00:00If you go back to the late 1800s, you had an explosion in populations and cities in
00:13the Midwest.
00:14And those cities were basically built of wood.
00:18Almost all of New England was clear-cut.
00:22The Forest Service was established in roughly 1905, during the Roosevelt administration.
00:29And Gilbert Pinchot was his right arm for conservation.
00:33It was the over-cutting, the clear-cutting, the massive forestry use in the late 1800s
00:42that created the impetus for Pinchot and Roosevelt protecting our forests, particularly in the
00:47West.
00:50At the time, unclaimed federal land, called the public domain, was auctioned off to fund
00:55the government.
00:56But Pinchot and Roosevelt realized, if these valuable forests were auctioned, they'd quickly
01:01be clear-cut and destroyed by the lumber barons.
01:05These fears weren't misguided.
01:07At that time, the rate of logging was so great that it was predicted only 60 years of timber
01:12supply were left.
01:14So Pinchot proposed something new, establishing government forests that would be both protected
01:20and productive, through careful scientific management.
01:25In the wake of the devastation of our forests, you had the conservation movement come in
01:30and propose this radical concept called public land.
01:33And the Forest Service was established to protect this public land and to police it,
01:39to ensure that people were not extracting the resources from it at a high scale.
01:44In 1905, the Forest Service was established to sustain healthy, diverse, and productive
01:49forests and grasslands for present and future generations.
01:53But soon, a catastrophe would rock the West that would make Pinchot's case for active
01:58management much stronger.
02:02Fire
02:08The Great Fire of 1910 raged for two days, August 20 and 21.
02:14It was started when coal-fired locomotives traveling through a previously logged forest
02:19shot sparks onto the logging waste, called slash, left behind.
02:24The slash left on the ground to dry all summer was a tinder time bomb.
02:32In that particular conflagration, Gifford Pinchot found an opportunity to explain how
02:40and why sustainable forestry could work.
02:45Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, they made a political decision to present the Forest
02:51Service as a fire suppression entity.
02:55They understood the role of natural fire on the ecosystem, but they also understood the
03:01fear that the American public, and therefore Congress, had of catastrophic wildfire.
03:07The Forest Service set up a military-style system, building a network of lookouts and
03:11ranger stations to catch fires as soon as they started.
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