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Seeing the Forest, the Trees, and
the World
November/December 2007
by Bruce Fellman
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.”
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“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.
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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.
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“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.”  |
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