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1785–1904, Growth of Forestry Research in America and California

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1785–1904, Growth of Forestry Research in America and California The Search for Forest Facts: A History of the Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1926–2000 Chapter 1: 1785–1904, Growth of Forestry Research in America and California American men of The beginnings of forestry as a science in North America came in the late 18th and science hotly pursued early 19th centuries—a time when modern American science was just emerging. As the “nearest visible it materialized, science in America developed along the lines of “fact gathering,” fact, counted it a goal whose ultimate aim was to find some specific economic utilitarian goal for the achieved, then went gathered facts. In short—applied science. To early American scientists, maximum on to bag the next…. gain clearly overrode any quest or thirst for pure basic scientific knowledge. In [And] they made no practice, as one author noted, American men of science hotly pursued the “nearest effort to look beyond visible fact, counted it a goal achieved, then went on to bag the next…. [And] they the necessities of the made no effort to look beyond the necessities of the immediate present” (Bruce immediate present.” 1987). The full value of theoretical science would not be realized until the 20th century. If early scientific interest in America’s forests began as a matter of applied science, its earliest students were Andre Michaux and his son Francois Andre Mich- aux—botanical explorers of North America. During the period 1785 to 1796, the elder Michaux traveled around North America’s eastern forests, and his son later extended and intensified the work his father initiated. Their work mixed botani- cal, horticultural, and forestry cultural observations, which found expression in several successful writings. They also pointed out one driving detail in the history of American forestry research—the Americans’ consumption of the continent’s wooded heritage at an alarming rate with no regard for the future. In 1803, Andre Michaux in his classic Flora Boreali-Americana observed that unlike Europe, “neither the federal nor state governments were reserving forest lands to safeguard the nation’s future economy.” Almost 15 years later, Francois Andre Michaux finished his notable three-volume work, The North American Sylva: A Description of the Forest Trees of the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia (1819). Worthy of note in it was Michaux’s warning of the “alarming destruction of trees proper for building.” He again expressed his anxiety over the growing scarcity of timber and the “failure of the Federal government or the states to establish forest reserves.” Both Frenchmen were not alone in their concerns. Several American writers picked up on the theme of an impending timber famine if Americans did not change their lumbering practices. They noted the growing disappearance of the eastern forests— what one author called “the most striking change that man had made in American environment up to the end of the nineteenth century” (Dupree 1957). For instance, J.D. Brown’s Sylva Americana (1832) and R.U. Piper’s The Trees of America (1855) gave pause to some Americans regarding the growing “devastation” of America’s 5 GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PSW-GTR-233 forest resources (Dana 1956, Dupree 1957, Rodgers 1968). Nonetheless, prior to the Civil War, most Americans believed the country had inexhaustible forest reserves and treated them as such. They cleared as much as 100 million acres of land by 1850 for agriculture, with no concern for regeneration. This laissez faire attitude toward the Nation’s natural resources continued as the American logging frontier pushed westward to California. In 1816, two scientists named Louis Charles de Chamisso and Ivan Ivanovith Eschscholtz landed at the shores of San Francisco Bay as members of an around-the-world scientific expedi- tion. During their month-long stay, they recorded many of the region’s unique botanical wonders, including the California poppy (see “Scientific and Common Names” section) that later was selected as the flower emblem of the state (Mirov 1934). But it was Thomas Nuttall’s North American Sylva (1849) that added to the Nation’s botanical knowledge regarding California trees, and various parts of the Western United States, such as Oregon Territory and the Rocky Mountains. In 1860, America’s laissez faire forestry attitude shifted slightly. In that year, the Agricultural Division of the Patent Office’s annual report devoted some 30 pages to the “Forest Trees of North America.” As a result of people reading it, tree planting became a popular movement in the prairie states (Smith 1930), and the word “forestry” was defined for the first time in an American dictionary to mean “the art of forming or cultivating trees” (McArdle 1955). Nonetheless, the divisive- ness and destruction of the Civil War pushed forestry out of most people’s minds. But at the end of war, many civic leaders returned to the idea of “forestry” and a nascent forestry movement began. In looking at the war’s wreckage, some Americans also witnessed the devasta- tion of their forests and concluded that if the rate of deforestation in the Eastern United States continued, the Nation would face a timber famine of historic propor- tions. Many Americans felt that such an event would not just affect the Nation’s economy, but would perhaps influence the future of American civilization. This shift in thinking stemmed largely from the publication of George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864) (fig. 1). Marsh’s work outlined the history of the destruction of Europe’s forests by the late 1700s, and how Europeans had responded to their crisis by developing forestry as a science in order to meet wood shortages (Lewis 2005). He clearly synthesized the ideas and philosophies of contemporary thinkers of his day (Williams 2004), and his conservationist ethic reflected the widespread values of these naturalists. In time, his thoughts regarding environmental degradation resonated with more and more Americans (Hall 2004, Judd 2004). 6 The Search for Forest Facts: A History of the Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1926–2000 Matthew B. Brady, photographer Courtesy Library of Congress, of Figure 1—George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Nature and considered to be america's first environmentalist. If Marsh’s Man and Nature was the catalyst for raising concern about the adverse effects of farm clearing, Reverend Frederic Starr’s American Forests, Their Destruction and Preservation (Starr 1866) rang the fire bell for many 19th century Americans. Appearing in the 1865 Commissioner of Agriculture’s annual report, Starr’s article pointedly predicted a “national famine of wood” (Dana 1956). Even though few read Starr’s report, use of the term ‘famine’ was apt, for wood in its various forms was among the most widespread and essential materials for domestic use and industry at the time (MacCleery 1993). The shaping of California forestry policies regarding conservation and preser- vation measures was inextricably involved with, and often ran parallel to, those on a national level. And like those states east of the Mississippi River, California had miners, lumbermen, stockmen, and railroaders who wanted the bounties of nature open to them and who were unconcerned about either conservation of natural resources or management and protection of forested public lands. The plundering of California’s public domain resources after the Civil War was the natural outcome, but as many in the Eastern United States had realized before them, the general pub- lic and some California state officials eventually began to recognize that the their state’s timber was not unlimited. For instance, the California Board of Agricultural Transactions addressed the problem in their 1868–1869 annual report. One section on “Tree and Forest Culture” read, 7 GENERAL TECHNICAL REPORT PSW-GTR-233 We have thoughtlessly come to regard our supply of these materials…as inexhaustible. The facts are quite different…California is far from being a well timbered state…It is now about twenty years since the consumption of timber and lumber commenced in California, and yet we have the opinion of good judges…that at least one-third of all our accessible timber of value is already consumed and destroyed! [Clar 1973: 71]. Despite the urgency of the statement, the California legislature responded with the passage of only a “mild” state law encouraging the production of trees, while the rapid, reckless, and wasteful cutting of trees continued in California and else- where. As lumbermen pushed fast and hard into the forests of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to meet the Nation’s insatiable demands for wood, and as warn- ings of a timber shortage were voiced by men in and out of government mounted, many, like Reverend Starr, began advocating a “program of government-sponsored research on the management of forests and planting of trees” (McArdle 1955) to mitigate the sustained and disturbing rate of America’s timber consumption. Franklin B. Hough, Nathaniel H. Egleston, and Forest Cultural Compilations, 1873–1886 In 1873, as expressions of the Nation’s concern mounted, Franklin B. Hough (fig. 2), a physician, historian, statistician, poet, and naturalist from Lowville, New York, distilled them into a paper that he presented before the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) 1 annual meeting in Portland, Maine. Entitled “The Duty of Governments in the Preservation of Forests,” Hough’s paper, which drew heavily from Marsh’s Man and Nature, convinced AAAS members to urge Congress and various state legislatures to take urgent action against unbridled exploitation of the Nation’s timbered regions. The AAAS memorial promoted conservative forest policy along with the cultivation of timber and asked for appro- priate legislation to create a commission of forestry “to study and report on the amount and distribution of woodlands, the influence of forests upon climate, and on European forestry methods” (Steen 2004).
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