FORESTRY in the United States attained the dignity of a profession about 50 years ago, largely because of the inauguration and the rapid spread of technical training.
Two schools of forestry opened their doors in 1898, the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell University and the Biltmore Forestry School on the Vanderbilt estate near Asheville, N.C. Both were headed by men who had been trained in forestry in Germany, B. E. Fernow at Cornell, and C. A. Schenck at Biltmore. Their establishment, at a time when the opportunities for the practice of forestry were few and too far between, required vision and courage and was an essential step toward providing trained men, without whom progress would have continued to be slow and uncertain.
In 1900 were established the Yale School of Forestry and the Division of Forestry in the University of Minnesota, which are today our oldest schools in continuous existence. The school at Cornell was discontinued in 1905 as a result of legislative disapproval of the management of a tract of Adirondack forest land which had been placed at its disposal. The one at Biltmore was discontinued shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. Several other institutions, however, introduced forestry into their curricula, and by 1914 schools of forestry were in operation in all parts of the country.
Today 22 schools are recognized by the Society of American Foresters as providing professional training of a caliber to justify the admission of graduates to the Society without further proof of their competence.
The first three schools of forestry had different approaches to the methods of professional training. The school at Cornell was established as a State institution and comprised a 4-year undergraduate program leading to the bachelor's degree. That at Biltmore, a private enterprise, also conferred a bachelor's degree, although the course in forestry covered only a year and was devoted largely to practical work in the field. The one at Yale, a privately endowed institution, was open only to men with a bachelor's degree and offered 2 years of study leading to the degree of master of forestry.
The pattern established at Cornell has been pretty generally followed at other institutions. There are today no "master" schools similar to that at Biltmore, and only three—Yale, Duke, and Harvard—require a bachelor's degree for admission. All the others admit undergraduates and are parts of State-supported institutions. The latter fact undoubtedly reflects the belief that the importance of proper management of the forests to the permanent prosperity of the entire community is such as to warrant public support of professional training.
Several features of that training deserve special mention. Without exception, the schools require that students obtain a foundation in such subjects as biology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, and economics in their first 2 years. Courses in those subjects are followed by professional instruction in the protection and harvesting, reproduction, management, and utilization of the forest and its products. Since thorough coverage of those subjects is obviously impossible in 2 years, many of the schools now offer an additional year, leading to the master's degree, in which the student's training can be broadened and intensified. Some encourage superior students to take still more intensive training for the doctor's degree. It is significant of the increasing demands being made upon foresters that more and more students are going forward to the higher degrees. The master's degree is, in fact, now commonly regarded as essential fur full professional training, and the doctor's degree is becoming an increasingly valuable asset for men in teaching and research.
Forestry in the broad sense is the science, art, and business of managing forest lands for the continuous production of forest goods and services. The average practitioner must be qualified to handle most of the problems encountered in the everyday management of a forest property, whether its size is 10 acres or 100,000 acres and whether it serves primarily to produce wood, wildlife, or scenery or to prevent erosion and control stream flow, just as the ordinary doctor must be prepared to handle any disease that he is normally likely to run across. But there is also need for highly trained specialists to develop the underlying principles that the practitioner uses in his daily work and to advise on particularly difficult or unusual problems, just as there is need for specialists in the medical field.
Consequently, the schools are now graduating doctors of philosophy who are intensively trained to handle problems that deal with such matters as the determination of the contents and growth of a forest; methods of cutting to obtain satisfactory current revenues and at the same time assure the reproduction of the forest; organization of logging operations to minimize waste and maximize profits; control of the environment to provide an abundance of food and other necessary conditions for the support of the deer, muskrats, pheasants, or ducks; provision of ample forage for the production of livestock; and maintenance of a forest cover that will control the runoff of water in the interest of water users of all classes.
In all these fields—timber management, management of wildlife, range management, and watershed management—effective practice must be based on increasingly accurate and comprehensive knowledge. Education and research therefore go hand in hand; and research is being increasingly recognized as a major function of the schools.
Closely related to the production and harvesting of the forest itself is the manufacture and marketing of wood and its innumerable products. Wood technology, as this field is now commonly called, includes all matters relating to the structure and properties of wood; the processes used in its manufacture and treatment, such as kiln drying, preservation from decay and termites, treatment to render it fire-resistant, application of adhesives in the manufacture of plywood; chemical utilization; and the tools, the methods, and power required in wood-working operations of all kinds. This group of activities might be described as "timber engineering." It requires a thorough knowledge of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and their practical applications in the form of machinery and processes. Some schools now recognize the distinctive character of the training needed for their effective conduct by providing special training in which the basic and applied sciences of particular interest to the wood technologist are emphasized.
Foresters today realize that forestry as a business founded on the commercial utilization of wood will succeed only if there is a profitable market for products made from wood and that the existence of such a market, in turn, depends upon the cost and utility of the goods to the consumer. They themselves, consequently, need some knowledge of the properties and uses of woods, and they recognize the importance of the wood technologist in providing the same kind of professional competence in utilization of wood that they themselves provide in its production. Wood technologists, on the other hand, need to know something of the distribution, production, and management of the resources from which they obtain their raw material, and they recognize the importance of the forester in producing a continuous supply of the material without which the wood technologist would have nothing with which to work. Schools of forestry today are training men for both fields of endeavor and are giving each an appreciation of the other's work as a basis for effective cooperation.
Closely related to the biological and engineering aspects of forestry are its economic and social aspects. Forest policies and forest practices have to do primarily with the production and use of wealth, whether the forests to which they are applied are in private or in public ownership. The private owner is naturally most interested in obtaining a net profit in dollars and cents, while the public owner may be equally interested in services that are difficult to measure in financial terms, such as the prevention of erosion, the regulation of stream flow, the production of wildlife for fur and sport, and the provision of other recreational facilities. Private and public forests alike therefore find their ultimate justification in an economic or social return that justifies the expenditures involved.
This means that professional training in forestry now places an emphasis on the social sciences that was unusual in the early years of the century. Forestry must be practiced in a world of reality in which income (including public benefits) must justify costs, in which all operations must be conducted within the framework of existing political and social institutions, and in which the forester must be able to work with other people both as individuals and groups. Economics, political science, sociology, administration, and psychology consequently are fields with which the modern forester is expected to be familiar, in addition to such fundamental subjects as botany, zoology, chemistry, mathematics, and surveying. He also must be able to fit his own specialty of forest growing into other activities that involve the use of cultivated lands in farms and of wild lands elsewhere, so as to develop a finely integrated pattern of land utilization in which each area is devoted to the use for which it is best adapted from the combined view of the biological, engineering, and social sciences.
That forestry is now a profession that offers an attractive career to well-trained men is due largely to the effectiveness with which schools of forestry have discharged their responsibilities during the past 50 years. The profession will doubtless continue to include within its ranks many men whose training has been acquired in the woods, in the practical school of hard knocks, but as the requirements become more rigorous and competition more keen, the advantage will increasingly lie with those who have had technical training in an academic institution.
Today these schools give the holder of an undergraduate degree in forestry a sound training in fundamentals and in the major branches of the profession. They give the man with a master's degree a somewhat broader foundation and a more thorough knowledge of some particular branch of the profession, and they give the holder of the doctor's degree a sufficiently intensive training to qualify him as a true specialist. In light of the broad scope of forestry, as it is now conceived, and of its increasing complexity, the problem is to give the general practitioner a training that will be comprehensive without being superficial, and to give the specialist a training that will be intensive without being narrow.
The successful practice of forestry requires a knowledge and a leadership that can be supplied only by men with a professional competence which is now difficult to acquire except at a recognized school of forestry. At the same time, there are many subordinate positions that can be filled satisfactorily by men with a semiprofessional or vocational training, just as there are many positions in a hospital that can be filled satisfactorily by nurses, laboratory technicians, and orderlies. Training of this kind has long been neglected in forestry, but it is now being offered at several institutions. The probability is that it will increase in importance.