Book Review

The Greatest Good: A Forest Service Centennial Film. By Steve Dunsky, Ann Dunsky, and David Steinke, filmmakers. Washington, DC: U.S. Forest Service, 2005. 3 DVD Set. 2 hours. $18; The Forest Service and the Greatest Good: A Centennial History. By James G. Lewis. Durham, NC: The Forest History Society, 2006. Cloth $29.95, paper $19.95.
The Greatest Good is well-produced, well-framed, and engaging, telling an im-portant story without over-simplification. It opens many questions that it cannot fully answer, pro-viding great opportunities for teachers. The film was produced by the U.S. Forest Service to mark its centennial in 2005. The filmmakers manage to convey pride and affection while giving full play to their agency's critics. The film traces the difficult passage through the era of timber extraction toward the pro-mise of "ecosystem management" that reconnects with the roots of conservation. It does not shy away from conflict, but celebrates controversy as central to the democratic process.	1
The lively production is shot in high-definition digital video, and brings a century of photographs and cartoons to life. It uses USFS and CCC training films and stunning original footage of mountains, trees, waterfalls, and fire. There are effective graphics, and a comfortable narration by Charles Osgood. But the story is mostly told by seventy interviews with retired rangers and all the living agency chiefs, plus forest analysts, critics, and many handsome and articulate environmental historians.	2
The story is framed by Char Miller as a great experiment in democracy. The 193-million-acre Nation-al Forest system was born in conflict. The film begins with Gifford Pinchot's famous utilitarian dictum, and then explores how ideas changed about what constitutes the "greatest good, for the greatest number, in the long run"—and about who gets to decide that question.	3
How to tell such a sweeping story in two hours, and still hew to a clear, compelling narrative line? The film is cut into four periods, devoting half an hour to each. It follows several major themes: conservation politics, forest management, wilderness, recreation, fire, and USFS culture. Those sections that concentrate mainly on one or two of these themes work best as narrative, but inevitably pay an analytical price.	4
Part 1, the "Fight for Conservation," focuses on the career of Gifford Pinchot before 1910. A brief side trip with John Muir to Hetch Hetchy marks the conservation versus preservation divide. Part 2, "Building the System" runs to World War II, and introduces fire suppression, rivalry between the USFS and the new National Park Service, and the rise of the wilderness idea. A lovely segment presents Aldo Leopold and the land ethic as a step beyond Pinchot's more straightforward utilitarianism. What gets left out is any discussion of timber management during the pre-war period. Of course, not much timber management was happening in the national forests yet—but why not? Part 3, "Boom" deals with the post-war expansion of timber cutting to 1970. The greatest good was redefined from custodial care of the forests to "getting out the cut." The can-do culture of the rangers and their families is evoked through home movies and interviews—lots of picnics. Aggressive logging is juxtaposed with the concurrent recreation boom and the push for the Wilderness Protection Act. This sets the stage for the most ambitious and difficult section of the film, "The Greatest Good?" in which the Forest Service's timber-heavy "multiple-use" policy finds itself beset by protestors wielding new environmental laws, by changes within its own culture, and by a ferocious return of its old nemesis, fire. The film cuts rapidly among these lines, finding clever links but often leaving things hanging. Still, it's amazing how much vivid material gets onto the screen.	5
Part 4, the film's climax, comes in the early 1970s. The Montana Bitterroot and West Virginia Monongahela cuts brought devastating political and legal challenges to the Forest Service. Gifford Pinchot Jr. denounced his father's agency, accusing it of abandoning its selective cutting ideal. Former forest supervisor Orville Daniels, reflecting on the "Oh my God!" clear cut on the Bitterroot, now feels that "we went over to the dark side."	6
A great dramatic moment, beautifully rendered. But why? The film says that the agency promised too much to all its "multiple-use" constituents. Driven by the housing boom and powerful political and economic pressures to provide lumber, while at the same time bringing more vacationers into the National Forests, in an era of rising environmental consciousness, the USFS lost the public trust and found itself in a swarm of angry bees—a position that exemplified the nation's conflicted and paradoxical attitudes toward consumer affluence and environmental protection. But the Forest Service was founded precisely to conserve timber supply in such an era of high demand, and failed its greatest test. Why?	7
The film might have done more with that pre-war period to get at this question. When and why did government foresters come to agree with the industry position that the best way to manage timber is to convert old growth as rapidly as possible to younger growing stock, and what relation does that have to the "forest nightmares" of disease and fire that have haunted the National Forests in recent decades? Is it an accident that the National Forests sat mostly idle through the first half of the twentieth century while the timber industry implemented this policy on its own lands, and then, in the second half of the century, had the political clout to cut the people's forests in just the way they liked?	8
The companion volume by James Lewis delves into these issues and many others that the film cannot examine in depth. The book does cover the pre-war debates over regulating private forestry and the agency's decision to cooperate with industry instead, and the difficulty of supervising cuts to meet high standards. At times it tries to give voice to so many interpretations at once that the writing becomes confusing and contradictory. But overall the book covers a wide territory, nicely integrating into the story little-known subjects such as the role of the Forest Service in Vietnam.	9
The Greatest Good ends on hopeful note of "ecosystem management" and "community-based forestry," in which the social and ecological values of the forest as a whole are placed above timber alone. Let's hope that such an era, inspired by Leopold as much as Pinchot, is truly dawning. The Forest Service is full of admirable people who still believe in their mission, and this film is an inspiring evocation of that spirit. I believe in ecosystem management and public forests too, but as a historian I wonder whether an institution the size of the National Forests can deliver. Given the political and economic reality in which the Forest Service is embedded, for all its proud heritage of trying to work for the greatest good, what is to keep it from going over to the dark side again, and again?	10
Brian Donahue is associate professor of American environmental studies on the Jack Meyerhoff Foundation at Brandeis University, and Environmental Historian at Harvard Forest. He is author of Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town (Yale, 1999) and The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (Yale, 2004).

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