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Seeing the Forest, the Trees, and the World

Five years ago, the dean and faculty of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies decided it was time for a (nick)name change. Founded as the Yale Forest School in 1900—it became FES in 1972—the school was usually, around campus, referred to simply as “Forestry.” But that designation no longer seemed adequate to the dean and most of the FES professors. “We’ve evolved considerably over the years, and our interests now extend to most environmental concerns,” says Dean James Gustave Speth '64, '69LLB, a leading environmentalist who helped found the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute and chaired the UN Development Programme.

So, in a 2002 memo to professors, staff, students, alumni, and a few journalists, Speth suggested that, for shorthand purposes, everyone should start calling the institution the “environment school.” Occasionally, people complained. One 1948 FES alumnus wrote to the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2004: “I and most of my contemporaries who have been involved in the profession of forestry are very unhappy at the movement to drop ‘Forestry’ from the name of the school.”

 
“The forests haven’t been saved yet, so our work isn’t done.”

The dean would reply that there was no such movement in the offing and that, even though forestry students now represented only about 15 percent of the FES total, forestry remained an important concern. Chad Oliver '70MFS, '75PhD, the Pinchot Professor of Forestry and Environmental Studies, puts a spin on it: “The forests haven’t been saved yet, so our work isn’t done.”

In many ways, Speth’s expansive vision has its roots in the school’s inception, says James E. Fickle, an environmental historian at the University of Memphis. Fickle is writing a history of FES, which was founded by Gifford Pinchot, a member of the Class of 1889, and his friend Henry S. Graves '92. At that time, “the prevailing notion toward this country’s forests was ‘Cut out and get out,’” says Fickle. “But Pinchot believed in the idea of growing trees and regenerating the woods.”

He did see wood as a commodity. Pinchot’s “conservation ethic was more about ensuring there'd be a steady supply of wood than about a strong sense of aesthetics,” says Fickle. So when that first class of about a dozen “gentlemen foresters” met in a mansion at the top of Science Hill, they were there to learn the most efficient ways of cutting down trees as well as scientifically based techniques for growing new ones.

 
The 1960s saw the rise of a new kind of environmental perspective.

In the school’s early days, the majority of graduates opted for careers in government, particularly in the U.S. Forest Service, which Pinchot helped start in 1905. The school would also graduate its share of industry foresters. By the 1940s, however, the forestry school had moved far enough away from training the kinds of technicians companies needed that industry began subsidizing state schools to provide them. Enrollment at Yale’s school declined through the 1960s.

But that decade also saw the rise of a new kind of environmental perspective. One of its founders was Aldo Leopold '09MF, who worked for both Pinchot and Graves at the Forest Service and later pioneered the concept of wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin. His 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac, called for a “shift of values” in humans' relationship with the natural world. “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” Leopold wrote. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

The school was in a good position to respond to the concerns Leopold articulated. “Yale trained its students to have a broader perspective—to be knowledgeable in economics and management, not just in wood technology,” says Fickle. “The school was always ahead of the curve.”

In the 1960s, Herbert Bormann, now the Oastler Professor Emeritus of Forest Ecology, joined the faculty. Bormann helped develop the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study in New Hampshire to investigate the interconnections among all components—air, water, plants, animals—of a forested watershed ecosystem. (It was the Hubbard Brook study that first documented acid rain in North America.) In addition, says Chad Oliver, he was “an environmental crusader. He took an activist view of science and felt that scientists should become involved in public policy.” Bormann testified in Congress, put out press releases about the implications of his findings, and ran a seminar called “Issues in the Environmental Crisis,” featuring both scientists and politicians.

In 1968, Yale president Kingman Brewster '41 took the forestry school to task for not contributing enough to the wider community. The dean, Francois Mergen, responded. The wood science program was phased out. The curriculum gained an emphasis on ecology. “Environmental Studies” was added to the school’s name. FES expanded its intellectual reach into environmental policy, sustainable development, and environmental management.

 
“Thwarting destruction is a full-time job.”

Thirty-five years later, as Gus Speth enters the last two years of a deanship that began in 1999, that expansion continues. Speth says the faculty has grown (from 27 to 38.5), fund-raising has grown ($3 million annually to more than $18 million in 2007), and the percentage of international students has grown (from 26 percent to 34 percent of the nearly 90 students in the incoming master’s degree class). FES collaborated with Yale College to create the environmental studies major, an interdisciplinary undergraduate program. And the range of scientific work done at FES over the past two decades includes discoveries about harm to human health from even low levels of air pollution, methods of assigning economic values to environmental resources, and the psychological importance of regular contact with the natural world, to name just a few.

Today, Speth is opening the school to still wider expertise. “We understand a great deal about the science, policy concerns, and economics of global-scale issues,” he says, yet “the rate at which land and biological diversity is disappearing continues to accelerate. You have to ask why you can’t just throw good analysis at these problems and solve them.”

The answer, he feels, requires a focus on human behavior and ethics. “We’ve heard lots from scientists and lawyers and economists,” he says. “We now need to hear more from preachers, poets, psychologists, and philosophers—people who understand the wellsprings of human behavior and values.”

Speth is also pushing forward a “designing the future” initiative. “For many people in the environmental community, our graduates included, thwarting destruction is a full-time job. But we now need to work on designing positive solutions.”

The school has helped create a Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering to start developing chemicals and products to replace the destructive ones that have caused environmental problems. FES is also working with the architecture school on a program that will train people in the art and technology of minimizing the environmental impact of buildings. It is already working on better designs for eco-friendly industrial developments and will soon tackle transportation systems.

“We need to be looking at everything from molecules to urban centers,” says Speth. “But that still includes, of course, trees.”  the end

 
 

 

 

 

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Getting Ourselves Back to the Garden
the Yale Sustainable Food Project

 
 
 
 
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