Forest Service

The national forest system in the United States must be considered one of the great success stories of the conservation movement. This remains true despite the continual controversies that seem to accompany administration of national forest lands by the United States Forest Service.

The roots of the Forest Service began with the appointment in 1876 of Franklin B. Hough as a "forestry agent" in the U.S. Department of Agriculture to gather information about the nation's forests. Ten years later, Bernhard E. Fernow was appointed chief of a fledgling Division of Forestry. Part way through Fernow's tenure, Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, which authorized the president to withdraw lands from the public domain to establish federal forest reserves. The public lands were to be administered, however, by the General Land Office in the U.S. Department of the Interior .

Gifford Pinchot succeeded Fernow in 1899 and was Chief Forester when President Theodore Roosevelt approved the transfer of 63 million acres (25 million ha) of forest reserves into the Department of Agriculture in 1905. That same year, the name of the Bureau of Forestry was changed to the United States Forest Service. Two years later, the reserves were redesignated national forests.

The Forest Service today is organized into four administrative levels: the office of the Chief Forester in Washington, D.C.; nine regional offices; 155 national forests; and 637 ranger districts. The Forest Service also administers twenty national grasslands .In addition, a research function is served by a forest products laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, and eight other field research stations.

These lands are used for a wide variety of purposes and given official statutory status with the passage of the Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960. That act officially listed five uses--timber, water, range, wildlife , and recreation--to be administered on national forest lands. Wilderness was later included. Forest Service now administers more than 34 million acres (14 million ha) in 387 units of the wilderness preservation system.

Despite a professionally trained staff and a sustained spirit of public service, Forest Service administration and management of national forest lands has been controversial from the beginning. The agency has experienced repeated attempts to transfer it to the Department of the Interior (or once to a new Department of Natural Resources); its authority to regulate grazing and timber use, including attempts to transfer national forest lands into private hands, has been frequently challenged and some of the Service's management policies have been the center of conflict. These policies have included clear-cutting and "subsidized" logging , various recreation uses, preservation of the northern spotted owl , and the cutting of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest.

[Gerald L. Young Ph.D. ]

RESOURCES

BOOKS

Clary, D. A. Timber and the Forest Service. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986.

O'Toole, R. Reforming the Forest Service. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1988.

Steen, H. K. The United States Forest Service: A History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976.

———. The Origins of the National Forests. Durham, NC: Forest History Society, 1992.

ORGANIZATIONS

Forest Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Sidney R. Yates Federal Building 201 14th Street, SW at Independence Ave., SW, Washington, D.C. USA 20250 Email: [email protected], <http://www.fs.fed.us>