L. Anders Sandberg

The Forest as Settlement and Agricultural Frontier
The Forest as Resource Frontier
The Rise of Forest Conservation
The Rise of Wilderness Preservation
Conclusion

I here provide some broad strokes of the historiography of the field of forest history in the United States and Canada. My approach is comparative, and my hope is to provide insights into the nature and change in the writing of forest history by pointing to some of the essential differences between the two countries. I start with the premise that the writing of any nation's forest history is shaped by its broader social, political and economic history. I also start from the assumption that forest history, as an academic field of inquiry, is a lot older than the point at which its students began calling themselves forest historians. In fact, in North America, much history is forest history, given the central role the forest has played in the lives of First Nations, settler and industrial societies.

I divide various forest history accounts into four categories and then explore how they have changed over time. The first deals with the forest as settlement frontier, when trees are seen as obstacles to expanding agricultural settlements. The second deals with the forest as resource frontier, a concept that describes the expansion of the forest industry, its participants, and its spatial diffusion across the continent. The third category encompasses the writings on forest conservation, and the rise of public institutions to promote the prudent use of forest resources on a multiple use and sustained yield basis. The final section deals with forest preservation, the notion that some pristine forests be preserved in their natural condition.

These divisions correspond neatly with the general nature and unique characteristics of North American forestry, which tends to be strongly divided into intensive industrial or preservationist uses. Whether forests are in private or public ownership, forest companies typically harvest trees as fibre for saw- and pulp-mills in distinct areas, while public (and some private) actors manage parks or reserves for recreation or preservation in other areas. The spatial division of such pursuits, in spite of references to such concepts as multiple use and ecosystem management, remains starker in North America than in most European jurisdictions.

To the first settlers of North America the forest constituted an important asset but also a significant obstacle. The first writings on the settlement frontier thus dealt with the ways and means to find cleared land or to clear forest lands of trees. Closed to fifty per cent of the present area of the United States and even more of Canada was covered with forests at the time of the European invasion. To most of these early pioneers, the forest was repugnant, forbidding and repulsive, and "the cleared patch, the made ground neatly fenced off, became a symbol of order and civilization." Prominent nineteenth century writers in both the United States and Canada, such as Alexis de Toqueville, Francis Parkman, William Cooper, and Thomas M'Culloch have documented this history, and idealized the efforts of the so-called backwoodsmen to tame the forest. To them, the clearing of the land constituted an act of redemption which also promoted economic and material progress.

But the notion of the forest as enemy was not all prevailing. In the United States especially, romantic notions of the forest as a pristine wilderness and bountiful paradise, expressed by writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, emerged in the early nineteenth century. These writers felt that there was something unique about the American forest environment, where Americans could find the essence of a national identity. In Canada, the romantic nature of the forest was less emphasized. A much more prominent theme was the struggle to overcome a hostile environment in the pursuit of settlements and agricultural and forest industry development.

The different position of the Canadian settlement frontier from its American counterpart is a common theme in Canadian literature. Of the celebrated women immigrants to Upper Canada, the deplorable remarks about the Canadian wilderness by Susanna Moodie have prevailed over the more complimentary comments of her sister Catherine Parr Traill. In Canadian literature, Northrop Frye has written about a Canadian "garrison mentality", and his student Margaret Atwood has referred to the Canadian existence as a battle for survival in a hostile land. In Canadian geography, Cole Harris writes similarly about the settlement process in the United States as "essentially welcoming," while in Canada the same process has been "checked by the land's ineluctable niggardliness."

It was the American people's confrontation with the land that provided Frederick Jackson Turner with the inspiration to formulate the so-called "frontier thesis," the notion that the relationship between Americans and the wilderness has uniquely shaped the American character. Turner's classic essay on the closing of the "frontier" in 1893 has become a model for emulation or critique for many subsequent writers. Turner believed that a materially abundant frontier at first forged an individualistic, democratic, egalitarian society in America. But with the closing of that frontier in 1893, social inequities, class conflict, and government authoritarianism intensified. Walter Prescott Webb has expanded the frontier thesis to a global scale, suggesting that the closing of frontiers on all continents posed imminent dangers for the world order. Though both Turner and Webb's writings bordered on environmental determinism, they clearly reflect and set the standard for much of the early work done in forest history. As from the 1890s, when the settlement frontier was closed and the forest industry took on greater proportions, the frontier concept was applied to the forest industry.

Relatively little has been written on the frontier thesis and lumbering in the colonial era, when the frontier constituted the frontline of imperialism. This is no doubt because lumbering in the period was dwarfed by the importance of agriculture and the settlement process. The expansion of the forest industry during the subsequent nation-building eras, and the important part the expanding lumber frontier played in that context, changed this situation. Much of the work on the lumber frontier celebrate the achievements of lumber barons and lumberjacks. But sporadically in the past, and more frequently in the last three decades, a more critical volume of writings have provided less complimentary accounts of the "progressive" elements of the frontier experience.

These critiques, as shall be seen, differ in the two national contexts. In the United States, a critical forest and environmental history has explored the dialectic between social actors, social actors and their forest environments, and the human and environmental costs of the expanding forest frontier. In Canada, forest historians have been more inclined to explore the social and economic costs of the development of a forest staples economy, but less likely to investigate its environmental effects.

J.E. Defebaugh's History of the Lumber Industry of America constitutes an early statistical account of the growth of the lumber industry, with a breakdown for the various states and the Canadian provinces. Nelson Courtlandt Brown's The American Forest Industry, "written from the standpoint of the timber owner, manufacturer, wholesaler and retailer," provides a similar account. Several histories of the forest industry in various states have followed. For New York State, William Fox has documented the growth of the lumber industry and lamented the prohibition of forest harvesting and management on the vast state-owned Adirondack Forest Preserve, established by the state in 1885 (the circumstances surrounding its establishmenet will be covered in more detail in a later section). Robert Fries' Empire in Pine drew its inspiration from Ellen Semple's famous dictum "what is today a fact of geography becomes tomorrow a factor of history," and then described how the nineteenth century Wisconsin economy was "carved out of wood." Since these early accounts, David Smith has reminded us of the continued relevance of the lumber frontier, showing how Maine lumbermen, loggers, tools, techniques and songs have moved westward.

Various hagiographical studies of individual lumbermen and lumber companies have formed an integral part of the nation-building project of the expanding forest frontier. In such studies, the subjects are typically described as valiantly struggling to expand their businesses in the face of numerous obstacles, such as a closing frontier, a shrinking resource base, militant unions, and unsympathetic governments. The formation of the Forest History Society in 1946 was very much a function of the initiatives taken by one such famous lumberman. Frederick Weyerhaeuser of the giant Weyerhaeuser forest corporation provided the major financial backing in the establishment of the Society, which was initially called the Forest Products History Foundation. The American historian Theodore Blegen convinced Weyerhaueser to put up the money for the Society. Blegen was a friend and admirer of the Weyerhauser family, and he was generally sympathetic to the lumber barons. In his study of the history of Minnesota, he wrote a frontier-inspired chapter on the lumber industry, entitled "With Ax and Saw", in which he told "a saga of primeval forests of white pine, or the westward advance of a great industry, of companies and owners and managers, land and finance, transportation by water and rail, mills, markets, and construction, of interrelations with other industries, of lumberjacks, camps, logging, and folklore."

In 1955, the Forest History Society was incorporated as a non-profit educational institution, but the influence of the forest industry remained strong. Much of the content of the Society's publication, Forest History, contained company, biographical and oral histories of the men who were active in the forest industry. In 1966, the Society organized the first national colloquim on the history of the forest products industry in Boston. Co-sponsored by the Yale School of Forestry and the Business History Group of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, businessmen were a prominent element both in attendence and in the comments given in the discussions, and of the five men chairing the paper sessions, four officials were from prominent forest companies.

Later studies of the forest industry have emerged that extend beyond the narrative and celebratory line, but do not differ from it significantly. Thomas Cox has documented the technolgical, organizational, and market changes in the lumber industry of the Pacific Northwest. Several recent business histories have traced the lumber industry's assault on the southern forests. Thomas Cox has teamed up with colleagues to produce This Well Wooded Land, a story of the central and unique role played by trees and forest products in the development of America from the colonial era to the present. Their thesis borders on a utilitarian determinism, be it based on forests as lumber or recreation, and the role played by wood as capital shaping the wealth of nations.

The historical writings on the position of the lumberjack or logger fit well into the old frontier tradition. The lumberjack is invariably described as an independent hard-drinking individualist strug gling to open up the continent for development in face of a hostile environment. As with the lumberman, he is idealized and romanticized in these accounts, and seldom put in the context of the struggle for unionization and better working conditions. The labour history of the forest workers before the 1970s, too, amounts to little more than a celebration of the union movement, and little effort to ground it in a more contextual history. In Lumber and Labor, for example, Vernon Jensen details the rise of unions and the beginning of collective bargaining during the 1930s and 1940s in the forest industry. In Rebels of the Woods, Robert Tyler tells the story about the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, whose activities figured prominently in the woods.

The anthropologist James C. Malin broke markedly with the Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb tradition in the 1930s and 1940s. His theory was that humans were more important in impacting the environment than vice versa. True, Malin recognized that the physical environment set limits for human action, but within those limits there was room for variability. Malin thus set the stage for an exploration on how ecological processes interact with humans' "contriving brain and skillful hand" to shape the landscape in different ways.

In parallel and perhaps influenced by Malin's ideas, a more critical genre of forestry studies was born in the 1940s, dealing with such issues as the social dynamics, structures and stability of forest industry communities. In 1946, Harold and Lois Kaufman published a study on two forest dependent communities in Montana commissioned by the Forest Service. The study intimated that the notion of "getting the wood out" had been prioritized at the expense of development and community stability. Though the study was the first and last community study commissioned by the Forest Service, it formed the foundation for a future sociology of resource management. Two other landmark studies were forerunners to the more critical forest history that emerged in the 1970s: James Willard Hurst documentation of the unqualified support of the law in the lumber industry's destruction of the Wisconsin forest in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and Samuel Hays' classic study on the Conservation movement (of which more will be said in the next section), which tracked the close affinities between the forest industry and the emerging forester profession.

The birth of environmentalism in the 1960s and the advent of environmental history in the early 1970s signalled the breakthrough of a forest and conservation history more critical of the frontier tradition. Environmental history emerged as a selfconscious field of inquiry, with an academic society and an academic journal. Inspired by the French annales school, environmental historians began to trace the dialectic and constant interaction between environmental and human forces. Common to all these studies is the recognition that the frontier experience has not only been postitive, but that it has also resulted in heavy social and environmental costs. Pioneering efforts were made by writers such as Donald Worster, Roderick Nash, and Richard White. Of these, Richard White's ecological history of Island County in Washington State was one of the first studies in the genre of forest history. William Cronon's classic on the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England documents not only societal changes, but also "fundamental reorganizations ... in the region's plant and animal communities." Susan Flader's Great Lakes Forest , though uneven in theoretical outlook, contains the writings of an interdisciplinary group of scholars "premised on an ecosystem conception of history, in which human communities and institutions as well as biological and physical factors are considered as naturally interacting components of the system through time." By the mid- to late 1980s, Michael Williams’ voluminous work of synthesis was published, telling the story of the clearings and use of the forests in North America over the longue duree. Williams reminds us that the forest has made a comeback after the exploitative phase up to the 1930s; since then, natural and artificial regeneration, fire and pest suppression, and the reversion of farm lands to forests, have increased the supply of wood fibre for industry.

Common to these early critical works is the message that the unexploited forest lands of the frontier were far from empty. First Nations were found to have lived complex lives and conducted economic activities which had changed ecological patterns. Ecosystems themselves were argued to have been in constant flux, and containing intricate dynamics of change. Several accounts of the confrontation of First Nations and local environments with the immigrant society were built on the earlier insights of Willliam Cronon. Barbara Amy Breitmayer Vatter has challenged the frontier thesis head on, arguing that the frontier was never empty, and that the lumber industry displaced viable First Nations community economies. Robert Bunting has examined the drastic decline in biodiversity in the western parts of the Pacific Northwest in the nineteenth century. He describes how Anglo-American settlers first conquered the First Nations and imposed agriculture, and then how the industrial capitalists systematically cut the extensive temperate rainforest. In contrast to Cronon, Bunting argues that these processes were class-driven, and the social benefits and environmental costs were distributed highly unevenly.

Various studies have explored the impact of logging on local communities in Oregon, changing forms of environmentalism in rural communities, and the reaction of loggers to the protection of the spotted owl under the Endangered Species Act. Richard Judd's monograph on lumbering in northern Maine has traced the impact of logging upon subsequent regional development in frontier areas. William Robbins has depicted the lumber industry from 1890 to 1941 as a phase of maturing industrial capitalism when industry leaders, through trade associations, solicited and biased federal government policies to instill order, stability and predictability into a chaotic economic environment, yet protected the system of private ownership and profit. John Fahey has shown how the frontier developments in Washington State and northern Idaho were unaffected by the conservation efforts promoted so vigorously elsewhere in America in the early parts of the 20th century. Donald Pisani has provided a similar picture, suggesting, as James Willard Hurst before him, the supprotive role of the law in the (mis)-management of water, land, and forests in the West.

More critical and analytical studies have followed in the field of labour studies. Jerry Lembcke and William Tattam have gone beyond the earlier institutional accounts of the growth of the International Woodworkers of America, and considered the significant role played by left-wingers in the growth of the union. David Vail has explored the conflict between contractors and union labour in the Maine woods. John Bellamy Foster has explored the relationship between forest workers, forest capital, and environmentalists.

In early Canadian forest history, the writings of Harold Innis and Arthur Lower fall in the same tradition as Frederick Jackson Turner school of history, though here the frontier is considered orderly, controlled and state led. Though the eighteenth and nineteenth century scenes did not lack critics of the lumber trade, and its alleged tendency of diverting settlers' attention from the more honourable practice of farming, Canada's first forest historians have readily acknowledged the central role of the lumber trade as an engine of economic growth. Innis and Lower founded the Canadian staples history tradition, whose adherents emphasize the colonial position that Canada has occupied toward the United Kingdom and the United States, and describe the ways in which export staples have emerged to shape national and provincial institutions.

Biographies of the men who headed the large forest companies have of course duly been written, sometimes commissioned, such as of British Columbia's H. R. McMillan and Gordon Gibson, and the Irving family in New Brunswick. The workers who laboured in the woods have also been celebrated. Such accounts are typically written in the romantic tradition, idealizing the brute force of the lumberjack in his quest to subdue the forest. Of these, some were authentic memoirs of life among the loggers, written with narrative power, an eye for detail, and a sympathetic approach to their subjects. An early systematic statement of the forest workers is Edmund Bradwin's Bunkhouse Man, which was published in 1927. A later account, nostalgic in tone but yet not romantic, is Donald MacKay's The Lumberjacks.

While environmental history made a significant impact on forest history in the United States in the early 1970s, the field had very little impact north of the border. Most writings on forest history in Canada have remained inspired by the Innis and Lower school. In 1973, Arthur Lower's Ph.D. dissertation from 1940 was published in only slightly modified form. It retained a narrow staples focus, emphasizing external factors in the shaping of the Canadian lumber frontier, neglecting to explore the social and economic implications of the trade on the producing communities.

Many of the best academic works in Canadian forest history have continued to be shaped by, and situated in, the colonial or neocolonial position of Canada and its provinces in trans-Atlantic, continental, transcontinental and global frameworks. Some of these works have taken into account the internal dynamics of the Canadian forest economy, but have retained the focus on the staple. Bertram and Watkins, for example, have explored the economic linkages and multiplier effects created by the export staple. Yet many have considered these linkages as insufficient for the formation of an integrated and balanced economy. Forest scholars on the left have drawn parallels between the Canadian forest industry sector with the vulnerability of Third World economies. Inspired by the genre of dependency theories on Third World development, many Canadian scholars have explored Canadian development in a similar light. Such studies include Patricia Marchak's Green Gold on British Columbia, Larry Pratt and Ian Urquhart's Last Great Forest on Alberta, and Anders Sandberg's Trouble in the Woods on New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Other studies in the staples tradition have focussed on the interaction between the forest industry and forest workers, forest communities, and small woodlot owners. Quebec historians have progressed the furthest in exploring the rural reality underpinning the staples trade. Here, various interpretations compete to explain the poverty and lack of economic linkages to the Quebec agro-forestry economy. Séguin argues that lumber companies promoted colonization to secure cheap labour near their camps. Bouchard blames the lack of local agricultural markets for the despair of farmers, and views the lumber economy as relieving some of that plight. Little blames settlers' poverty on the state's refusal to give settlers access to the only profitable local resource: lumber. In Ontario, Michael Cross has documented violence and conflict on the lumber frontier, as lumbermen trespassed and used armed gangs to protect their operations. He has also pointed to the ethnic conflict which often plagued these skirmishes. Danny Samson's Contested Countryside provides illustrations of the central role played by rural workers in supporting the staples economy, and the contested and negotiated terrain between the large corporate leaseholders, rural producers and subsistence users, in the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland.

More recent work on the labour in the woods has followed in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. These studies are typically set in a wider political, economic and social context, and look at the central role of the labour process, science and technology in shaping the forest industry. Ken Drushka's work on British Columbia has documented and/or lamented the growth of transnational capital, and its effect on forest workers and communties. Several scholars have also explored the active participation of First Nations in the forest economy. Drushka has also, along with others, outlined alternative tenure systems and forest management methods in British Columbia. Richard Rajala provides a useful overview of the overall relationship between the forest economy and forest work over the last two centuries, showing well its significance in Canadian forest history.

Canadian studies in the James Malin tradition have been less common, though there are notable exceptions, especially in historical geography. These take more account of the two-way flows of human and environmental dynamics. Andrew Hill Clark pioneered such studies in Canada, clearly not with a forest focus, but inspiring others in that pursuit. Graeme Wynn's classic Timber Colony is a careful exploration of the dynamics of the timber trade in nineteenth century New Brunswick. Wynn comes perhaps the closest to a forest history that incorporates the forest environment as an active agent, but his line of inquiry has not been pursued in more detail until very recently. Neil Forkey feels that Andrew Hill Clark provides more of a inspiration for an only-now-emerging Canadian environmental history than Innis and Lower.

In 1993, Richard Judd, in comparing the work on the Maritime and United States forest sector, suggested that there is a difference in the studies of the forest frontier in the United States and Canada. He argued that much of the strength in the writings of Canadian forest historians lies in their ability to "demonstrate the enormous power big capital wielded in a region bent on 'industrialization by invitation.' Here, the provincial governments have used their one crucial bargaining chip--their forests--to attract investment, and having offered this up they have become captive agencies." Conversely, Judd continued, American historians have often been "naive in their neglect of corporate hegemony." No doubt, Canada's longer colonial and neocolonial position as a staples producer for external markets has contributed to the Canadian strength in this area.

On the other hand, however, Canadian students have been less appreciative of the effects of the corporate assault on the forest, and the efforts of conservationists and preservationists in fighting against it. On this score, as we will see in the next two sections, American students have been more sensitive.

Out of the exploitative use of forest resources and the romantic feelings toward the forest in the nineteenth century, two wider movements were born: the conservationist and preservationist movements. The conservationists argued for the "wise use" of natural resources, and their concerns were very much connected to the expansive areas of public lands which were held by the federal government in the western parts of the country. The preservationists, by contrast, argued for the establishment of national parks and preserves, either for recreational use and/or to maintain the few vestiges of wilderness that were left on the continent.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a growing concern was raised by forest conservationists over local and future wood scarcities in the forest industry. George Perkins Marsh provided the most important statement in the conservationist tradition, warning humankind of the negative environmental impact of uninhibited resource exploitation. In both the United States and Canada, it gave rise to bureaucratic agencies, such as the United States Forest Service of the Department of Agriculture and the Canadian Forest Service, and professional organizations, such as the Society of American Foresters and the Canadian Institute of Foresters. The American and Canadian Forestry Associations were prominent elitist organizations, with a wide professional and industry membership. North American forest historians have turned to document the rise and change of such organizations.

The first major historical account of forest conservation in the United States was written by Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the United States Forestry Service of the Department of Agriculture. His Breaking New Ground provides an account of the achievements of scientific forest conservation. His practical efforts on the Biltmore Estate, owned by prominent industrialist George Vanderbilt, provides a showcase of professional forestry, though the economic viability of the estate was clearly in doubt.

William Greely's Forests and Men and Coert DuBois' Trail Blazers provides an early picture of the esprit de corps felt by the foresters of the United States Forest Service, and their enthusiastic devotion to the high ideals of public service. Early historical accounts of the Service by Harold Steen and Glen Robinson provide historical narratives, but with little critical context. William Robbins has covered the cooperation of the Service and various state and private ventures. These projects reached their height between 1924 and 1942 before the period of increased congressional oversight, less administrative discretion, increased pressure group militancy, and slashed federal budgets. Of all the collaborative schemes, the Civilian Conservation Corps, an effort to provide work for the unemployed during the Depression, has been portrayed the most favourably.

More critical and comparative material can be found in Samuel Hays 1959 classic on the Progressive Movement, where he argues that the conservation movement has had less to do with a fight against rapacious and exploitative corporations than a search of professionals and businessmen to find the most "efficient" ways to exploit the nation's natural resources. In this context, Herbert Kaufmann has treated the organizational mechanisms used by the Forest Service to ensure that local forest rangers complied with the central directives of "efficiency". Such central directives were often not accepted locally, and on many occasions local populations did not appreciate the forest management efforts of the Forest Service.

In the environmental era, forest historians have supplied more critical accounts of the Forest Service from a range of perspectives. David Clary has provided an analytical exploration of the ingrained timber focus of the Service over the years. Klyza has described how the Forest Service became rooted in its founding ideologies - producing wood fibre for the forest industry - and over time developed a thick wall of defense of deeply rooted forest management practices. In a recent account, Paul Hirt has argued that the budget allocations to the Forest Service has constrained its ability to meet the increased demands for mutiple use and ecological objectives. Harold Steen's edited work on the national forest reserves has set the United States experience in a broader international light. Jonasse has provided a postmodernist critique of North American forestry. Economists and conservatives, on the other hand, have accused the Service of inefficient economic management, and the pursuit of its own self-aggrandizement.

From the critique of the Forest Service, a new genre of studies have emerged studying alternatives. Some of these are inspired by the writings of Aldo Leopold on the so called land ethic, a concept he coined to describe environmental management methods which are more respectful of ecosystem integrity. Leopold's Sand County Almanac contained the initial so-famous essay on the land ethic, which has been re-published in many forms, and occasioned Leopold's life and times to be probed time and time again. The critique of the Forest Service and the celebration of Aldo Leopold's teachings were based on the confrontation between elite individuals or groups. Richard Judd provides a more popularly-based perspective on the conservationist movement. In his study of northern New England, he argues that conservation "is far more inclusive, eclectic, and contradictory than the carefully refined logic expressed by elite, offical, or scientific conservationists." Based on moral assumptions, this popular conservation was based on "a belief in democratic access to, and common stewardship of, the land; an aggressive aproach to reshaping nature to serve human needs; and a pietistic, perfectionistic vision of the balance of cultural and natural features in the evolving landscape." An increased appreciation and documentation of the conservation of forest ecosystems by First Nations is linked to the literature which provides alternative perspectives on conservation.

In the 1990s, some fine studies, rooted in history, were published which recognized the complexity of managing the forest resource, and the necessity to take into account ethical and unknown factors in their management. William Cronon's Uncommon Ground, and particularly the contribution by James Proctor on the ethical questions that need to be resolved in the jobs versus the environment debate, provides one example. Nancy Langston's monograph on the forests of the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon and Washington shows a high ecosystem complexity in the region and the repeated failure of foresters to grasp, let alone manage, that complexity. She thus recommends that the old ideal of a maximum sustained yield give way to "other ideals which allow for complexity, diversity, and uncertainty."

One aspect of forest management that forest historians have changed their views on is forest fires. While early historians have conveyed the Forest Service as the valiant protector of the enemy fire, later observers have questioned that simple message. Historians have become more sensitive to the recurring debates over the benefits of fire, a phenomenon recognized formally when the National Park Service and Forest Service adopted prescribed burning as a forest management tool in 1968 and 1971, respectively. Since then, Stephen Pyne has become one of the leading authorities on this matter, showing the frequent use of forest fires by First Nations, and pointing to fires as important ingredients in forest ecosystem renewal.

Writings on the history of the forestry profession in the United States are not as numerous as on the Forest Service. One of Gifford Pinchot's students, Henry Clepper, has pioneered works in the self-congratulatory tradition, stressing in particular the efforts of the American Foresters' Association in promoting tree planting and public participation in annual Arbour days. Elmo Richardson's study of forester David Mason constitutes an account of the man behind the promotion of the sustained yield concept in American forest management. The sustained yield concept was based on the climax theories of Frederic Clements, the notion of ecosystem balance, and the trust in the human ability to calculate and harvest a constant "annual interest" from the "natural capital". Others foresters believed, among them the Harvard Forest's Hugh Miller Raup, that forest ecosystems were in a constant state of flux and disturbance. These contrasting perceptions implied different management strategies. Samuel Hays recent collection of essays provides critical statements on the adjustments made to the sustained yield concept to meet ecological concerns.

In Canada, Bernhard Fernow pioneered writings on forestry with a strong conservationist fervour. Few works, however, have dealt with the federal forest service, and those that do are uncritical and commissioned by the Service itself. This flows from the small proportion of forest lands that fall under the jurisdiction of the Service. With Confederation in 1867, all natural resource ownership in Canada was assigned to the provinces, and in 1930, when the two last Prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were formed, the federal Forest Service lost virtually all its jurisdiction of the management of forest lands.

Provincial ownership of forests has frequently been touted as an advantage to the Canadian conservation effort. Indeed, Bernhard Fernow left the United States for Canada on account of the better prospects of promoting forest conservation in a jurisdiction where the government could take a more active part. But the reality was different and historians have repeatedly argued that provincial ownership of forest resources may in fact have sped up forest exploitation and devastation. Peter Gillis and Thomas Roach provided the first analytical history of the decline of forestry at the national scale, and they cover in some detail the failed forest policies of the Canadian federal government and the provincial governments of Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. Peter Gillis has documented the adoption of conservation values by the Ottawa River lumber barons, but this commitment becomes less impressive when it is considered that the lumber frontier had already moved elsewhere. The lack of commitment to forest conservation by the Ottawa lumbermen is confirmed by Gillis' study on sawdust pollution of the Ottawa River, a problem rejected by the lumbermen while recognized by the conservationist voices of a wealthy lobby of fishermen and naturalists. Gillis, Benedickson and Hodgins have written about the forest reserves of Ontario and Quebec constituting timber reserves for the lumbermen. Roach and Judd, and Parenteau and Sandberg have shown how the pulpwood export embargo, advocated by Canadian conservationists to protect valuable forest reserves in the 1920s, was more an attempt by businessmen to secure and profit from the pulpwood supply. Jamie Swift has added a poignant account of the same processes in more recent settings. Howlett and Beyers have provided critical accounts of the federal forest service, situating it in the context of a colonial history, the staples tradition and the close networks between the forest industry, provincial governments and the professional forester communities.

The jurisdictional division of forest lands favouring the Canadian provinces lie at the basis of the much richer and more extensive literature on the provincial forest services and administrations. One set of these accounts has followed the celebratory line, documenting the gradual expansion of these services, the growth of professionalism within them, and the men (and some women) who worked and were in charge of them.

This school has at times taken on economic nationalist sentiments, recording the exploitative relationship between the United States and Canada, and the attempts by the federal and provincial governments to retain ownership and processing rights of the timber resource. Less prevalent in such analyses is a sense of how corporate hegemony has made an impact on the forest itself, and how the forester profession has supported or contested the corporate assault on the forest. A notable exception, clearly inspired by the writings of Samuel Hays, is H.V. Nelles, The Politics of Development, which documents the abysmal failure of forestry in Canada, and the province of Ontario's use of Crown lands to attract industry on concessionary terms.

Besides Bernhard Fernow, there are no Canadian foresters who have made a lasting impact on the Canadian forest scene. Some have clearly failed in their conservationist aspirations, some have taken part in documenting the growth of the industry, while others have only been critical of their practices in retrospect. Donald MacKay's Heritage Lost provides some light on the progressive voices who tried to buck this trend, but his overall story is about foresters' role in gross neglect and ruthless forest liquidation.

A critical study of the Canadian forester profession and its educational history still has to see the light of day. Some studies have emerged to celebrate various anniversaries of some Forestry Schools, but these are more descriptive than analytical, and address their alumini rather than a wider audience.

Wilderness has formed an important ingredient in the North American imagination, especially in the United States. In the writings of the romantics of the nineteenth century, such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the forest was viewed as an escape from a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing society. Nature to them was a reflection of God. Their sentiments still resonate in the larger society and have resulted in the expansion of a national parks system, with the first designation being Yellowstone National Park in 1872.

The mystic, spiritualist and founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir, wrote convincingly in defence of the national parks system to a broad audience. In 1901, his Our National Parks was published as a testament to the importance of parks to the American psyche. Muir not only described the parks in glowing terms, he also encouraged people to appreciate them, spoke of the practical need for wilderness, and advocated the exclusion of industrial activities from the parks. Since his death in 1914, John Muir has grown in stature and myth, and the re-issuing of his works, and the writings of his life has taken on the size of a small cottage industry. Much writings in the American tradition have since been occupied with the affinity of the American mind with wilderness. The classic is Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind, where the American wilderness and its forest cathedrals are seen as a source of national pride equal in stature to the churches and palaces of Europe.

The National Park Service, which was established in 1916, to administer the parks system, has been a frequent object of study. In total, ten per cent of the United States' land area is protected as parks or wilderness areas, and the National Park Service manages roughly about a third of the area (of which fifty national parks are a part). The Service is the focal point for preservationist policy in the United States. In 1961, John Ise published the first comprehensive history of the Service, providing a sympathetic account, but criticizing both its public and private enemies. At later points, similar accounts have been written about leading Park Service officials.

By the mid-1980s, however, the National Park Service, just like the Forest Service before it, was beginning to be seen in a more critical light, being taken to task for an insular and expert mentality. Alston Chase has argued that the Service has had more to do with destroying rather than protecting the parks by catering to recreationalists rather than protecting ecosystems. The recreational aspects of the parks were indeed important from the very beginning, and the National Parks and Conservation Association, a private organization formed in support of the Park Service, was originally formed to protect the national parks from intrusions by dambuilders and mining companies, and to ensure that the national parks contained supreme scenery and rich landscape of primitive conditions. But by the late 1980s the Association had lost its confidence in the Service, and put out a voluminous guide of statutes to be used in litiguous action to protect the national parks system. Even more damning judgements have come from an insider to the Park Service itself. Richard Sellars' Preserving Nature contends that the Park Service has ignored science and good sense for over 80 years. Rather than listening to biologists and ecologists, the Service has bent to the demands of recreational tourism. Just like the Forest Service, the Park Service has also had its "free enterprise" critics.

Some of the social forces that have shaped the parks system in the United States are covered well in Susan Schrepner's monograph on the efforts to save the redwoods in California. Her focus is the Save-the-Redwoods League, which was founded in 1918. She describes the League as composed of patrician progressives and naturalists who, with money from the Rockefellers, purchased and transferred to the state of California some 56,000 acres of virgin forests. In the process, the League worked closely with the lumber industry, and managed to preserve the "fittest" monumental groves of trees. Michael Cohen provides an account of a larger national organization, the Sierra Club, formed by John Muir in 1892 to protect nature. Its roots are also elitist, its first members being a hiking group of affluent males with close ties to the federal land-management bureaucracy. It was only in the 1960s that the Club was tranformed into an activists' environmental lobby with mass appeal. From a different perspective, Philip Terrie has traced the different conceptions, and tensions, of the Adirondack Forest Preserve in New York State. It was here that the concept of an environmental aesthetic, the notion that wilderness is an appealing characteristic of the landscape, was first formulated. Yet New Yorkers have over time struggled with an ambivalence toward wilderness preservation.

In Canada, the wilderness idea has had a different impact on the national psyche. There are fewer national parks and preserved areas. In 1994, only five per cent were reserved in parks and protected areas. The Canadian Park Service, established in 1911 [then called the Dominion Parks Branch], now administers thirty-four national parks. But the parks system was largely developed for economic purposes, primarily recreation and tourism, but also allowing commercial development and resource extraction. In the beginning, the parks were "an afterthought" rather than a project of national priority.

Canada has had its wilderness writers and advocates to be sure, but they have written different accounts than their American counterparts. Ernest Thompson Seton and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts pioneered the writing about the experience of real, wild animals in natural settings, and similar stories have been penned by later writers, such as Roderick Haig-Brown, Fred Bodsworth, and Farley Mowat. Such accounts invariably touch on the organic ties between animals and First Nations peoples. Grey Owl, an Englishman posing as an Indian, has obtained international fame in marketing the Canadian wilderness through speeches and books. Such images very quickly created another staple commodity, the wilderness, which has then been marketed to wealthy American, European and Japanese tourists.

In Canada, no comparative studies to the United States have been conducted on the formation of the national or provincial parks system. Most studies are applied, or take on an advocacy rather than analytical approach. First Nations have been actively encouraged to become parks, hunting and fishing guides, while marginalized from their traditional subsistence activities, and notably absent in the motifs of Canadian landscape painting. Grey Owl became Canada's most notorious parks guide. It is perhaps also interesting and not a mere coincident, that the most famous of Canada's landscape motifs were not merely the statuesque forest giants of British Columbia as painted by Emily Carr, but the humanized degraded and second-growth woods of the Canadian Shield which are so prominently depicted in the works of the Group of Seven.

Clearly, the concern for wilderness preservation has been less prominent in Canada than the United States. This picture may, however, change as local Canadian concerns for wilderness areas grows, and as the issue becomes increasingly internationalized.

Leo Marx's concept of the garden versus the machine is clearly a dominant theme in United States forest history: the notion (or myth) that humans have the ability to integrate the maximum use of the forest through technology while still maintaining it as a pristine garden. Whether the forest is seen as a settlement/agricultural, lumber or recreational frontier, Americans have historically felt that these notions are compatible with technological progress and the romantic notion of forests as wilderness preserves and symbols of a national identity. In Canada, a more prevalent forest history theme is the persistence of a human struggle with wild nature, and the problems associated with living in a harsh and inhospitable environment. In this context, the theme of a struggle to carve out export staples to promote economic development appears more dominant, and the idea of the machine and the garden blend into one rather than remain separate.

The above distinction is reflected in the history of the parks systems in the two countries. In 1913, American preservationists lost the epic battle over the building of a water reservoir for the city of San Francisco in Yosemite National Park. It was, however, their final loss. No resource development has since taken place within the national parks system. In Canada, by contrast, the integrity of both the federal and provincial parks systems has been more readily compromised. Parks have been less tied to a national identity, and frequently opened up to commercial activities and resource extraction.

In the past, forest historians have typically endorsed and celebrated the American forest as resource base and garden, and the Canadian forest as a hostile but potential source of wealth. But as the social and environmental costs of the development process have become more apparent, forest historians in both countries have turned to documenting the negative consequences of human-forest environment interactions.

A critical forest and environmental history is more fully developed in the United States than in Canada. American forest historians have readily documented the environmental impact of the forest industry, the key contributions made by bureaucratic agencies in the name of forest conservation and preservation, the careers of the men and women who were concerned about the impact, and, to an increasing extent, the role of the forest environment itself. Canadians, by contrast, have lagged behind and suffered from an environnmental "blind spot".

Canadian forest historians have been more thorough in recognizing the limits of relying on the forest as a source of export staples. They have thus documented the selfish motives of colonial and neocolonial governments and transnational forest companies, and the limited economic linkages created by, and social benefits emanating from, the forest staple. Americans have been slower in embracing a critical position toward the forest industry.

But whether these different ideas about the forest in the United States and Canada translate into different realities is questionable. The histories of people's relationship to the forest appear exploitative in both counties, and the character and extent of an "envrionmental consciousness" is more different in quantitative than qualitative terms. An ethic based on economic growth and development, and an instrumentalist approach to nature, is still very much in place. Ecological preserves remain islands in an ocean of intensive industrial resource use. Forest historians in both countries have provided increasingly sophisticated accounts of the exploitation and limited respect for the continent's forest ecosystems. They have documented the actions of the people who have challenged the status quo, and who have pursued alternative paths. They have also provided studies of the dynamics of forests themselves. These trends will continue. Forest history, in other words, is becoming more respectful of a more culturally and biologically diverse world, though we still have to wait for a reality that is substantially different from the exploitative one.