Protectors of their Friends, the Trees: Adolescent Activists, Amateur-Professional Collaboration, and the Broadening of Forest Conservation in America, 1912-1933

• In Event: Forest Commodification and Protection in the US and India, 17th - 20th Centuries

Abstract

Many environmental history accounts have argued that forest conservation was primarily in the hands of government and corporate professionals and scientists focused on profit analysis and efficient timber extraction between the 1913 Hetch Hetchy Valley dam controversy and the 1933 creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, but popular forest conservation ideology and initiatives in these decades as represented by numerous youth activists and their growing range of amateur and professional collaborators was intimately linked with Romantic aesthetics and spirituality, urban beautification, wildlife protection, and a proto-ecological concept of habitat protection. Adolescent forestry advocates, many of whom belonged to outdoor youth organizations such as the Boy and Girl Scouts, served as a common ground linking government officials at the city, state, and federal levels with environmental and civic organizations on a growing range of forest conservation projects and movements. The Michigan Forest Scouts and the Pennsylvania Forest Guides exemplified young Scouts’ early collaboration on fighting forest fires, community tree planting, and wildlife protection. American Presidents and the U.S. Forest Service allied with Audubon Societies, the Sierra Club, and women’s reform clubs to promote forest conservation through a reform army of adolescents in such programs as the American Forestry Guides and national Forest Protection Week. Adolescent activists around the country planted millions of trees, fought thousands of forest fires, served as guardians for Scout and School Forests, helped rehabilitate logged-and mined-over lands back to health, and promoted wildlife conservation through ecological habitat protection. Specialized youth forest conservation units and forestry camps helped lay the groundwork for the widened scope of forestry work undertaken by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps during the New Deal. Together, these initiatives demonstrate the era’s broadening vision and moral-spiritual dimensions of forestry, frequent public-private and professional-amateur collaboration, and a surprising degree of youth environmental agency.

Author

• Benjamin Rene Jordan, St. Mary's Episcopal School