Woodman, Chop that Tree!

Fifty years ago last week, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot organized a Government agency to preserve what was left of the American forest. They were none too soon: in less than three centuries, the pioneers had ripped deeply into the continent's skin of trees, and another century might have left the U.S. as bare and barren as a desert. From the time of the first settlers, Americans had operated on a theory of chop and run; they had none of the Western European's respect for the wealth of forests. The mythological hero, Paul Bunyan, was a logger who uprooted trees with his bare hands.

Leafy Museums. In 50 years the U.S. Forest Service has come a long way. Starting originally with 734 employees and 60 protected forests covering 56 mil lion acres, the service has extended its boundaries to 151 forests, 181 million acres and 9,000 employees, one-third of them trained professionally in forestry or related sciences.* More important, the Forest Service in recent years has radically changed its aims and methods. Less than 20 years ago its mission was to snuff out fires and preserve the noble woods intact as leafy museums. Nowadays the Forest Service runs a thriving business, selling prime wood to private lumbermen, reforesting cutover or burnt-out areas, farming the nation's trees on a longterm, big-business basis. In 1953 the Treasury banked $70 million in cash receipts from national forest sales.

The forest ranger, in his natty green uniform and campaign hat, strikes the national imagination as a sort of 20th century Robin Hood who lives a lonely life in a tower and periodically saves the bosky heritage from burning up and luscious lady campers from death. Today's ranger still fights forest fires, but he does his scouting from a plane instead of a lonely tower, lives cosily in a town with his wife and children, and spends about one-third of his 40-hour work week at a desk, shuffling papers.

European Notions. Forest Ranger Nevan McCullough, who was an infant when Roosevelt and Pinchot began the Forest Service, is typical of the new breed of forester--and the old as well. His father, an Irish immigrant who got the conservation bug, was a ranger before him, and his eldest son, a forestry student at the University of Washington, plans to follow the family tradition. McCullough, a wry, wiry man with a grey cowlick and steel-rimmed glasses, is boss of a 164,000-acre tract of the Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington State. He conducts the Government's business from an office in the hamlet of Enumclaw (pop. 2,788), just seven minutes' walk from his home. And on a salary of $6,140 a year, and with two permanent assistants, he manages a timber operation that turned a profit of $631,884.88 last year.

Until World War II, Ranger McCullough's duties were mainly janitorial. He fought fires, built roads and telephone lines, kept a sharp eye out for log rustlers, and was lonely and bored during the long winters. By the early 19405 the ancient European practice of tree farming and sustained-yield forest crops had infiltrated the U.S. consciousness. The colleges were turning out eager young foresters who were more interested in timber management than in sparing the old pine tree.

With the war, and the enormous demands of defense plants, the Government opened up its forests to major lumbering, and Ranger McCullough, like everyone else in the Forest Service, had to learn a new trade.

An Angry Hamadryad. He hiked, drove, mushed on snowshoes over his forest, and "learned more about the dynamics of the district than I'd ever known." He learned the need for weeding and care of the timberlands: acres and acres of his domain were useless, some trees as old as 800 years, others choked to death. McCullough had to absorb the hard facts of the lumber industry--how to figure permissible profits (12%), write newspaper ads, conduct bidding and police logging. He had to plan the cultivation of crops that might take 120 years to harvest. And he was profoundly impressed by what he learned: "Now that we're actually land managers, we've got an awful lot of real estate to get the greatest good out of for the greatest number. Someday we may be as good as the Europeans. Over there, in Germany for example, if a limb falls off a tree in a wind, they've practically got a man waiting to catch it."

As McCullough and his fellow foresters took to the new ideas, thousands of neo-druids--conservationists of the old touch-nothing school--were horrified: "One schoolteacher I took on a tour was so damned mad when she saw tree stumps in a national forest she couldn't talk," he says. "The lady thought for sure I'd sold out the nation's birthright to the robber barons. That happens quite a bit with people who haven't learned that conservation today means cutting down trees, not just leaving them to rot in noble splendor.

"We could let this country go to pot, like the forests in China, Greece, and Turkey. But I don't think we're going to let it, now. It's been awfully nice, just in my lifetime to see things being done to halt that trend. I've begun to learn something, to make a little advance on what my father knew. Someone's going to carry it on from here. Maybe my sons. I'd like that."

*The formal science ofsilviculture began in France, after Leonardo da Vinci interested Louis XII in forestry.

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