Forest Service

From the early colonial vision of forests as a wilderness to be tamed to their current status as major recreational lands and touchstones of environmental controversy, the forests of the United States have always captured the American imagination. The national forests, and the Forest Service that manages them, provide a record of the nation's evolving relationship to the natural environment. The U.S. Forest Service is the largest natural resources research organization in the world, managing 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands. The service, and much of its approach to management, grew out of a desire to manage the timber resource for human consumption. Perhaps more than any other agency, however, the Forest Service became deeply embroiled in the contentious development of U.S. environmental law and policy.

The controversy over clear-cutting forests such as this one in Oregon, which had been a habitat for the northern spotted owl, led to the adoption of new priorities for the U.S. Forest Service beginning in 2000.

Source: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

In 1799, the young nation's first federal forest protections grew out of a need for timber to build the U.S. Navy's ships in the 18th century. When these ship-building needs were met by iron, however, the need for and enforcement of these protections faded. For much of the 19th century, federal land policy focused on expansion through taming the wilderness, causing rapid depletion of the United States' vast forest expanse.

By the 1870s, however, concern for the loss of forest resources began to rise. Several states enacted laws for the protection of forests. In 1876, Congress appointed a special agent to assess the state of forests and, in 1881, it established the Division of Forestry (subsequently renamed the Bureau of Forestry)—the precursor of today's Forest Service—within the Department of Agriculture. In 1891, Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act, authorizing the president to designate portions of public land as “forest reserves” managed by the Department of the Interior, and thereby laid the groundwork for today's national forests. The act did not provide significant guidelines for managing the forest reserves, however, and two visions of managing the forests competed: preservation and conservation.