve forest lands. Roosevelt signed the bill, but not before adding another 16 million acres to the national forest system—lands that were designated by Pinchot and his assistant, who circled them on a map the night before Roosevelt signed the bill. These last-minute reserves are called Roosevelt's "midnight forests."
Once the forests reserves had been created, the debates began over how to use them. Americans would never have accepted the idea of forest reserves if the intent was to set land aside for its own sake, historian Alfred Runte said in the film. Instead, Pinchot promised that the land would be used for the people. The 1905 manual, The Use of the National Forest Reserves: Regulations and Instructions, written by Pinchot and his staff, states:
"Forest reserves are for the purpose of preserving a perpetual supply of timber for home industries, preventing destruction of forest cover which regulates the flow of streams, and protecting local residents from unfair competition in the use of forest and range. They are patrolled and protected, at Government expense, for the benefit of the community and the home builder."
But societal values shift, and in the last century the Forest Service has found itself in the middle of a sometimes bitter conflict over how best to use the national forests.
In 1935 a small group of men that included Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall—both of whom had cut their teeth in the Forest Service—founded the Wilderness Society. Concerned with the impacts that roads and facilities were making on the public lands, the men argued for the preservation of some of that land in its "natural" condition.
As early as 1924 the Forest Service, at Leopold's behest, had set aside the 500,000 acre Gila Wilderness as an administrative wilderness area. But in later years, the Forest Service fought against passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which defined wilderness as "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." Preserving land as wilderness, the agency reasoned, was a single use of the land and didn't fit within the agency's multiple-use mandate.
But there was another reason, too, why the service chafed at the popular legislation. The Forest Service was "used to thinking of itself heroically," environmental historian William Cronon said in the film. And it was also famous for its stubborn can-do attitude that one audience member at the screening characterized as "sometimes wrong but never in doubt." That attitude likely exacerbated the fight that was soon to erupt over logging in the national forests.
In the middle of the twentieth century, more and more people turned to the woods for recreation and solitude. At the same time, the Forest Service was facing immense pressure to "get the cut out," or produce as much timber as possible for the burgeoning post-World War II population and the homes that would shelter them. As hikers and picnickers came face to face with ugly clearcuts in their national forests, a conflict was inevitable.
Before World War II, the average annual timber cut in the national forests was ?? billion board feet [gotta look that number up]. In the 1980s, it skyrocketed to nearly 12 billion board feet per year, which caused a major backlash from many environmentalists and recreationists. That battle mirrored a similar one inside the service itself. Jeff DeBonis, a timber sale planner in Oregon's Willamette National Forest, became fed up with the high timber cut and founded Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, with the goal of pushing the Forest Service to manage its lands in a more ecologically and economically sustainable manner.
| Clearcutting in the 1960s, especially in the Pacific Northwest (above), inspired radical environmentalists such as those in Earth First! (below) to campaign against the Forest Service. |
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Looking back, even some high-level Forest Service employees acknowledge in the film that they went too far during the 1980s. Orville Daniels, former Forest Supervisor for the Lolo and Bitterroot National Forests in Montana, said that during those years the agency "went to the dark side" in its attempt to get the cut out. Dale Robertson, Forest Service Chief from 1987 to 1993, said the agency during the timber-hungry 1980s really stretched the multiple-use concept by taking timber at a rate that was not sustainable.
But in the post-film panel discussion, Rick Cables, forester for the Rocky Mountain region, challenged the film's criticism of the agency as a whole, saying the timber frenzy was isolated in one area of the country.
"The Northwest, northern California, Idaho, Montana is where the whole agency got painted with one broad brush—that we all went to the dark side," he said. "And I don’t accept it, personally. Because that never happened to me."
Still, he and other panel members acknowledged that the public is more skeptical of the Forest Service now because of the perception that the service went too far with logging.
"Trust was lost, and that still plagues us," said James Bedwell, forest surpervisor for Colorado's Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests and Pawnee National Grassland.
That distrust was illustrated by one audience member, who said President Bush's Healthy Forests Restoration Act could be called the "leave no tree behind act." Cables responded that such a characterization is "patently absurd." Still, he acknowledged the public's distrust as an obstacle the agency still has to face.
"The only way that you rebuild trust that I know is you make promises and you keep them," he said.
The Greatest Good is primarily a chronological overview, a history of great men—and a small handful of women—who created the Forest Service of today. For people who care about the public lands, it's a fascinating and enlightening journey. But most intriguing, perhaps, are the questions and the conflicts that it leaves unanswered.
In looking toward the future, filmmaker Steinke said he hopes the next documentary would tell a story about a Forest Service that survived budget cuts, avoided being absorbed into a "Department of Natural Resources," and maybe even managed to expand its land base.
"And it would be really neat to see another Pinchot, and another Leopold, and another [early forester Elers] Koch…" he said. "And I think another Earth First!, and another—maybe not Earth First!—maybe a better Sierra Club, to have that passion, I think, that makes for great story telling."
For more information about "The Greatest Good," including background material, interviews with the producers and upcoming screening dates, see the Web site at www.fs.fed.us/greatestgood.
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