274 FOREST OUTINGS 



ment first took form. There seemed to be plenty of room in this country 

 then. Population pressure upon public parks and forests was not so intense. 

 The initial cry was to preserve timber, minerals, soil, and water. There was a 

 tendency to regard forest residents and forest visitors as inconvenient inter- 

 lopers, probably up to no good. There were old-line foresters who regarded 

 every forest resident or visitor as a suspected wood thief, firebug, or squatter. 

 A few early rangers and supervisors, even after 1906, dealt in that spirit with 

 people trying to make a living in the forest, and with people who came to the 

 forests on pleasure bent. This was never the idea of Gifford Pinchot, the first 

 Chief of the Forest Service; nor of any of his successors. As public pressure 

 on the forests mounted, the number of forest officers concerned only with 

 trees, never with people, diminished. 



Not only in forestry, but on all the fronts of conservation, the narrowly 

 materialistic view, which seeks to preserve this segment or that of our 

 national resource and ignores all the other interrelated segments of the life 

 cycle is on the wane. Unified planning with a view to final values is distinctly 

 on the up. 



Ferdinand Silcox, Chief of the Forest Service from late 1933 through 1939, 

 worked hard to advance, to humanize, and to coordinate land-use planning 

 throughout our land. His first thought was always of the final crop — the 

 people. He never visited a forest without asking "Who lives here?" or 

 "Who uses this forest?"; he always put that first in his inspections. 



He is dead now; but his way of looking at land lives on. "Damage to the 

 land is important only because it damages the lives of people and threatens 

 the general welfare," said Henry A. W T allace, Secretary of Agriculture, 

 before the Association of Land Grant Colleges late in 1939. "Saving soil and 

 forests and water is not an end in itself; it is only a means to the end of better 

 living and greater security for men and women. Human conservation is our 

 first and greatest goal." 



The year 1940, as this book goes to the printer, is barely a month along; 

 but the year has brought forth already a number of extraordinary pronounce- 

 ments as to conservation, in the broadest sense of the word. "I can see," 

 writes E. B. White in the February issue of Harper's Magazine, "no reason 

 for a conservation program if people have lost their knack with earth. I can 



