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Show 596 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT virgin timberland. The average price was $5.95. Moderate appropriations made for slow progress in acquiring land so that by 1921, when additional purchase units had been established in Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Arkansas amounting to 9,225,000 acres, only 1,613,845 acres had been acquired. In 1933, with eight more states authorizing the creation of Federal forests the total acreage bought had reached 4,532,698 acres, with the largest holdings in Virginia, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.ss This was a far cry from the acreage the Copeland Report of 1933 said should be in public ownership. Between the adoption of the Weeks Act in 1911 and the Clarke-McNary Act in 1924, advocates of two sharply defined theories concerning the role of the Federal government in forest management and protection clashed at the meetings of forestry associations, in their journals, and in Congress. The first, the traditional theory of the conservationists, whose spokesman was Gifford Pinchot, was that the increasing consumption of timber, together with the heavy losses from fire, disease, and insects so threatened the future supply of timber that more drastic action than thus far adopted was essential. The drastic action might have included extensive purchasing of timbered and cutover lands but this appeared unrealistic in view of the costs. Instead, it was proposed to require by national legislation that lumbermen should follow forest management practices on their privately owned lands, somewhat similar to those enforced in the national forests. The generation of foresters who had grown up with and been influenced by Pinchot might agree with him in the pursuit of these goals, but a new and younger group was coming to the fore who believed it possible to cooperate with private manage- 88 Reports of the Forester 1912, pp. 73-74; 1921, p. 10; 1933, p. 15. ment, to secure the goals of conservation without compulsion. The leader of this group was Colonel William B. Greeley, who became Chief Forester in 1920.8!) Well before 1924, leaders in the lumber industry had become aware of the need for protecting their timberlands from fire, diseases, and insects, for nurseries to provide seedlings for reforestation where natural regeneration did not follow clearcutting, for cutting practices that would permit long-range milling operations in a restricted area, and for the employment of professional, trained foresters to aid in planning all these operations. Pinchot himself, in his earlier years as chief of the Division of Forests in the Department of Agriculture, had tried to aid the large owners of timberland to establish these desirable practices but had become disillusioned with their slow response and was convinced that compulsion was the only way to achieve the desired results. Well before 1924 Greeley had been advocating a policy of cooperation with lumbermen but is pictured by a recent student, as also in these early years, advocating additional purchases of forest lands, extension of public management to all Federal forest lands and the acceleration of research and of road construction.90 An important provision of the Weeks Act authorized an appropriation of $200,000 annually for protection from fire in such 89 Greeley's own account of the early days of the Bureau of Forestry under Pinchol and his remarkable tribute to his predecessor is worthy of quotation: "G.P. had the happy faculty of inspiring his young Forest Service with the same spirit of team play in everything we undertook. . . . One of G.P.'s finest qualities was his capacity to understand and work with men whose background was totally different from his own. . . . Around the solid, realistic job of protecting and administering a hundred millions acres of federal forests and ranges Gifford Pinchot built an organization of three thousand people and inspired it with genuine zeal for public service. He made crusaders of all. ... He made the merit system of Civil Service a vital, living thing." Greeley, Forests and Men, p. 66. |