Clayton - Natural Rivals

NATURAL RIVALS

NATURAL
RIVALS

John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the
Creation of Americas Public Lands

JOHN CLAYTON

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

To Charlie Chasmo Mitchell,
teacher, scholar, inspirer, friend

On the 189697 National Forest Commission:

John Muir (18381914), (nonvoting) naturalist, wanderer, writer, activist, evangelist. Defender of Yosemite National Park, cofounder of the Sierra Club.

Gifford Pinchot (18651946), (secretary) forester, politician, administrator. Founder of the U.S. Forest Service, advisor to Theodore Roosevelt.

Charles Sargent (18411927), (chair) horticulturalist, botanist, head of Harvards Arnold Arboretum. Friend of Muir, mentor to Pinchot.

Arnold Hague (18401917), geologist, Yellowstone expert. Imagine John Muir crossed with a Washington, D.C., insider. Ally of Pinchot.

William Brewer (18281910), botanist, proto-forester, taught Pinchot at Yale.

Henry Abbot (18311927), civil engineer, streamflow and reservoir expert, ally of Sargent.

Alexander Agassiz (18351910), zoologist. Did not participate.

O. Wolcott Gibbs (18221908) (ex officio), chemist. President of the National Academy of Sciences.

Magazine editors:

Robert Underwood Johnson (18531937), associate editor of The Century. Muirs close friend and political collaborator.

William Stiles (18371897), editor of Garden and Forest. Charles Sargent owned the magazine, but Stiles was chief writer and lobbyist.

George Bird Grinnell (18491938), editor of Forest and Stream. Aristocratic hunter-conservationist and friend of Theodore Roosevelt.

Supporting players:

Frederick Law Olmsted (18221903), landscape architect, park planner, mentor to Pinchot.

Bernhard Fernow (18511923), forester, Pinchots predecessor as chief government forester.

William Kent, (18641928), philanthropist, congressman, donor of Muir Woods National Monument.

William Holman (18221897), Indiana congressman. Rural cheapskate and anti-monopolist.

Relevant U.S. presidents:

Benjamin Harrison (R), in office 188993. Created first Forest Reserves.

Grover Cleveland (D), 189397. Convened the National Forest Commission.

William McKinley (R), 18971901. Little interested in the natural world.

Theodore Roosevelt (R), 190109. Nature lover with charismatic personality.

William Taft (R), 190913. More timid than Roosevelt but charged with carrying on his legacy.

Woodrow Wilson (D), 191321. Little interested in the natural world.

Before Muir and Pinchot meet:

Muir-Pinchot collaboration (climax of this book):

1893: Pinchot and Muir first meet in New York

Later events:

O n a springtime drive from my home near Yellowstone to Glacier National Park, I tumbled across rolling green foothills and then crested a snowcapped mountain pass where evergreens blanketed bustling creeks. As my eight-hour route spooled along rural two-lane roads, I enjoyed changing patterns of landscape: varied geology of mountains and plains, varied ecology of woodlands and grasslands, and varied land use of ranches and small towns. Behind those patterns, visible only on specialized maps, was the fact that some of this land was privately owned and some was public.

My house looks out on public land managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Glacier is public land managed by the National Park Service. Between the two, I drove through lots of public land administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

When I was growing up in Massachusetts, most public lands were recreational destinations, such as a beach, a woodsy trail, a city park, or an athletic facility. In 1990, I moved to Montana, where public lands are both ubiquitous and multifunctional. In addition to recreational destinations such as Yellowstone and Glacier, Montana has public lands managed for a variety of purposes by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Indeed these multiple-use agencies seek to balance logging, grazing, habitat, recreation, and other useson acreages twenty times greater than that of the Park Service.

Managing public lands is thus complicated. Each interest group pursues a different deep-rooted passion, but furthermore each stretch of land boasts different characteristics. Matching everything up is like putting together a jigsaw puzzleexcept that ongoing political developments keep changing the sizes of the pieces. Furthermore, although assembling a jigsaw puzzle is a fun family activity that merges interests to assemble a beautiful vision, on public lands the puzzle-work is a tedious prerequisite for peoples true interests, which are the activities that take place on the land.

My drive to Glacier in the spring of 2017 followed a series of controversies suggesting that the nationwide public-lands jigsaw might get entirely swept off its table. The reigning Republican party platform called for federal lands to be returned to states. Congress changed accounting rules to make such land transfers easier. The administration of President Donald

I had trouble with both sides of the debate. The arguments for federal land transfer relied on nave fantasies in which well-paying rural jobs would magically appear and litigation would magically vanish, despite everything we know about our economic and legal systems. Meanwhile, many defenders of public lands ridiculously overstated the bogeyman, acting as if Americas crown jewels were already on the chopping block.