|
|
|
Book Review
| The Harvard Black Rock Forest. By George W. S. Trow. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. 109 pp. Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction;. $14.95 paper.
|
| The history of conservation in the United States cannot be told without speaking of Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt, and yet their work and time together spanned less than eight years at the turn of the twentieth century. Their visions for sustainable management of natural resources and reclamation (really, forest reclamation) are well known among students of the conservation movement in America. Pinchot perfected his craft as the nation's first professional forester, developing plans for the reclamation and management of the vast forests in the mountains of western North Carolina that made up George Washington Vanderbilt's Biltmore estate. Pinchot's and Roosevelt's values held sway between the death of President William McKinley in 1901 and President William Howard Taft's firing of Pinchot in 1910. Those values did not begin to take hold among the citizens of the nation, and especially in the halls of U.S. federal bureaucracy, until many decades later. Some might argue that they have never truly taken hold. George W. S. Trow's account of the history of the Harvard Black Rock Forest, which first appeared in the New Yorker, June 11, 1984, tells a part of the story of the conservation movement from the perspective of one small tract of forest along the lower Hudson River. A visionary forester—the first professional forester in the United States, a young Harvard professor, his wealthy student, and the most influential center of teaching and learning in the nation are all characters in Trow's essay. It is a lyrical telling of one place that has served as a compelling example of Pinchot's conservative forestry and of the conservation ethic he described as "the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time," a dictum that Trow tells us Pinchot later attributed to ethnologist William J. McGee, "the scientific brains of the Conservation Movement." |
1
|
|
Conservative forestry and the conservation movement did not take hold in the federal government after forester Gifford Pinchot left it in 1909. However, through George Trow's storytelling, the reader will learn the connections between George Washington Vanderbilt and the young Pinchot, between Pinchot and Professor Richard Thornton Fisher of the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, between Fisher and his former student Dr. Ernest Stillman, and ultimately between Stillman and the president and fellows of Harvard College. The story is told to waken a sleeping giant to its responsibility as a moral leader and guiding light, and it is a story that should be on the minds of men and women working in natural resource agencies as well as the lawyers and fellows of a powerful educational corporation. |
2
|
|
George Trow's essay is reprinted here as part of the Iowa Series of Literary Nonfiction, and most certainly because of the profound influence it must have had on contemporary decision makers charged with the stewardship of a neglected legacy. When first published, it inspired the permanent protection of the three-thousand-acre forest that Stillman bequeathed to Harvard in 1949. There is a richness in this writing that comes from weaving threads of science—of research and teaching—with threads from the history of resource exploitation, and even the threads of university governance—of gifts made and legacies honored. Every student of the history of conservation should read it. Twice. |
3
|
|
W. Donald Hudson, Jr., is the president of the Chewonki Foundation in Wiscasset, Maine. When time allows, he follows his academic interest in the ecology and evolution of plants to points north. |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|