Research: Topics: Environment: Environmental Affairs in NY: An Historical Overview
Environmental Affairs in New York State: An Historical Overview
3. 1895 to 1970: The Conservation Era
Conservation Vs. Preservation
Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858 and raised among the privileged classes of New York City and Long Island. As a child, he was taught to venerate wild nature -- his father was a founder of the American Museum of Natural History, and the family regularly took camping trips in the Adirondacks and the West. Roosevelt was a lifelong adherent to the tradition of drawing spiritual strength from nature: as his biographer writes, "walking on silent, moccasin feet down a luminous nave of pines, listening to invisible choirs of birds, he came close to religious rapture."[58]
Roosevelt began his political career at age 24 in the New York State Legislature and gained popularity during a term as the City’s Police Commissioner. He was elected Governor of New York in 1898 and immediately called on Gifford Pinchot, a family friend, to be his chief advisor on conversation issues. But Governor Roosevelt resigned less than two years after taking office to become Vice-President. When William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Roosevelt became the youngest President in US history. He learned the news while camping in the high peaks of the Adirondacks.
Setting up his cabinet in a hurry, Roosevelt named Pinchot Secretary of Agriculture; Pinchot later became head of the newly created US Forest Service. Promoting conservation on a national scale became the centerpiece of Roosevelt’s domestic policy agenda, with Pinchot serving as his chief advisor and closest friend in Washington. The conservation idea was highly popular with voters, but strongly opposed by Congress and businessmen. Roosevelt left the Presidency after two terms in 1908 with an unfinished agenda, but he and Pinchot had succeeded in making scientific land management the official US government policy. They also tripled the number of acres under federal control, from about 46 million to more than 150 million.[59]
New York’s conservation agenda proceeded in fits and starts, and eventually the state chose strict preservation over Pinchot’s conservation. In 1895, the legislature consolidated different agencies into one Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission in an attempt to better enforce hunting and fishing laws. The Commission’s major role was to supervise a crew of fish and game "protectors," and one member of its board was even dubbed the State Oyster Protector. In 1987, a three-member Forest Preserve Board was created to supervise the Adirondacks and Catskills. But enforcing game laws was difficult in the early years, especially for wardens that occasionally had to arrest their neighbors. Deer hunting season in the early 20th century took place in the summer, for the convenience of wealthy visitors, but was closed in the winter, when rural residents had the greatest need for food.[60]
Despite the tighter laws, great fires raged in the north woods in 1899. That same year, The New York Times revealed that widespread logging continued in the Preserve, in clear violation of the law. The fires and bad publicity were setbacks to those who promoted scientific management, and they advanced the cause of hands-off forest preservation. Another setback to the management side came when the new State College of Forestry at Cornell University, under the direction of Bernard Fernow, made a brief attempt to demonstrate scientific management principles on 30,000 acres east of Tupper Lake. Fernow was forced to over-harvest the land to meet his budget, leaving unsightly fields of stumps. A fire he set to clear the land got out of control and burned part of a neighbor’s estate. In 1903, as half a million more acres of Adirondack forest burned, Fernow’s college was cancelled.
Scientific management became the rule in New York’s privately-owned forests, but it would never again be tried in the Forest Preserve. In 1914, a coalition of loggers and land owners made another attempt to modify the state constitution to allow controlled timber cutting in the Preserve. Louis Marshall, a prominent New York City lawyer and member of the influential Association for the Preservation of the Adirondacks, argued eloquently against the proposal. He characterized Fernow’s scientific forestry experiment as 30,000 acres "cut down flat from one end to the other." He said that a post-logging Preserve would be a "a howling wilderness . . . of stumps, enough to make one’s heart sick to behold them." While the logging proposal was defeated, voters were sent a new version of the constitution that would allow fire trails, dead tree removal, and a new highway through the Preserve. The voters rejected that, too.[61]
Marshall, a native of Syracuse, was not against forestry. In fact, he lobbied successfully to have a new State College of Forestry established at Syracuse University. When the college was established in 1911, he served as the first president of its Board of Directors. Yet Marshall also represented a faction that wanted some land set aside as wilderness aside from any economic consideration. The argument that wilderness should exist for its own sake ran like a philosophical thread from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir, but Louis Marshall may have been the first to successfully make the argument before a state legislature. And Marshall’s son, Bob, took the argument to the people.
