before the age of petroleum the nation's economy was built on wood horses do wooden carriages over plank roads the Southern Pines produced millions of barrels of tar and pitch for sealing wooden ships wood-fired engines pulled trains over millions of railroad times the rotted and had to be replaced [Music] as the forests of the north east south and lake states fellows to the axe alarm sounded about an impending shortage of wood a timber of famine the idea of a timber famine was at the time understandable because people who looked into the eastern forests could see that all of the prime trees were being cut or were already gone and they were worried about running out because their experience had been cut over landscapes abandoned and moving west and they were running out of places to move west to [Music] painters and writers naturalist sand philosophers idealized the American landscape the vast wilderness distinguished this new world from Europe they looked upon the march of progress great ambivalence [Music] in 1864 George Perkins Marsh wrote man and nature innit he compared the cutover mountains of his native Vermont with the barren landscapes of the Mediterranean what Marsh did as a US counsel in Italy and also in Turkey was to recognize that the Mediterranean had been devastated a land that once was heavily treed we talked about the Cedars of Lebanon where are they they're gone and he said it could probably happen to us if we don't protect our forests if we don't protect our streamflow we could become what the Mediterranean is we could become just another desert in 1865 a year after the publication of man and nature a boy was born whose love of the outdoors and influential parents would lead him to become America's first home world Forester [Music] what Gifford will do is to repair the land that his grandfather and great-grandfather destroyed Gifford Pinchot's family emigrated from France and settled in Milford Pennsylvania there they built a fortune by cutting down forests and selling the land to farmers the logging of the Pinchot family generated was cut and run you took your axe you ripped down the landscape you ripped it all the way down because you were gonna sell this for farming later and then you just shipped it off to market [Music] by the 1880s Gifford Pinchot's parents were among those who feared a timber famine in Milford they built a summer home wait hours and set out to restore the damaged landscape you see the change of the focus of the family from that of gaining and growing wealth to that of using their wealth to make an impact on American life and I think James and Mary Pinchot dedicate the most valuable thing they have to it their oldest son during his studies at Yale University Gifford Pinchot's parents gave him a new edition of man that nature now retitled the earth as modified by human action they gave the book to their son in his 21st year and in effect they're telling him this is your career in their lives become completely focused on Gifford success and his potency in bringing this forestry to life in the United States he went to his professors at Yale and said I want to be a forester what do I do and they had no way to answer him because there was no force to be practiced in the United States that if he really wanted to pursue this profession he had to go to Europe in France and Germany picha learned how forests could be managed using the principle of sustained yield trees were a crop that could be harvested profitably forever from very early on Pinchot ISM was a strong advocate of what we would call scientific forestry but he thought it should be applied quite differently here in the United States Gifford Pinchot believed that American forestry should reflect the democratic values of the nation America's land should be managed for the benefit of all but the nation had no plan for managing its vast land holdings the policy was to dispose of the general land office the United States Department the interior is just giving it all away as fast as possible land grants to railroads opened the West to rapid development uncontrolled mining branching and logging reshaped the Western landscape corrupt syndicates found ways to sidestep the law to bring public domain lands under their control [Music] you want land and there are rules attached to it but getting around rules is is is the fun of it all fraud is the American Way you'd have to be above 21 but nobody says years of age do they so you paint a 21 on your shoe and you stand there in a land office and say I'm above 21 and you are you're above it and you get the homestead even though you're underage [Music] in 1891 Congress added a one-sentence amendment to a land law reform these words would have far-reaching effects becoming the basis of the federal system of public lands the amendment gave the president the power to reserve forested lands for the public good the importance of the forest reserves of 1891 the act that created them and in time they would grow into national forests is that it happened at all for the first hundred years of the American Republic her attitude towards the public lands was to get rid of him to railroads to land speculators to homesteaders to others that a nation would decide in 1891 that some lands will never be given away that they will be held in the hands of the people all people not some people but all people is a tremendous shift this was a radical step that would be better for the nation as a whole to keep some lamps in public ownership so they could be managed for the good of all the people and that we could prevent resource damage it's a remarkable step for a nation to me [Music] the president may now by Proclamation set-aside lands on the public domain and say they're not open to occupancy sale or settlement are not for disposal they are for the future and this is a significant dramatic departure from a hundred years of American history by the time president Benjamin Harrison's term ended in 1893 he had designated 15 reserves but the forest reserve act said nothing about what should be done with these lands should they be protected like Yellowstone National Park for their aesthetic and recreational values or open to use by local communities without a clear answer without consulting Western congressmen President Grover Cleveland exercised his authority just before he left office he doubled the size of the forest reserves from 19 to 39 million acres but a sweep of a pen that caused a firestorm in the West outraged members of Congress tried and failed to eliminate these reserves while others supporters of scientific forestry and watershed protection pushed through a law outlining their purposes it's one thing to have a land set aside it's another thing to know what you're going to do with it and in effect that opens the way for Gifford Pinchot to begin the process of forestry in the United States in a very sustained way that has now lasted us over a century we talked about Gifford Pinchot as our first scientifically trained American Forester what he really is is our first political Forester and he was a genius at that keep in mind that his parents this moment he had this new position in Washington built a home for him a beautiful house in which he could entertain hundreds of people at a pop which meant this chief of a lowly Bureau and the Department of Agriculture could have congressmen and Senators to his home the Pinchot family endowed a forestry school at Yale its students completed their field program at great hours so he creates the school he creates the agency that will provide the labor for those students he creates the journal that they will read he creates the professional organization that they will join and pay dues for in short he gave birth not to the Forest Service but to a profession and there are very few single individuals about whom that can be said [Music] the assassination of President McKinley gave the new century of dramatic stars after the death of McKinley Teddy Roosevelt became president you know the Republicans that hope by making a vice president they never hear from him again and here he was he was president and he was a strong conservationist roosevelt had long been interested in conservation issues nature was the world he loved most and so when Roosevelt comes in office it was as if God had sent manna how many Chiefs of agencies are very close friends with the President of the United States and that helped pen show enormous ly he spoke in his own name to be sure on the one hand but everybody knew who stood behind him Roosevelt worked to get the forest reserves out of the General Land Office and under the supervision of Gifford Pinchot Gifford Pinchot hated the general Land Office he hated it with a passion he hated the Interior Department he thought they were in bed with every scoundrel in the country and in many respects he was right Gifford Pinchot organized an American forest Congress in January of 1905 it provided political backing for a law transferring the forest reserves to the Agriculture Department the Bureau of Forestry became the United States Forest Service and the forest reserves were soon renamed the national forests the name change from the forest reserves in the late nineteenth century to the national forests of the 20th century is symbolically important for a couple of reasons reserve means withdraw but Pinchot is actually really interested in the word national it meant nationally owned nationally controlled nationally regulated and that reinforced the notion of a forest service and its mission was to serve the people of the United States it's founded in this very idealistic moment it is in the ice certainly of its own staff but in the eyes of the American populace as a whole the perfect government bureaucracy the purely idealistic government bureaucracy the one that is really doing what government ought to do the people who are recruited into it are immensely idealistic and they really do you think that they know best and sometimes they get into trouble in a democratic context because of that the Forest Service sought men who were self-motivated and who love the outdoors and could learn on the job leaders Koch was one of those men here's koch grew up in Montana in the Gallatin Valley his parents were involved in ranching and farming he had gotten wind of Yale starting a school in forestry for Koch and his classmates Yale instilled deep esprit de corps that Pinchot wanted for his new agency for the first 25 years more than 50% of the graduates of the Yale School going to work for the Forest Service in fact the joke about the Forest Service's it's referred to as the Yale Club hired by the Forest Service upon graduation Ehlers Koch was assigned to Missoula Montana the low-low and the Missoula National Forest were virgin territory and you can imagine what it must have felt like when he stepped off the train in Missoula Montana with his young Danish bride at 27 years old to begin work Percival where is National Forest he has to determine boundaries he has to set up an office he has to do local hires and he really goes at it when the National Forest were created they hadn't been surveyed the boundaries weren't laid out they didn't have any structure of governance says there were ranger stations that weren't roads so it was a tremendous job just to get these lands identified and under management and under some form of protection and the term national forests itself was misleading because so much of the land wasn't Timberland half of the national forests were grazing lands most of the the mountain peaks of the US are in national forests and they're nothing but ice and rocks to help him manage a million acres of wild land the supervisor like ellos Kosh had a handful of Rangers and forest guards initially all the district Rangers were pretty much local hires they picked people of what they called high moral character they wanted people that were already respected and admired in the communities respect in the West also meant the ability to handle tough characters dangerous situations what was said of one old time ranger he didn't start any fights but he didn't lose any either whether you were a college-educated Forester or a locally hired forced guard all Forest Service employees had to pass a civil service exam the exam included such practical matters as packing a horse and cooking a meal in the field and then eating it [Music] every Forest Officer was required to keep a daily log of what they were doing and what they were working on and you can imagine these vary quite a bit some of them that you read they go on for pages and their descriptions others is I worked on grazing period that's it five days later continued to work on grazing there's a funny entry in one of the Diaries I saw the forest supervisor four times this year he saw me twice what we forget in this age in which we fight over timber all of the time is that it wasn't timber people fought over in the early part of the 20th century it was always grazing because that's where the West made most of its money one reason for that is that very little timber was being caught from national forest lands the grazers were the established users and the controversial users and the ones that gave the forest service fits the Forester sungrazing was faced with the fact that there were cows and sheep all over the national forests now they ranged freely without charge regulating became a major project Pinchot hired Arizona Rancher Albert Potter to develop a system for controlling livestock on federal land despite low fees and minimal restrictions the policy met bitter opposition the grazers claimed that access to the public lands was a right not a privilege it was not certain that the Forest Service had the authority to regulate use on the National Forest or even to sell timber Colorado ranchers red lights deliberately violated his grazing allotments supported by his state legislature he challenged Forest Service authority in port this became one of several test cases tried by Forest Service attorney George Woodruff he takes 11 cases to the Supreme Court he wins all 11 10 of them unanimously the congressional delegations from the West are livid they feel that Pinchot is basically writing his own legislation by using the courts that's exactly what they were doing my grandfather knew very precisely what he wanted to see happen was building the public land system and I think yes did he did steamroller over over local interests in order to get that to happen and it made a lot of people really angry and a lot of people still are angry about that in addition to the legal system Pinchot used the press to advance his cause they would write articles for magazines they would write articles for newspapers they would be interviewed all over the country they were propagandists for themselves and brilliant at it the Western congressmen think they're too livid they can't stand it they're trying to cut off the budget that nearly no franking privilege you cannot spend any money on mail stop stop stop but the stuff keeps rolling out Westerners also complained about the amount of land that the Roosevelt administration was withdrawing from the public domain Congress then passed a law that said that the president no longer could simply delineate land and say this is going to be a national force and they put this in a spending bill the president had ten days to sign the bill before we died by pocket veto there was a set of days in which Pinchot and the Forest Service looked at maps circumscribed areas on land that said that these were going to be new forests they just drew lines around areas it made him National Forest there called the midnight forests the term meaning that this was done at midnight both in the dark of night but also rapidly on the part of the Forest Service Teddy Roosevelt would put more land into the public land system than any other president in his first term he was quite cautious he set aside about 20 million acres of land by presidential proclamation under the forest reserve act of 1891 but in the second term he really went to town and he set aside approximately 80 million acres of land which is the almost the equivalent of California [Music] the states called convention called the Denver public lands convention in 1907 in which these western states would hopefully argue that the federal government has no rights over these lands for two days during the Denver convention Westerners attacked the federal land grab and the man they called czar or Pinchot they held responsible for it on the third day Pinchot stood before the convention to speak he had to go out onto a frontier and convince people that they could indeed still have the resource even if they turned it over to government management and wise use one must appreciate the enormity of the selling that he had to do what he said was you should understand why conservation is going to save you Gifford Pinchot had become the most ardent and persuasive advocate for Teddy Roosevelt's conservation policy yet early in this progressive era a split developed between those like Pinchot who favored wise use and those who favored stronger protection like naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir John Muir argued that these national forests that were being created in the early part of the 20th century actually ought to be preserved no use whatsoever no cutting no mining no grazing Pinchot disagreed with the preservationist approach arguing that the only way to save the forests was conservation the careful and controlled use of Natural Resources the national forests could not have been sold to the American people without the guarantee of use [Music] and the Forest Service always promised the American people that wisely manage these lands could be used for hundreds of years to come if the idea of preservation only had been advocated we would not have had the National Forest because the American people would not have accepted it what's interesting about Pinchot and Muir is they've come to stand for two radically different visions on the one hand Pinchot presents himself as standing for the Democratic good standing for the use of nature to benefit as many people as possible you're on the other hand stands for nature as the place to which we go to understand the creation in its whole Laureus beauty and those are both in their way very attractive visions but they were on kind of a collision course [Music] [Applause] the two views collided in a scenic Valley of Yosemite National Park known as Hetch Hetchy [Music] Yosemite and a handful of other Western parks were patrolled by the army in this era before there was the Park Service the Hetch Hetchy controversy is one of the most explosive events in the history of conservation in the United States it was probably the first time in which a debate over development or preservation erupted on to the national stage at its center were two men John Muir who argued that this gorgeous valley in a Hetch Hetchy section of Yosemite National Park should be preserved on the other side was Gifford Pinchot San Francisco desperately needed a new safe reservoir so when San Francisco applied for a dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley Pinchot was one of those who supported it the eventual decision to build the dam would be a crushing blow to John Muir would lead some to call for the creation of a new agency to manage the national parks I started off as a John Muir preservationist I thought the Gifford Pinchot was some screwball you know with these utilitarian ideas I had no idea what this was all about I would go back and read the book the first principle of conservation is development whole development was the problem how could that be the first principle of conservation and it wasn't until you know I actually got experience working in real communities and I found out you know that the the central problems are economics and you're never gonna solve conservation if you can't address the the fundamental well-being of the community and you can't address the fundamental social justice in the community if you can't address those two parts of the equation then you're never gonna preserve anything he was convinced that forestry would only succeed if the citizenry felt that it was paying a dividend to them and so he has to figure out a way by which to articulate this and the key for him then is that wonderful sentence the greatest good of the greatest number and the longest run the idea behind the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time is that you do things for the greater public good and benefit and that's what matters I think what pincher was thinking about is the role that what he called the evils of concentrated wealth or the using the public resources for personal gain and that to him that was a sin it was immoral and it endangered our national democratic way of life they chose final battle as chief of the Forest Service would revolve around just such an issue a small coal mining claim in Alaska that would explode into the biggest political scandal of the era when William Howard Taft succeeded Theodore Roosevelt Pinchot realized that there was no longer a conservationist in the White House it's a complicated story but effectively what agents of the Forest Service came to believe is that the Taft administration was releasing public lands to a syndicate out of New York City Richard Bellinger was William Howard Taft Secretary of the Interior Pinchot and his allies implicated Ballinger in the Alaska scandal and blamed Taft from not firing him he's basically accusing his superiors of corruption and he's basically telling the press in the United States that he's not doing his job and he's doing it publicly unable to resolve this rift within his administration Taft wired Gifford Pinchot he should have been fired for insubordination because he was insubordinate Pinchot was defiant and publicly upbeat about his dismissal allowed him to campaign openly for the cause of conservation but at Forest Service headquarters where he gave a rallying farewell speech his employees were apprehensive they understood that he had created this entity and to have him leave under these circumstances was awful because it wasn't clear to them whether in fact the agency would continue once its charismatic creator had disappeared would we have a Forest Service if we didn't have Gifford Pinchot I think yes but I think it would be so different we would hardly recognize it he was only head of the Forest Service for five years it wasn't really even a full five years but his stamp on this agency was then and remains profound he invented something really completely new and it became known as conservation the summer that followed Pinchot's firing provided a test for the young agency as it set out to build a system for delivering the greatest good [Music] while 1910 was truly one of the formative events in American fire history it it was a kind of perfect storm it all came together you have an extended drought there was lots of fuel around lots of lightning begins in July there were lots of human-caused fires onto railroad fires and then finally on the morning of August 20th it all exploded and what became known as the big blowup [Music] the Forest Service at that time was five years old there had about 400 Rangers in the field they were incapable of mounting a defense let alone an offense against something that burned three million acres in two days and killed 85 people high winds fanned isolated fires into a fast-moving wall flamed towns were evacuated just before they were incinerated trains raced over burning trestles moments before they collapsed the firefighters just tried to survive edie Pulaski was the icon Ranger of 1910 he was everything that an old-time ranger should be he cared about his men and he got caught by the 1910 five the webs are plucking up trees sparks are coming down it's absolutely dark I can hardly see anything and what you forget about it is not just the visuals the heat it's the noise the enormous roar that that occurs like a thousand trains rushing over a thousand steel trestles one of them you remembered an old mineshaft and let his man about 40 of them with horses and put them inside the shaft there to wait while the fire blew past and it must have been an absolute nightmare there was nothing but darkness and fire and smoke it's all panic and pandemonium and at least one guy in the back shouts he'll is just getting out and decides he's going to run out of the cave and Pulaski holds a man at gunpoint threatening to shoot whoever tried to leave knowing that if panic said then they would all be overcome after the fire had passed the next morning the men staggered out of the mouth of the mine and there was Ed's body blocking the way and one of them said my god boss is dead and pulled himself up off the floor of the mine and said of like hell he is five died in all the rest survived and they unanimously attributed their survival to Ed Pulaski and his stand cholesky himself is badly hurt couldn't see suffered from lung ailments but they managed to get the rest of the crew back into town as he becomes the sort of great hero of the 1910 fires the big blowup consumed nearly three million acres in western Montana and northern Idaho but its longest term effect was on Forest Service policy they were conscience struck but what had happened and they vowed never to let it happen again the fires of 1910 catalyzed the federal policy of full fire suppression after 1910 it was almost impossible for anyone within the Forest Service to advocate anything other than all-out war against fire fire would persist and it would become perhaps paradoxically the major index of Forest Service success for the Forest Service fire suppression was clearly the greatest good at the beginning of the 20th century we had a horse and a shovel that was really the way fires report you couldn't get into the backcountry to fight a fire for days because you had to go by trail the assaults on forest fires required a big investment in infrastructure roads communications equipment and lookout towers the biggest challenge however was finding men for the frontlines the fire crews in 1910 were stumblebum crews you would have a ranger who was a competent individual but he would go to a saloon or a post office or someplace like that to get his crew together and there are hilarious accounts from these guys what it was like trying to herd a bunch of guys with hangovers out onto the fire line you'd lose 20 30 percent while you're getting them out there you know they just kind of fall into the bushes it was equally hard to find qualified lookouts in 1913 after a fire spotter in California's Klamath National Forest quiz assistant forest ranger MH McCarthy informed his forest supervisor that he had three applicants for the position one was a drunk the second at poor eyesight the third was no gentleman [Music] now they more stagette became the first female fire lookout she and others like Ellen Dow in Colorado were pioneers in an era before women could vote national forests have been carved out of the vast public domain lands which were mainly in the western states in 1911 a bill sponsored by representative John weeks authorized the Forest Service to buy from willing sellers the cheap deforested lands of the east south and lake states [Music] [Applause] in the eastern part of the country the national forests were created out of the lands that nobody wanted and these lands were purchased under the week's act to protect the watershed and they were generally purchased for about three dollars and forty three cents an acre as the Forest Service expanded in the East it also tried to add the Western national parks preservationist furious over the Hetch Hetchy Dam argued that a separate parks agency in the Interior Department would do a better job of protecting the parks the Forest Service was not very pleased with the idea of a competitive agency to say the least there was a concern among some foresters quickly at the upper levels that the Park Service was after some of their most precious holdings the eventual response of the Forest Service as the Park Service begins to win these battles is why don't we get into recreation in our own right why don't we form our own recreational agenda for the National Forest the Park Service and the Forest Service were opening public lands to a nation falling in love with the automobile [Music] as words penetrated the national forests more and more summer homes were built at trappers lake in Colorado Forest Service landscape architect Arthur Carhartt had the assignment of designing a group of cabins with roads leading to them Carhartt came up with the rather modest but quite important idea that rather than developing this lakefront it ought to be preserved that these vacation homes ought to be kept at least a half a mile away from the lakefront cartes suggestion met with success and trappers Lake was preserved from this sort of development [Music] and a forest service meeting Carhartt met a forester who shared his ideas about the greatest good Aldo Leopold Filippo who I considered to be the greatest conservationists of 20th century first went to work for the Forest Service in the southwest and 1909 Leopold when he first arrived in the southwest was pretty naive about what he was getting into he was going to be taking his first job off in the Arizona Territory not even a state yet like other foresters he was out there starting from the beginning and Aldo Leopold's first real job in the Forest Service was to go out measure the Apache National Forest with his young crew a disciple of Gifford Pinchot's utilitarian approach to resources and an avid hunter himself they both believed that wildlife should be managed to maximize the yield of Fish and Game species as Leopold viewed game management in the early years it was the management of habitat to produce a crop of game when he's a young forester Leopold has no understanding and nor does anyone else of the complex interrelationships between predators prey landscapes both live in much less the people who also share those landscapes so he was of his generation in time to kill a predator was no big deal [Music] he was leading a crew of timber cruisers out in the Apache National Forest two weeks on horseback as he describes it it was he and his crew looking down from a high Rimrock above the stream where pack of wolves came out a mother with some Cubs and as he says in those days we didn't think twice if we saw a wolf it was fair game so to speak and they shot at the Wolves from this high rim rock and took down the mother wolf scrambling down afterwards to investigate what they'd done they found that the mother wolf was still alive he wrote we reached the old wolf and time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes I was the young then and full of trigger itch because fewer wolves meant more deer I believe no wolves would mean hunters paradise but after watching the green fire die I realized that neither wolf nor mountain agreed with such a view [Music] they would disappear in just a few more short years by the time Leopold would leave the southwest it would be essentially gone for most of the mountains of that region later on in his life when he was reflecting back on this moment he was beginning to see that that was the place where he first began to get this inkling that his job was more than just to manage the forests [Music] [Applause] they saying that ultimately the measure of our success it's not how many board feet can come off the forest or how many head of deer we're able to raise in Arvest but he's also saying that we need to use the land as the standard land is the ultimate measure and reflection of all that we do on and with it as managers as citizens as users he began to realize that there was potential for developing a new kind of recreational experience in the forests what he called wilderness hunting grounds as Leopold defined it a wilderness area should be large enough to absorb a two-week pack trip without encountering any roads or buildings it would be unspoiled habitat for game while preserving an original American landscape and he proposes this wilderness idea a forester in the American Southwest suggesting that a large chunk of the National Forest be set aside and not developed with roads in particular although local developed a proposal for a Gila wilderness area that was subsequently approved in 1924 setting the pattern for the national system of wilderness areas that we have today [Music] as the nation moved into the 1930s the greatest good was redefined to meet huge problems in society and on the land these are tough here's the depression in the Dust Bowl for that entire generation was a another wake-up call just as pinchos generations wake-up call was the destruction of the Upper Great Lakes forests so was this massive environmental disaster the Dust Bowl and this simultaneous economic and social disaster the depression when Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933 one of his first initiatives was to create the Civilian Conservation Corps he took the scores of men who were unemployed and moved them to camps on the public lands and used them to do all sorts of things in just four months an array of ambitious government programs was put into place President Roosevelt's attack on the depression began with his emergency conservation project the purpose of which he clearly expressed what he said this enterprise is an established part of our national policy it will pay dividends to the present and future generations the president's profound interest in this work prompted him to visit and personally inspect several of the conservation camps this conservation army is rebuilding the forests one of our most important and valuable natural resources the New Deal workers help the Forest Service develop on a much larger scale in California they cut a firebreak of more than 600 miles through the Sierra Nevada they restored totem poles in Alaska they constructed Timberline Lodge on Oregon's Mount Hood in the Prairie States they planted 2,000 miles of tree windbreaks on farms from Texas to Minnesota [Music] [Applause] [Applause] a small farm restoration project became the passion of Aldo Leopold who is now a professor at the University of Wisconsin it was about 1935 and my father came home one day and said that he had bought some property up in the sand counties of central Wisconsin and here was this old worn-out piece of land coming up and corn stubble and cockle burrs it had a worn-out old chicken coop and it had a foundation of a house that had burnt down they all shared kind of this unspoken vision if the land is worn out try to fix it Aldo understood that ultimately both private lands and public lands we needed a common ethic of care for the land although Leopold really found his voice as a writer in the late 30s when he began writing a series of essays what he said in his most often quoted passage was a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity stability and beauty of the biotic community it is wrong when it tends otherwise while Leopold was creating a land ethic another Forester was building the wilderness system Bob Marshall new American will her is better than anyone else in America precisely because he had literally ground truth that he had walked through so much of the American wilderness by the late 1930s Marshall grew up in a wealthy New York family as a young man he hiked all 46 high peaks of the Adirondacks but he yearned for even bigger mountains he was an obsessive hiker he would hike routinely 40 miles a day and I think his record was something like 70 miles in a 26 hour period and it's really out in at the Northern Rockies where Bob Marshall first sees what to him is true wilderness and particularly after he visits Alaska for the first time in the late 1920s Marshall in many ways becomes the motive force of the motto wilderness idea [Applause] [Music] as the first director of recreation for the Forest Service Marshall worked to expand and protect the national forests wilderness areas [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] in 1935 Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall helped create the Wilderness Society they were concerned about the impacts that New Deal programs were having on the landscape roads were opening public lands to Recreation and improving access for firefighters at the same time some material is coming out from professional foresters in the south that suggests fire as a useful perhaps mandatory role in the Southern Pines so there's an ecological argument that comes into play and all this stuff lands on Ferdinand silk Cox's desk in the spring of 1935 and he has to he has to decide what do we do Silcox he was the number two man in the Northern Rockies during the 1910 fires had written an article after those fires in which he argued that they had been wholly preventable and all it took was more trails men or telephone lines we could have prevented the 1910 fires so now he's faced with a choice and he ups in effect to refight the 1910 fires with all the resources that are now available particularly the Civilian Conservation Corps and that yields the 10:00 a.m. policy which stipulated as a universal standard that it would be the goal to control fire by 10:00 o'clock the morning following its to meet the new standard a lookout would spot a plume of smoke and then race to the fire in those days they were lookout smoke teachers fewer the first one or one could get there quicker they dispatched you and then they despite to support up maybe the sports would have to hike from the ranger station maybe twenty miles or more the idea for the smokejumpers came out of the Blackwater Fire of 1937 15 firefighters were killed because they couldn't get a crew in to fight that fire fast enough David Godwin was one of the investigators on the Blackwater fire he said well why if we don't have roads why can't we drop him in from the air you're already a firefighter and if you were tired of walking 20 miles to get to a fire as I was y jumpered was easy it was a pleasure to look down at that fire and say all I gotta do is get out of this airplane and then walk a hundred yards the fire Evan Evan the gym champ jumping job makes you happy you soon the techniques of the smokejumpers and the fitness of the CCC boys and be put to the test the fires of World War two [Music] meeting the needs of a nation at war and a post-war economic boom the Forest Service will enjoy strong support and endure severe criticism in the concluding hour of the greatest good [Music] to order a copy of the greatest good on DVD for 2495 plus shipping and handling please call one eight hundred nine three seven five three eight seven or visit us online at Channel nine store comm the companion book the greatest good a centennial history is also available to learn more about your national forests and find out how you can get involved visit us had become a friend org Friends of the forest empowers people to care for our national forests through giving volunteering and enjoy unforgettable outdoor experiences major funding for the greatest good is made possible by the Fowl foundation proud founder of the Continental Divide Trail Alliance helping people experience our American heritage the Continental Divide Trail visit us at falco dot-com [Music] be ready for some big surprises globetrekker live the adventure [Music] [Music] Wednesday at 8:00 real people independent voices untold stories' a window into the world local communities global connections new perspectives see for yourself on global voices Wednesday at 9:00 next time on nature they've been our entertainers our guinea pigs and our explorers in spite of our past exploitation there's no way I could forgive like they forgive there have hearts bigger than ours now is the time for us to set things right get them on grass let them look at the sky for God's sakes without there being bars over their head chimpanzees an unnatural history next time on nature watch nature Thursday at 8:00 for humans drinking may be harmful to your health but for animals it can be downright deadly in Africa a two pronged drama plays out at scarce watering holes animals can quench their thirst risking attack by a predator or they can stay safely away and risk dying of thirst see watering hole drinkers dilemma next time on wild Thursday at 9:00 a few creatures can compete with the tortoise for sheer charm and charisma but what it first seems to be a cute benign little creature turns out that you wanted to architects of arid land ecology join me on the day's expedition as we go digging and nature's sandbox with the tortoise Thursday at 10:00 while I was growing up I always wanted to be an American I didn't really quite know what that meant I grew up in Portland Oregon area in a Caucasian community I felt always a little different because I looked a little boyfriend when I saw the Civil War series on PBS the realization of what it is to be an American crystallized in my mind and it has nothing to do with how you look I've suddenly realized that I always was an American