By Jane Shaw Stroup

Did you know that the “cradle of American forestry” is in North Carolina? The first forestry school in the country, the Biltmore Forest School, was built on land around the famed Biltmore House in Asheville, and the first effort to apply scientific management to American forests was made on those lands in the 1890s.

George Vanderbilt, grandson of the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, wanted to restore forests around his new home — land that totaled 125,000 acres, much of it ugly cutover forest. He hired a young man, Gifford Pinchot, to manage it. Pinchot soon brought in Carl Schenck, a German forestry professional, to carry out the task.

“Vanderbilt gave Schenck two projects after hiring him in 1891,” writes Jason Hayes in First in Forestry: “Repair the land and make sustainable forest management a profitable occupation.”

Pinchot went on to be the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, and Schenck started the first forestry school in the nation.

There are some ironies in this story, however.

• The project did not become profitable.
• The “sustained yield” approach Schenck carried out was unnecessary.
• The U.S. Forest Service was created based on the “sustained-yield” approach.
• Some people today question whether sustained-yield forestry was ever needed or is needed today.
• Let’s look at the state of forestry around 1900.

Demand for wood was insatiable — for houses, for ships, for fuel, for railroad ties. Americans were logging trees all over the country, then moving on to another forest, leaving stumps and trashed land behind them.

In a 1905 speech to the American Forest Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt expressed fear of a “timber famine.” Trees are being destroyed, he said, “far more rapidly than they are being replaced.”

Vanderbilt came to the rescue. Or so it seemed.

Gifford Pinchot and Carl Schenck had studied in Europe, including France and Germany. Because the densely populated continent held only limited forestland, Germans had developed “sustained-yield” forestry. This management approach ensures that when trees are cut down, others are growing, providing a steady stream of timber.

“Schenck was used to the forests of Germany,” wrote Jonathan Hill in 2017. German forests “were of pure artificial design: forests were often of a single type of tree, planted in even rows and all of the same age. The forests of Biltmore were practically the exact opposite.”

Schenck tried to apply his German training to this wild, uncouth, and cutover forest. Making matters worse, he and Pinchot differed on just how German practice should be applied to American forests. When Pinchot first arrived at Biltmore, he had selectively cut some of the bigger trees to obtain revenue and also to open the forest to more sunlight and faster growth of young trees. To Schenck, this violated the orderly process he had learned in his home country.

The problem

The fundamental problem, however, was that the United States was not like Germany. Land, including timberland, was widely available and cheap. There was so much wood in the United States that prices weren’t high enough to justify regrowing the forests. In 1991, economist Roger Sedjo wrote, “The primary reason that forest management and tree planting were rare, even on private lands, was simply that these investments did not pay financially.” He described the Vanderbilt effort as one that “eventually proved unprofitable.”

And consumption of wood was about to drop. Coal replaced wood as fuel, brick replaced some of the wood used for housing, and new technologies reduced the need for wood and the waste in its processing. In 1907, two years after Roosevelt’s “timber famine” speech, wood consumption peaked in the US, not to return to such a height for 70 years. So the need for a “sustained-yield” process to curb overuse became even less necessary.

Randal O’Toole, author of Reforming the Forest Service, explains further:

“(W)ood is extremely abundant in this country; wood technology has dramatically increased the amount of usable wood from individual trees; there are a lot of substitutes for wood; and as a result, per capita consumption of wood has dramatically declined since the (Pinchot) era even as the amount of wood grown in the U.S. each year is significantly greater than the amount we use. In short, there was no need for their (forestry) profession in the Biltmore era and there is no need today.”

Thus, no timber famine and no need for sustained-yield forestry.

The aftermath

Yet the idea that Pinchot and Schenck saved America’s forests is hard to quash. Schenck “emphasized not just preservation, but forest management practices that would assure continued production of saleable timber,” wrote Amy Ney in Carolina Today. “This was sustainable forest management, which we practice today.”

Yes, but many analysts think that the sustained-yield policy set the Forest Service on the wrong track. It led the agency to ignore market demand and ultimately to sell much timber at prices below their cost, as it tried to follow the rigid plan crafted in the forests of a cramped and heavily populated Europe.

As a Harry G. Smith, a Canadian analyst, said of sustained-yield forestry in 1969, “Ignoring values, costs of management, costs of capital, trends in technology, trends in markets, and various possibilities of improvement in yield and value through management, should seem intolerable but actually represents established policy in many forestry administrations.”

Jane Shaw Stroup is an editorial consultant for the North Carolina History Project, a special project of the John Locke Foundation.