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interview
samuel p. hays
Retirement has obviously not diminished the intellectual creativity of Samuel P. Hays, one of the founders of our field. In this interview, we asked Sam to discuss how his personal and academic experiences have shaped his choice of scholarly topics from his first major publication, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Harvard, 1958), to his most recent one, Wars in the Woods (Pittsburgh, 2006).
Editor and Associate Editor: We are delighted that you have agreed to do this interview. In his foreword to your Explorations in Environmental History (Pittsburgh, 1998), Joel Tarr tells us that you have founded and endowed a nature reserve on the 360 acres of your father's former Guernsey dairy farm in southern Indiana. Could you tell us something about your Indiana boyhood and your early experience of the natural world?
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Hays: I grew up in Corydon, a small town in southern Indiana, population about 1,800, the first capital of the state. A considerable number of my ancestors had migrated there in the early 1800s, and so I was surrounded by family and community history. My parents had inherited three farms and my father organized them to support a Guernsey dairy farm. There was nothing special about this rural setting. It was just there and a part of our lives. I worked on the farm off and on. In terms of evolving interests in conservation, my first acquaintance with a federal agency was the Soil Conservation Service (SCS). We knew the local SCS representative and I especially remember the soil maps that he developed for our farm and which we sought to follow. We had a twenty-acre woodlot on the "home" farm but the thought of managing it for wood production never occurred to us. In fact, we pastured cattle and hogs in the woods, which is a "no no" so far as growing trees systematically is concerned.
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Editor and Associate Editor: Your experience with forest and conservation issues goes back at least to the early 1940s, when you worked for a government agency in the forests of western Oregon. You've written about that experience in your autobiographical introduction to Explorations in Environmental History, but could you say something about it for our readers as well?
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Hays: During my early college years I had personal experience, a "learning experience" you might call it, with federal conservation-related agencies. In 1941, I participated in a Quaker work camp in eastern Tennessee, in which we built a barn on a "demonstration farm" in the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) area and learned quite a bit about the TVA program, which sought to revamp southern cotton-corn agriculture to promote soil-building pastures and dairy farming. We had a considerable number of speakers about the TVA program, visited firsthand the famous Copper Hill in northern Alabama, and in general learned about New Deal programs to improve southern agriculture. In 1942 I participated in another Quaker camp, this time in the "boot heel" of southeast Missouri, in which I got to know firsthand the sharecrop country of the Mississippi Delta and the work of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. We lived in a community of homes built by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) for farm day laborers, and I had an opportunity to learn about the wide range of efforts by the FSA on behalf of farm workers. I wrote an extensive paper on one of the FSA cooperative farm projects, LaForge farms, for an economics class at Swarthmore College, and I got to know about a wide range of farm problems, which were being written about by a half dozen college students from other work camps in other parts of the country when we were together in a seminar at the University of Michigan for three weeks. When I was drafted into the Civilian Public Service in 1943 and began work with the Oregon and California Revested Lands Administration (the O&C), the next few years expanded my range of educational experiences. It was my first encounter with forests and forest management. I read a considerable number of books and pamphlets, most of them distributed by the U.S. Forest Service, and got to know officials in the O&C and became an advocate of "sustained yield management." Because of this interest I became "project education" director with the job of telling others about the O&C. And I wrote a document about the history of the O&C program. This interest in forest management has stuck with me, and the various articles I have written about it, as well as my recent book, Wars in the Woods: The Rise of Ecological Forestry in America (Pittsburgh, 2006), is a result.
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