employ of the Government; but it had no public forest
lands whatever to which the knowledge and skill of these men could be
applied. All the forest reserves of that day were in the charge of the
Public Land Office in the Department of the Interior. This was managed
by clerks who knew nothing of forestry, and most, if not all, of whom
had never seen a stick of the timber or an acre of the woodlands for
which they were responsible. The mapping and description of the timber
lay with the Geological Survey. So the national forests had no foresters
and the Government foresters no forests.

It was a characteristic arrangement of the old days. More than that,
it was a characteristic expression of the old attitude of thought
and action on the part of the American people toward their natural
resources. Dazzled and intoxicated by the inexhaustible riches of their
bountiful land, they had concerned themselves only with the agreeable
task of utilizing and consuming them. To their shortsighted vision there
seemed always plenty more beyond. With the beginning of the twentieth
century a prophet arose in the land to warn the people that the supply
was not inexhaustible. He declared not only that the "plenty more
beyond" had an end, but that the end was already in sight. This prophet
was Gifford Pinchot. His warning went forth reinforced by all the
authority of the Presidential office and all the conviction and driving
power of the personality of Roosevelt himself. Pinchot's warning cry was
startling:

"The growth of our forests is but one-third of the annual cut; and
we have in store timber enough for only twenty or thirty years at
our present rate of use.... Our coal supplies are so far from being
inexhaustible that if the increasing rate of consumption shown by
the figures of the last seventy-five years continues to prevail, our
supplies of anthracite coal will last but fifty years and of bituminous
coal less than two hundred years.... Many oil and gas fields, as in
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the Mississippi Valley, have already
failed, yet vast quantities of gas continue to be poured into the air
and great quantities of oil into the streams. Cases are known in which
great volumes of oil were systematically burned in order to get rid
of it.... In 1896, Professor Shaler, than whom no one has spoken with
greater authority on this subject, estimated that in the upland regions
of the States South of Pennsylvania, three thousand sq