removal for release of pine 

 reproduction, was widely 

 criticized by wildlife 

 interests, who feared that 

 more widespread conifer 

 forests would hurt the deer, 

 squirrel, and turkey 

 populations and potential 

 game harvests. In Alabama, 

 certain critics attributed a 

 deer die-off from a virulent 

 disease to the use of a 

 granular herbicide to kill 

 undesirable hardwoods for 

 the release of pine. An 

 outdoors writer stated that 

 extensive hardwood 

 defoliation by an outbreak 

 of the elm spanworm in the 

 Chattahoochee National 

 Forest in north Georgia 

 was actually due to an 

 overzealous young forester 

 who allegedly introduced 

 the insect to aid in control 

 of the hardwoods on pine 

 sites. 



The turmoil created by the 

 controversy among Forest 

 Service foresters, wildlife 

 biologists, and 

 administrators on the one 

 hand and local officials, 

 hunters, and other private 

 wildlife interests on the 

 other hand was, in 

 retrospect, a harbinger of 

 the all-out conflict that 

 developed in the 

 environmental arena of the 

 late 1960's and 1970's. 



New Legislation of the 

 Sixties 



As in the case of fire 

 prevention, Forest Service 

 timber management policies 

 and practices and public 

 education efforts may have 

 been more successful than 

 understood by the general 

 public. New and vigorous 

 stands of trees on previously 

 denuded lands and larger 

 wildlife populations may 

 have been viewed as 

 concrete evidence that the 

 exclusion of fire from the 

 woods and "selective" 

 cutting were the proper 

 means by which national 

 forest timber, wildlife, and 

 other renewable resources 

 would be perpetuated. 

 These changes in national 

 forest timber management 

 policy and practices may 

 have been construed as 

 contradictions of good 

 forestry and what the Forest 

 Service had been preaching 

 and doing for nearly 40 

 years. Whatever the public 

 rationale, timber 

 management on the 

 southern national forests 

 following World War II 

 played a major role in the 

 chain of national events 

 leading to passage of the 

 Multiple Use Sustained 

 Yield Act of 1960, the 

 Wilderness Act of 1964, the 

 Forest and Rangeland 

 Renewable Resources 

 Planning Act of 1974, and 



39 



