The National Forests and federal wilderness areas that are often taken for granted today only exist because of the efforts of some dedicated conservationists and foresters with the foresight to realize that if these lands were not protected, they would be logged and developed into oblivion. To share the history of how U.S. public lands were rescued, joining me on the podcast this week is Jeffrey Ryan, a well-traveled hiker and the author of “This Land Was Saved for You and Me.”
In addition to being a writer, Jeffrey is an adventurer, photographer and historian. His debut book, “Appalachian Odyssey: A 28-Year Hike on America’s Trail” was hailed by the former executive editor of National Geographic as “a classic of nature and travel writing.” His other books are “Blazing Ahead: Benton MacKaye, Myron Avery, and the Rivalry That Built the Appalachian Trail” and “Hermit: The Mysterious Life of Jim Whyte.”
Chance meeting in Wisconsin when Jeff was on a 28-state book tour in my 1985 VW camper.
Photo Credit: Larry Chua Photography
From the time I first read one of Jeffrey’s books, I knew he was someone I wanted to talk to. Like Jeffrey, I have a real heart for trees, forests and woodlands. (For decades, every car I have owned has sported a window decal that reads “Trees Are Good.”)
Before there was an awakening in the public consciousness, there was a time when the land was viewed only as a resource that we could plunder for whatever we needed. Forests were clear-cut with abandon for lumber, and there was a belief that the resources were infinite. But eventually, people came to realize that is not the case and the consequences of clear-cutting are far-reaching.
In his latest book, Jeffrey calls attention to the people who — excuse the pun — saw the forest for the trees long before the majority did.
Meet Jeffrey Ryan
Jeffrey grew up on the coast of Maine with the ocean a quarter mile away from his home on one side and the woods 50 feet away on the other side.
“What a magical place to grow up in, particularly since the woods behind the house was a 62-acre nature preserve,” Jeffrey says. “So it was really my playground all through childhood, and also very fortunately, my parents were very much into enjoying the outdoors.”
Jeffrey is comfortable tramping around in the woods, with or without a trail. Growing up spending a lot of time in the woods was good for his physical health as well as his mental health, he says.
When Jeffrey was in his early teens, his mother handed him a book from the family’s floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and told him it would be one of the most important books he’d ever read. The book was “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau.
“I just became enamored of the way he wrote his love of the woods in the mountains,” Jeffrey says of Thoreau. “His observation of humanity and the audacity to build a cabin and live in the woods was something that really stuck for me.”
Today, Jeffrey is working on a replica of Thoreau’s cabin, which he is building by hand, with mortise and tenon joints, using blueprints from the Thoreau Society. It will become his writing studio. (You can see the cabin under construction in the photo at the top of this page.)
Not long after Jeffrey read “Walden,” his mother asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. He said he wanted to write the L.L. Bean catalog. That ambition came to fruition. He started working at L.L. Bean in 1980 and spent several years convincing his employer that he would be the right person for the catalog.
In 1982, Jeffrey asked for a six-month leave of absence to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada with two friends. L.L. Bean’s grandson, Leon Gorman, agreed to give Jeffrey six and a half months off and to outfit Jeffrey and his pals head to toe in L.L. Bean gear. The only thing Mr. Gorman asked Jeffrey to give him in return was honest feedback about how the gear performed on the trek.
On April 1, 1983, they started their journey from the Mexican border, and they arrived in Canada on September 21.
Jeffrey also hiked the entire length of the Appalachian Trail, a nearly 2,200-mile trail between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine. He did this in sections over the course of 28 years. Yes, years.
“Appalachian Odyssey: A 28-Year Hike on America’s Trail” details Jeffrey Ryan’s experience taking on the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail over nearly three decades.
This Land Was Saved for You and Me
Hiking a number of National Forests and digging into the history of conservation inspired Jeffrey to write “This Land Was Saved for You and Me: How Gifford Pinchot, Frederick Law Olmsted, and a Band of Foresters Rescued America’s Public Lands.” While the National Parks story was well known, he wanted to explore how other public lands came into being.
He says he was absolutely stunned to find out that landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was deeply involved in the creation of Yosemite National Park in addition to co-designing New York City’s Central Park with Calvert Vaux.
Olmsted grew up as a lover of scenery and was a failed fruit farmer before he became a landscape architect. Throughout his life, Olmsted spoke of the importance of scenery to human happiness. That could be unblemished scenery but also constructed scenery, such as a garden.
Olmsted actually walked off the Central Park project before it was completed.
“In making Central Park, he got into a squabble with the guy who was holding the purse strings,” Jeffrey says. “And after a couple of failed attempts to quit, he finally pulled it off and he left the park project in Vaux’s hands and became involved in the Civil War effort in coming up with the plan to get bandages to the battlefield for the union troops.”
Olmstead was in a bad financial state after that endeavor and needed to come up with $10,000 to pay his father back after some failed business ventures. He took a job in California running a gold mine for a fee of $10,000.
“That’s what got him to California, and when he was out there, the gold mines started going belly up,” Jeffrey says. “He fortunately cashed in his portion of the stock options before the writing was truly on the wall. At the same time, he had had the chance to get into Yosemite Valley, and when he saw it for the first time, that scenery piece, he was awestruck by the size of the trees, the waterfalls, all of it. And he wrote a letter to his dad saying, this place is absolutely stunning. It needs to be protected.”
At the same time, a steamship magnate wanted to figure out how to preserve Yosemite, and he also intended to make money for himself by bringing his steamship passenger up to see it.
“He knew that Olmsted was out there and also was able to get the senator of California to submit a bill naming Yosemite as a California state preserve,” Jeffrey says.
Olmsted predicted in 1865 that some day there would be 3 million visitors to Yosemite annually. He was right, and that number has even exceeded Olmsted’s expectations, growing to 4 million a year.
“He made a similar statement about Central Park when he said to Vaux, ‘Someday there will be these large buildings all around this place, and this will be the only greenery for miles.’” Jeffrey says. “And again, he was absolutely right.”
Vaux lured Olmsted back to the East Coast to be a landscape architect after the Yosemite deal. Olmsted would go on to design many parks and estates, including the Chicago World’s Fair (1893) fairgrounds and the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina.
Jeffrey Ryan’s latest book, “This Land Was Saved for You and Me: How Gifford Pinchot, Frederick Law Olmsted, and a Band of Foresters Rescued America’s Public Lands.”
Photo Credit Jeffrey H Ryan
Passing the Baton
George Washington Vanderbilt II, who commissioned Olmsted to design the landscape architecture of the Biltmore Estate, approached Olmsted about what could be done to manage the clear-cut forests the Vanderbilts had bought up around the estate. Olmsted passed the baton to Gifford Pinchot, who has studied forestry in France and Germany and whose father had endowed the Yale Forestry School at their family estate in Milford, Pennsylvania, for the first 20 years of its existence.
“Pinchot gets hired to prove the viability of forestry as we know it now,” Jeffrey says. “Sustainable forestry was a new concept in America. We’re talking about turn of the century now. And what had preceded that was largely unregulated, cut-and-run forestry, where lumber barons were coming into areas, basically creating billiard tables out of old forest land, cutting everything down and leaving devastation in their wake.”
Ironically, it was Pinchot’s grandfather who had come into Milford, Pennsylvania, and clear-cut the lands, making lots of money selling lumber.
Jeffrey says people had awakened to the fact that in the Adirondacks, hundreds of thousands of acres were left bare and everyone absconded on paying their taxes.
In New England, which was one of the areas to be hard hit by clear-cutting first, people were starting to raise the alarm that the practice was leading to landslides, mudslides, floods and other devastation. It also caused economic harm to businesses such as fabric mills in New Hampshire and threatened the viability of the Erie Canal as a means for shipping goods. Some people also recognized the threat to tourism as the view from Mount Washington looked like a moonscape.
“Of course, there was great pushback by the lumber people and mining people, et cetera, and so even getting the Forest Service established was a bit of a battle,” Jeffrey says.
But Teddy Roosevelt was swept into power, and he named Pinchot the forestry chief.
Pinchot “had the title, but not the political wherewithal to get it done,” Jeffrey says. “So that took a bunch of fits and starts, but he was ultimately able to do that.”
Pinchot then passed the baton to the young foresters that he had hired to manage the millions of acres of forest land. “He hired mostly young graduates of the Yale Forestry School to go out into the world and try to convince people there’s a new way of doing things.”
Pinchot urged the foresters to make alliances with people who were philosophically against doing things in a new way. He was able to successfully prevail upon them that if they don’t manage the forests, there would be no forests left to manage. Managing forests protected a resource so it would be around for the viability of their businesses and for their kids and grandkids.
One of those foresters, Aldo Leopold, had the idea to take a segment of National Forest in New Mexico and make it wilderness that would remain “untrammeled by man.”
“That finally came to fruition in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law,” Jeffrey says. “And so that’s sort of the arc of the book. I go into much more detail, but that’s really when the light bulb went off for me. It was this three-generation baton pass piece that I think really not only holds the book together, but helps you realize all the fits and starts along the way.”
Early American Forestry
Pinchot wrote for the magazine Garden and Forest about forestry when the concepts were new to readers — and the magazine had over 1 million regular readers.
“It was a brand new concept to basically everyone who read it at that time,” Jeffrey says. “But he finally got the gig at the Biltmore, and that changed the arc of history.”
About two years before his death, Pinchot sent 300 letters out to the young foresters he had hired and asked them to write down remembrances of the forest service. In the National Archives, Pinchot’s niece found a box of 200 replies that Pinchot had received, including one from Aldo Leopold.
“There are more Gifford Pinchot letters in the National Archives than any other person,” Jeffrey says. “It’s astonishing how much he wrote. He was trying to get the Forest Service going and spent most of his time trying to get people on board. And it was a hard sell. It wasn’t just the timber industry that was causing resistance. It was the National Park Service and others in the federal government that felt threatened.”
The Founding of the Appalachian Trail
Benton MacKaye is a very well known and much celebrated hero in the Appalachian Trail community, Jeffrey says. He had written eloquently about the need for the trail to provide solitude and a way to get away from the day-to-day rat race and man-made environment.
“Benton came up with the idea for the Appalachian Trail and published it in 1921,” he explains. “However, MacKaye had a falling out with the guy who was largely responsible for building the trail, a guy named Myron Avery, who had a personality like Gifford Pinchot and sort of railroaded stuff through.”
At one point MacKaye and Avery bumped into a huge problem in Shenandoah in Virginia when they found out that the first 34 miles of Skyline Drive was built over the top of the Appalachian Trail.
“They went up there to look at it, and MacKaye was crestfallen,” Jeffrey says. “He just thought, ‘How much sickening irony can there be? A man-made device is wheeling over the top of this footpath.’”
Avery was disappointed but less concerned. He thought it was more important to have a contiguous trail. The National Park Service could move the trail over, and who cares if it’s in the shadow of a road? he thought
But MacKaye and Avery could not resolve that difference of opinion over Skyline Drive and similar roads on the Appalachian Trail’s path, including one over the top of the White Mountains and the Green Mountains in Vermont.
Finally, MacKaye was undermined because Avery was such a political genius that he basically made it so that the Appalachian Trail Conservancy — or Conference as it was known then — would pull the rug out from under MacKaye’s leadership ability. And MacKaye was ousted, and he licked his wounds and went on to become the founder of a movement to create wilderness areas that would keep roads out.”
That movement was the precursor of The Wilderness Society. Jeffrey says wilderness activist and forester Bob Marshall had the audacity and brilliance to suggest to MacKaye that a society should not be formed to be against anything, like roads. Rather it should be for something, like wilderness.
“Thanks largely to seed money provided by Bob Marshall’s estate, they were able to get the organization off and running,” Jeffrey says. The upstart group eventually saw through the establishment of the Wilderness Act.
Jeffrey Ryan’s “Blazing Ahead: Benton MacKaye, Myron Avery, and the Rivalry That Built the Appalachian Trail.”
Don’t Forget Howard Zahniser
Another key figure is environmental activist Howard Zahniser, the Wilderness Society’s leader from 1945 until his death in 1964. He was the primary author of the Wilderness Act, which was signed into law months after he died.
“I feel badly that Howard has not really achieved the pantheon that he deserves,” Jeffrey says. “But he basically gave his life to the creation of wilderness areas. He would ply the halls of Congress with a slide projector on wheels, and anybody he could get to listen, he would wheel the thing into their office and say, ‘Don’t you understand how important this is to the American psyche, to our health.’”
Risks to Federal Lands
“I have been fearing for the health of the National Parks for a while, and it has to do with the bouncing ball of budgets,” Jeffrey says. “And I think any of us that have spent any time in National Parks, if we look closely enough, we see cracked stone steps. We see handrails that are missing a few screws. We’re seeing trails that have blow downs across them or have backcountry outhouses that could be in better shape.”
He goes on to say: “Our National Parks are us, and people identify with them so strongly, and they’re used so heavily, and it’s not just seasonally now. Year-round, they’re getting a lot of use.
“So I worry about the infrastructure. I worry about the people that are tasked with taking care of them having jobs. And a third piece of it is, I’m increasingly worried that some of the ethics around our personal responsibility to take care of those assets are not what they used to be.”
As he continues to visit backcountry, he has increasingly noticed that people leave behind granola wrappers and leave the campsites with fires and embers still going.
He worries about the forests themselves because when lumber prices go up, clear-cutting forests is a quick fix. But with no succession plan for those forests, the land will either be left fallow to reseed on their own or they will be planted in a monoculture of nonnative species.
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jeffrey Ryan on how conservationists and foresters saved America’s public lands. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Have you visited a U.S. National Forest or another federal public land? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
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Episode 373: The Land Ethic: Aldo Leopold’s Conservation Philosophy
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GGW Episode 104: Phipps Conservatory-The Greenest in the World
Jeff Ryan on Instagram | @jeff_ryan_author
Jeffrey Ryan on the “Nature Revisited” Podcast
“This Land Was Saved for You and Me: How Gifford Pinchot, Frederick Law Olmsted, and a Band of Foresters Rescued America’s Public Lands” by Jeffrey H. Ryan
“Appalachian Odyssey: A 28-Year Hike on America’s Trail” by Jeffrey H. Ryan
“Blazing Ahead: Benton MacKaye, Myron Avery, and the Rivalry That Built the Appalachian Trail” by Jeffrey H. Ryan
“A Hike in the Woods: Your comprehensive guide to day hiking gear, clothing, safety and other essentials” by Jeffrey H. Ryan
“Hermit: The Mysterious Life of Jim Whyte” by Jeffrey H. Ryan
“Walden” by Henry David Thoreau
“Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action” by George Perkins Marsh
Grey Towers National Historic Site – The home of Gifford Pinchot, the founder and first chief of the U.S. Forest Service
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Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Corona Tools, Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Earth’s Ally, Proven Winners ColorChoice, Farmer’s Defense, Heirloom Roses and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
