Acknowledgment 



THIS was planned as a book of 32 parts, with each separate part or chapter 

 signed by its author or authors. The arrangement was found unsuitable. 

 The problems of using the national forests as places of rest and of human 

 renewal, and at the same time administering a long-span program of ground- 

 line conservation, are essentially coordinate. All the special fields of interest 

 overlap and interlink. 



It was determined, then, to call in an editor from outside the Forest 

 Service, to have him travel and live for a while on the national forests, and 

 then reorganize the manuscript — writing, here and there, his own sequences 

 of narrative and interpretation — from an outside point of view. This has 

 been my principal occupation for the past year. 



Even were this note of acknowledgment to be extended chapter-length, 

 it still would fail to give adequate credit, by name, to the many professional 

 foresters, afield and in Washington, who have written and then have 

 helped to edit this book. The very men who wrote most of the initial draft, 

 and who thus would have received the most credit in chapter bylines, were 

 the first to urge that the chapters be merged, and that the chapter bylines 

 be killed. Nowhere, I think, except in what we now have in this country of a 

 college-trained Civil Service, will you find so many skilled and articulate 

 people willing, even eager, to forego personal credit, to sink their personal 

 identities in a common effort. 



The names of the 30 authors are listed alphabetically. All save 2 are staff 

 men of the United States Forest Service. Althea Dobbins is a free-lance 

 writer. The late Robert Marshall, when chief of Recreation and Lands for 

 the Forest Service, sent her forth to observe forest visitors and report. She 

 wrote Guests of the Forests, chapter 3. Marshall's personal contributions to 

 the manuscript include the sweeping inventory of the forests as pleasure 

 grounds in the first chapter, practically all of the wilderness chapter (5), 

 and most of the discussion of forest recreation for low-income groups which 

 now is threaded through the closing chapters. 



Bevier Show wrote the concluding sections of chapter 2, Americans Need 



XIII 



