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The U.S. national forests grew, along with the Interior Department's national parks, out of the U.S.'s late19th-century realization that its clear-the-wilderness drive was depleting the nation's basic resources. The National Park Service (now running 23 million acres) was set up in 1916 to conserve recreation grounds and scenic splendors. The national forests were intended for controlled development and use.
Conservation got rolling in 1891 under President Benjamin Harrison, who got broad powers from Congress to close off forest reserves from exploitation by timber barons, set up the first reserve in Wyoming (now Shoshone National Forest in the soaring Absaroka and Wind River mountains); in all, set aside 13 million acres under the Interior Department. Theodore Roosevelt gave conservation an evangelist's fire: "Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation." Roosevelt, in 1905, transferred the forest reserves to the Agriculture Department, created the Forest Service under his brilliant conservationist friend, Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania. Controlled cutting and sale of timber, and systematic reforestation of the national forests were authorized. Roosevelt's Agriculture Secretary James Wilson gave the U.S. Forest Rangers the enduring directive to run the forests for "the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run."
The greatest fear of U.S.'s fervent conservationists is that too much multiple use of the national forests might threaten the natural splendors. On the urgings of conservationists, the Forest Service, by administrative order, has set aside 82 Wilderness, Primitive, Roadless and Wild Areas, where roads and resorts are prohibited and a man can come and go only on horseback, on foot or by boat. Now Illinois' Senator Paul Douglas, Oregon's Dick Neuberger and Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey are trying to get these wilderness areas made by law into a new and inviolable National Wilderness Preservation System. Says Chief Forester (since 1952) Richard E. McArdle, a rugged (6 ft. 1 in.; 206 Ibs.) Forest Service pro since 1924: "I am taking no sides. This country needs to maintain and preserve some of primitive America, and this we intend to do. Ninety-nine percent of the people who hunt, fish, camp, picnic, or just ride around enjoying the scenery in the national forests don't use our wilderness areas. Many of them don't have the time or money to get there. There is a steadily growing demand to make more recreational areas accessible to motor transportation."
Thus, in a direct way that pioneer conservationists would have wondered at—and some might have shuddered at—millions of Americans in whose name the forests were saved from the timber barons are now pouring into the national forests. The millions of U.S. citizens today want not only to co-own and co-profit from the forests, but to harvest the personal dividends of their heritage by browsing through the ferns of upper Michigan or drowsing to the trickle of waterfalls in North Carolina or pitching the tent far from crowded camp sites and far, far from the urban world.