Book Review: Pinchot and the Greatest Good

April 11, 2014

Pennsylvania’s first environmentally aware governor was Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot was also the first chief of the National Forest Service, a founding father of conservation who defined the concept as “the foresighted utilization, preservation and/or renewal of forests, waters, lands and minerals, for the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time.”  Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot, was written by Pinchot’s biographer and a senior fellow at the Gifford Pinchot Institute. Allegheny Front commentator Ken Chiacchia recently read up about the institute charged with carrying out Pinchot’s heritage.

Pinchot’s philosophy was not exactly what we would call green today. At the turn of the 20th century, you conserved natural resources, heavy on the idea that you were going to use them.  The concept that we might preserve the environment in a pristine state had not yet occurred to most Americans.  Pinchot’s ideas set the stage for “radicals” like Carson, Muir, and Leopold to give birth to true environmentalism.  Made that birth possible.

Certainly, Char Miller—an environmental analysis professor at Pomona College—would seem to agree with this proposition. In Seeking the Greatest Good, Miller charts the history of the Washington, D.C.-based Pinchot Institute for Conservation. The book isn't really about Pinchot as much as how his ideas fared after he was gone, as his family, the Forest Service, and various nonprofit organizations created the Institute to carry on his legacy, and tried to manage it from the early 1960s to today.  Miller starts with John F. Kennedy’s appearance at the 1963 inauguration of the Institute, at a time when Pinchot’s conservationism was coming into conflict with the new environmentalism.

Miller is careful to point out—more than once—that during his life Pinchot showed flexibility and common sense in achieving his goals. It's possible that, had he lived beyond 1946, he might have appreciated and even joined the environmental movement that emerged in the 1960s. But many times the people responsible for his namesake institute – particularly those running the Forest Service, originally a partner in its governance—seemed unable to see beyond the standard Pinchot catechism of sustainable extraction. Dismissing the early environmental movement as radical and uninformed, they found themselves overtaken by events.

Worse, a series of directors filed through the Pinchot Institute and Grey Towers, the Pinchot family's northeastern Pennsylvania estate and sometime headquarters of the Institute. These leaders' varying strengths—and sometimes, profound weaknesses—caused the organization to stumble between philosophies and often grandiose goals.

Seeking the Greatest Good is a formal history book, not what I would call a popular account. But don't let that scare you off. It's a fascinating portrayal of an organization struggling to find its footing even as the world around it changes. When the Pinchot Institute and Grey Towers were led by those with that rare combination of vision and competence, it flourished. When its leaders failed it, it circled the drain.

My only qualm about the book is the sanguine tone of the last chapter, which describes the Institute's current activities and its future prospects. Mind you, the projects are impressive. Returning, perhaps, to Pinchot's original vision, it has taken up a kind of holistic approach toward sustainability for people whose chief wealth lies in the land around them, both in the United States and nations such as Ecuador. The idea is to responsibly harvest the land to provide people with income and improve their health, helping them maintain the land rather than develop it. But I'm left with the thought that, given the wrong change in leadership, this work could suffer just as the Institute's mission has in the past.

I don't view that as pessimism. More as a call to action, a reminder that the price of conservation, like liberty, is eternal vigilance. Perhaps that's the moral of Seeking the Greatest Good.

Image of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot at the Governors' Conference, French Lick, Indiana, June 2, 1931. Photo: National Park Service.