| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.1

Book Review

The U.S. Forest Service: A History, centennial edition. By Harold K. Steen. Durham, N.C.: Forest History Society in assocation with University of Washington Press, 2004. xxxix + 356 pp. Includes bibliographic references and index. Cloth $40.00, paper $25.00.
First published in 1976 and reissued in honor of the U.S. Forest Service's centennial, Harold K. Steen's The U.S. Forest Service: A History has long been a foundational work in forest history. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in forestry in the United States, the role of the Forest Service in public land management and the conservation movement, and environmental historiography.	1
Steen traces the administrative history of the U.S. Forest Service through successive chiefs from Bernard Fernow, Gifford Pinchot, and William Greeley to John McGuire in the 1970s. He emphasizes the visions and points of view of these leaders, weaving together three related themes. First are the policies and laws that established the Forest Service's organizational structure and mission within the federal government and its relationship to state agencies and private industry. For example, from its first incarnation in the late nineteenth century as the Division of Forestry, administrators and politicians were engrossed by struggles between the departments of the Interior and Agriculture over the agency. Steen vividly narrates events leading to legislative milestones such as the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, the Clarke-McNary Act of 1924, and the Wilderness Act of 1964.	2
A second theme is the Forest Service's approach to public land management. Steen follows the development of influential but problematic concepts such as sustained yield and multiple use. He chronicles agency efforts to persuade an increasingly recreation-minded public of the merits of logging in federal forests. He examines periods of veiled and unveiled antagonism between the Forest Service and the National Park Service. He also examines how the Forest Service labored to fit wilderness preservation into its larger economic framework of cultivated forests.	3
The many paradoxes that the Forest Service has faced during its history make up a third theme in the book. Steen identifies the origins of competing mandates for flood control, timber production, and grazing on national forests; the origins of western hostility toward the forests; the origins of federal-state struggles for ownership and disposal of public land; of philosophical differences between conservation and preservation; of antagonism between the Forest Service and environmentalists; and of divergent environmental values held by the Forest Service and the American public. Steen's skillful historical sweep of these controversies helps the reader to put each in a national political context.	4
The structure of the book—its narrative and analytical concentration on upper levels of Forest Service administration—does not always facilitate sustained analysis of the controversies and challenges Steen identifies. This is partly because those controversies played out at multiple levels, down to particular forests and the communities that surrounded them. In reading it today, then, thirty years after its original publication, the book leaves some fundamental questions unanswered, including: How did relationships between high-level administrators and foresters in the field (key historical actors in their own right with distinct political, economic, social, and environmental perspectives) affect environmental and policy outcomes? Or, what happened to the national forests themselves during the twentieth century, ecologically speaking? Steen's new preface brings Forest Service history up to date in a format consistent with the original book but isolated from related scholarship that now addresses such questions. Readers will therefore want to consult important alternative histories of the U.S. Forest Service by historians like Nancy Langston, Char Miller, and Paul Hirt. Thus, while The U.S. Forest Service: A History no longer stands alone, it remains an impressive study and a landmark in the field of forest history.	5
Lynne Heasley is assistant professor of history and environmental studies at Western Michigan University. She is author of A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley (Wisconsin, 2005), and is currently working on a history of the Peace Corps entitled The Peace Corps and Ecology.

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