THE TECHNICAL FORESTER IN NATIONAL FOREST 

 ADMINISTRATION^ 



By L. F. Kneipp 

 District Forester, U. S. Forest Service, Ogden, Utah 



In a recent talk before the Intermountain Section of the Society of 

 American Foresters, Mr. Graves emphasized the fact that practically 

 every activity connected with the management of a National Forest 

 really is technical in character — that is, that its performance involves 

 a number of technical processes. Arguing along this line, it may be 

 assumed that every man engaged in the work of managing a National 

 Forest is a technical forester. However, the purpose of this paper is 

 not to discuss the future of the whole Forest Service personnel, but 

 rather that part of it which is comprised of men who have devoted 

 several years to the close study of, and systematic training in, the more 

 technical and refined features of true forest management, and by doing 

 so have not only earned degrees, but have met the exacting require- 

 ments of the civil-service examination for the position of forest as- 

 sistant — the class of men, in other words, who very largely comprise 

 the membership of the Society of American Foresters. 



The Forest Service was created and took over the complicated ad- 

 ministration of ninety million acres of National Forest land on Feb- 

 ruary I, 1905. At that time the technically trained forester and the 

 field officer without technical training shared the common belief that 

 administration under the Forest Service would involve the exclusive 

 employment of men of technical training, which naturall\- would result 

 in the complete elimination from the superior grades of the Forest 

 Service of men who lacked such training. This was rather an ex- 

 aggerated or an erroneous conception of the scope and nature of the 

 organization which Mr. Pinchot and Mr. Price had in mind, but never- 

 theless it was almost general throughout the organization during the 

 period immediately preceding and immediately following its official 

 creation. Its origin lay probably in the more or less general recog- 

 nition of the facts stated by Mr. Graves, namely, that the management 

 of a forest is largely a matter of technical processes, which naturally 



'Paper read before IiitcrmouiUain .Section. Society of American l""oresters, 

 April 18, 1917. 



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