Peeling Back The Bark
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A Visit to the Carl Alwin Schenck Redwood Grove
By James Lewis on January 20, 2015The silence, once I recognized it, struck me as odd, but then it made sense. I’ve been in louder empty churches, an apt analogy because I was here to pay my respects to the late, great man. I stood alone in the natural cathedral. The giant trees reminded me of the Corinthian columns that supported…
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The Hoo-Hoo Response to the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906
By James Lewis on October 27, 2014The International Concatenated Order of the Hoo-Hoo is one of the country’s oldest industrial fraternal organizations. Formed in 1892 at a train station in rural Arkansas almost as a lark (and possibly while under the influence of alcohol), the idea of a fraternal organization for the timber and lumber industries founded on the ideals of fellowship and…
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A Giant in Forestry is Gone: Bill Hagenstein, 1915-2014
By James Lewis on September 9, 2014Last Friday we received word that Bill Hagenstein, a giant in the forest industry and the history of American forestry, had died. The following biography is adapted from the files of the World Forestry Center, which he helped to establish in Portland, Oregon. While it does a fine job of summarizing his life and career, it…
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A review of "Arming Mother Nature"
By James Lewis on June 19, 2014The following book review by FHS staff historian James G. Lewis appears in the Scientists’ Nightstand section of the July-August 2014 issue of American Scientist. ARMING MOTHER NATURE: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism. Jacob Darwin Hamblin. 320 pp. Oxford University Press, 2013. $29.95. In May 1960 scientists and military officers at NATO headquarters came to a conclusion about…
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A River Runs Through Me: Experiencing Thoreau’s Maine Woods
By James Lewis on June 13, 2014Before I left to join the Thoreau-Wabanaki Journey on May 26, I had planned to write a blog post that would tie together the 150th anniversary of the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods with George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature and the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Wilderness Act. The…
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Gifford Pinchot’s "Ten Commandments"
By James Lewis on July 16, 2013A short time ago, my co-blogger Eben received a query from someone asking for “GP’s 10 commandments.” He had not heard of this and passed the query along to me. “GP” is Gifford Pinchot, and as you probably know, he was the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service and helped develop many of the agency’s policies that…
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What’s On Your Forest History Vacation Bucketlist?
By James Lewis on September 11, 2012I’ve just returned from Connecticut, where I spent time at Yale University conducting research in the Yale Forest School papers and also visited Simsbury, birthplace of Gifford Pinchot, to see the world premiere of the new film, Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot. Produced for PBS, Seeking the Greatest Good effectively weds…
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Back to the Future, Part IV: “Where we’re logging, we don’t need roads”
By James Lewis on October 22, 2010The 25th anniversary of the iconic film franchise Back to the Future and the Blu-ray release of the trilogy on October 26 got us thinking about what forestry and logging were supposed to look like today as predicted by the best minds of the mid-20th century. Some of those same minds had predicted that we…
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Gifford Pinchot and the Search for "Permanent Peace"
By James Lewis on January 11, 2010The following is an op-ed piece that appeared in the Raleigh News and Observer on January 3, 2010. It was co-authored by FHS staff historian James G. Lewis and FHS member and professor of environmental history Char Miller. Getting together for the environment “In international relations, the great feature of the growth of the last…
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How Turkeys Changed Forest History
By James Lewis on November 25, 2009In the spirit of Thanksgiving and large-scale turkey consumption, we wish to acknowledge the impact of turkeys on forest history. How did a couple of turkeys change history? Well, a better question might be: How did a handful of angry turkey hunters in West Virginia upend U.S. Forest Service timber management policy and help usher…
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It’s "Talk Like a (Log) Pirate" Day
By James Lewis on September 18, 2009In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19, we here at Peeling Back the Barrrrk bring you the dramatic tale “Log Pirates of Puget Sound.” Although “Log Pirates” is an article by Stewart H. Holbrook that appeared in the January 1937 issue of American Forests, it reads like a pulp thriller/film…
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Recap of the First World Congress of Environmental History
By James Lewis on August 21, 2009The first World Congress of Environmental History concluded two weeks ago in Copenhagen, Denmark. There were more than 500 attendees from all over the world. In addition to sending two people to the conference, the Forest History Society was also a sponsor. I’m happy to report that forest history is alive and well and thriving…
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Visiting Mann Gulch 60 Years Later
By James Lewis on July 10, 2009I just returned from a trip to Montana, where I conducted an oral history interview with the 15th chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Dale Bosworth. While there, I took the opportunity to visit Mann Gulch, site of the first smokejumper tragedy. There, sixty years ago next month, 13 firefighters (12 were smokejumpers, 1 a…
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Who should the president appoint to his cabinet?
By James Lewis on January 16, 2009As President-elect Barack Obama’s cabinet nominees are being finalized with little controversy, we here at Peeling Back the Bark can’t help but think back one hundred years ago and wonder what might have happened if, as newspapers speculated, Gifford Pinchot had been appointed to a cabinet position in William Howard Taft’s administration. Here’s what the…
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Historian Char Miller Ruminates on SAF Birthday
By Guest Contributor on November 30, 2008What do you give a professional organization on its 108th birthday? Warm wishes, I suppose. But in the case of the Society of American Foresters, formally founded on November 30, 1900, in the cramped office of its first president, Gifford Pinchot, it seems appropriate to offer up something a bit more meaningful than an air-kiss…
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Moved by History
By James Lewis on September 16, 2008Our recent Forest History Today article, “Timber for the Comstock,” told the history of lumbering around the eastern Sierra and Lake Tahoe area of Nevada. It centered on a set of eight historical markers that tell a forest history story; the idea was to provide a driving tour of historical interest. Some of those markers…
