“Conversations in Forest History”

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In The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory, Susan A. Brewer traces the history of a parcel of land in central New York and the stories of the two families---her own European settler family and the Mohawk/Oneida family of Polly Denny---who called it home. Her talk considers the struggle over land, tales of pioneer progress, and native dispossession. Although these two families lived as neighbors for centuries, they clashed over beliefs and practices regarding the land and its forests, streams, and soils.

Susan A. Brewer is the author of The Best Land: Four Hundred Years of Love and Betrayal on Oneida Territory (2024). As professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point from 1990-2015, she taught American history and specialized in the history of US Foreign Relations. She now lives in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York.

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When Americans landed on the Moon in 1969, in the northeastern U.S. there were still workers cutting trees with axes, skidding with horses, and driving logs to the mill by river. It wasn’t the chainsaw and the feller-buncher that industrialized American logging. The power of nature did. Starting around 1870, bodies and forest landscapes were used in new and sometimes ingenious ways to move the second- and even third-growth trees from stump to mill, ultimately sustaining forest products production for nearly a century. Historian Jason Newton’s talk describes this unique process of industrialization. He explored how a lumberjack class formed in relation to the seasonal cycles of the forest and why these seemingly primitive technologies lasted until surprisingly recently. Join us for a discussion of logging technology that will challenge commonly held ideas of the working class, industrialization, and capitalism. For his talk Jason drew from archival research conducted at FHS as well as historical images and videos.

Jason L. Newton is a historian of modern America specializing in the history of capitalism, labor, and the environment. He is an assistant teaching professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a two-time recipient of the Forest History Society’s Alfred D. Bell Jr. Travel Grant. His new book, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, will be published by West Virginia University Press in October 2024.

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On August 5, 1949, a fire was spotted at Mann Gulch, near Helena, Montana. The U.S. Forest Service dispatched a team of 15 smokejumpers, who were met by a fire guard from a nearby campground. When the fire blew up, thirteen firefighters were killed, three escaped. While the Forest Service studied what happened and revised its training and safety measures, few outside the agency remembered the tragedy. Not until Norman Maclean published Young Men and Fire did the event connect with national and cultural interests—and continues to still today. Watch fire historian Stephen Pyne and host Jamie Lewis discuss the fire on its 75th anniversary and how Maclean’s book affected the American fire community.

Stephen Pyne is a fire historian and the author of The Northern Rockies: A Fire Survey, which contains the essay "How I Came to Mann Gulch."

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By substituting traditional construction materials like concrete and steel with mass timber, we have the potential to materially reduce our carbon footprint with the added benefit of incorporating the beauty of wood into the architecture. Learn how companies in the state of Georgia are using local forest resources to construct "locally grown" buildings with mass timber.

Russell Gentry is Professor of Architecture and Associate Dean for Faculty in the College of Design at Georgia Tech. Troy Harris is the Managing Director of Timberland and Innovative Wood Products at Jamestown. Guest host Lynn Wilson has had a long career in the forest products industry and served as chair of the Forest History Society's Board of Directors.

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Productive agricultural land remains elusive for many landowners and agricultural professionals are often limited in helping them due to complicated legal and social issues. This is particularly true for forestland owned as heirs' property—property with multiple owners, each of whom inherited their shares. A new documentary film Family Tree looks at this issue heirs’ property rights through the eyes of land owners throughout North Carolina and those advising them. In the film you meet forester Sam Cook, who advises two sisters, Natalie and Nikki Jefferies, landowners and advocates for family forests. Webinar host Jamie Lewis spoke with Natalie, Nikki, and Sam about the issue of heirs’ property and their experiences as natural resource managers.

Natalie and Nikki Jefferies are inheritors of a family legacy rooted in the land and advocates for the profound significance of family forests. Sam Cook is the executive director of Forest Assets and VP of the Natural Resources Foundation for the College of Natural Resources at NC State University, the former Director of Forestry Center for Heirs' Property Preservation, and is Immediate Past President of the Society of American Foresters.

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Trees are crucial infrastructure to cities. However, studies have shown that due to redlining and other discriminatory policies, neighborhoods with more low-income families and people of color living in them have fewer trees, which has a significant impact on overall health and quality of life. The Tree Equity movement led by American Forests seeks to remedy this issue through enacting change on both a local and policy level. Presenter Jad Daley, the CEO of American Forests, spoke about this organization’s work with tree equity and its importance.

Jad Daley is the 40th president and chief executive officer of American Forests, the nation’s oldest forest conservation organization. Tania Munz is President and CEO of the Forest History Society.

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With about 37 percent of all forestland in the states of California, Oregon, and Washington privately owned, creating economic models for forest conservation by private landowners that works is changing the game there. The Pacific Forest Trust is one of the players working closely with landowners and communities to make this important work possible. The webinar was hosted by Peter Stein, a leading expert in the economics of conservation.

Laurie Wayburn is Co-founder, Co-CEO, and President of Pacific Forest Trust. Peter Stein is Managing Director of The Lyme Timber Company, and has extensive experience in conservation-oriented forestland and rural land purchases and dispositions.

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Russia has more than one-fifth of the world’s forest areas, which contain more than 55% of the world’s conifers, and 11% of the world’s biomass. Yet, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, their forests are "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Historian Elena Kochetkova helps us better understand this important part of the Russian economy and the world's ecosystem. Elena discussed how the Soviet economy developed a unique approach toward forest resources after the Second World War, how the industry neglected socialist experience after the demise of the USSR, and has been revived in post-Soviet countries in recent decades.

Elena Kochetkova is a historian at the University of Bergen in Norway and the author of The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology (MIT Press, 2024).

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For centuries, Christian monks have embraced sustainable forestry practices to protect the land around their monasteries. Today, in the United States and elsewhere, monasteries face challenges to managing their lands similar to those of secular landowners, including feeling pressure to sell their lands and managing for climate change. But monasteries have additional challenges associated with being a religious order, too. Jason M. Brown, author of Dwelling in the Wilderness: Modern Monks in the American West (Trinity University Press, 2023), discussed the history of monastic forestry and explores some lessons for our times.

Jason M. Brown teaches courses in comparative religion and ecological humanities for the Department of Global Humanities and occasionally environmental ethics for the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University.

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In 1846 and 1847, three thousand Black New Yorkers were gifted with 120,000 acres of Adirondack land by Gerrit Smith, an upstate abolitionist and heir to an immense land fortune. On their new land they could hope to meet the $250 property requirement New York imposed on Black prospective voters in 1821. Smith’s plan was prescient, anticipating Black suffrage reform, affirmative action, environmental distributive justice, and community-based racial equity more than a century before these were points of public policy. But when the response to Smith’s offer fell radically short of his high hopes, his zeal cooled. Timbuctoo, Freemen’s Home, Blacksville, and other Black enclaves were forgotten. Local and regional historians then marginalized the Black experience for 150 years.

Amy Godine is the author of The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier (Cornell, November 2023). Her book is available through her website or from online retailers.

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The vast majority of Americans live in an urban/suburban environment, where trees have historically thrived with little care and scant attention to soil. With increased population, intense urbanization, and climate change, this is no longer the case. Join us to learn about the technology urban foresters are using to successfully plant and manage trees in this newly complex environment. We’ll discuss the technological and social components that determine where trees thrive—or where they die.

Katie Rose Levin teaches urban forestry and greenspace management at Duke University. She runs her own consulting company, City Leaf Works, and helped found two tree planting organizations, Trees for the Triangle and TreesDurham. Katie Rose is a board-certified Master Arborist with Masters of Forestry and a Masters of Environmental Management degrees.

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In less than 20 years, the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) movement has grown into a global phenomenon representing more than $30 trillion in assets under management. ESG ratings aim to measure a company’s long-term management of financially relevant ESG risks and opportunities. However, controversies (and confusion) emerge when different companies post ESG ratings and how relevant those ratings are to informing sustainable investing. This can leave investors, company leadership, and government regulators challenged to understand the real meaning of ESG and how it may relate to the forest-based supply chain. Jason Metnick spoke about the ESG topics that are driving innovation and mitigating risk in the forest sector.

Jason Metnick is Senior Vice President, Customer Affairs, with Sustainable Forestry Initiative, Inc.

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Depending on who you ask, the mythical US Forest Service ranger may be either a superhero or supervillain—a forester who is either the moral and knowledgeable face of conservation or the embodiment of an overbearing federal government. In reality, some of those rangers are District Rangers—midlevel managers who are responsible for a large geographic area and all US Forest Service employees in it, and for enforcing agency rules and policies that try to balance the ecological needs of the land they manage with the demands of a diverse public. What has historically been the role of the district ranger, and who is the district ranger of today? Join historian Rachel Kline as she explores the history, myth, and reality of the Forest Service district ranger—and what all this may mean for the agency in the era of ecosystem services management and climate change.

Rachel Kline is a supervisory historian for the USDA Forest Service who holds a PhD from the University of New Hampshire. Rachel previously presented on how we can rethink our land ethic narratives by listening to what women have been saying about it since the mid-1800s.

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Do you have a basic understanding of forest carbon markets (or attended our "Introduction to" webinar in January, linked below) and are ready to learn how carbon revenues could help conserve American forests? In “Conserving American Forests With Carbon Revenues,” you’ll learn about forest conservation, climate mitigation, and legacy building, and then about carbon program options for U.S. landowners, no matter how large your property is.

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In “An Introduction to Forest Carbon Markets,” you’ll learn the history of carbon markets in general and forest markets in particular, including about the Chicago Climate Exchange, Cap and Trade, and voluntary markets, before being introduced to today’s U.S. carbon markets for forest landowners.

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Many of us have come to know those most responsible for America’s public lands through their well-documented accomplishments and writings. But what led people like Aldo Leopold, Benton MacKaye, Ernest Oberholtzer, and Howard Zahniser to become advocates for our parks, forests, and wilderness areas? While researching his latest book, author Jeffrey Ryan visited the birthplaces and other critical landscapes of these and other early conservationists to better understand how “nature” shaped their lives and careers. Ryan will share images from his travels as well as quotes from the subjects themselves about how their early connections with nature helped set them on the path to becoming fervent defenders of our parks, forests, and wilderness areas.

Maine-based author, historian, and speaker Jeffrey Ryan is the author of This Land Was Saved for You and Me, which traces the 150-year history of the development and management of America’s public parks, national forests, and wilderness areas.

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Timber theft exists because there is a strong market for poached old-growth timber and redwood burls, which enter our homes in the form of firewood, furniture, and building materials. But while poaching contributes to a lucrative trade, it’s also an ancient crime that’s deeply rooted in the identity of those that live and work in forests. Many contemporary poachers see their actions as following in a long line of protest, and also as a response to conservation plans that contributed to rural poverty. In her new book Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods, Lyndsie Bourgon explores the social and economic drivers behind timber poaching in the Pacific Northwest.

Lyndsie Bourgon is an author, oral historian, and 2018 National Geographic Explorer. Her book is Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods.

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Through archival and contemporary photos, historian Chris Bolgiano explored how the misuse of forests across the eastern U.S. over more than four centuries still impacts watersheds today. Legacy Sediments, as the results of historic erosion are officially called, have only recently been recognized as a major problem not only for the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the U.S., but also for other bays along the Atlantic coast. To understand why requires a map of long-gone water mills, a lidar-equipped drone, and a revolutionary new understanding of streams that look “natural” but definitely are not. These and other tools inform Chris's research and presentation.

Nature writer and environmental historian Chris Bolgiano has written or edited six books, as well as travel and nature articles for many publications.

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Shing Yin Khor's National Book Award finalist graphic novel, The Legend of Auntie Po, follows a 12-year-old Chinese American camp cook as she tells Paul Bunyan stories (reinvented as an elderly Chinese matriarch named Auntie Po) in a Sierra Nevada logging camp. Join Shing Yin to talk about making graphic novels, adapting W. B. Laughead's Paul Bunyan drawings and stories, integrating forest history research into historical fiction, and telling stories about Chinese-American contributions to forest history.

Shing Yin Khor is a Malaysian-American cartoonist and experience designer making stories about immigrants trying to find a home in nostalgic Americana. Shing’s middle-grade historical fiction graphic novel The Legend of Auntie Po was a National Book Award finalist and Eisner Award nominee. Learn more about this celebrated artist and writer at their website.

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The founding of the Wilderness Society in 1935 marked the beginning of organized wilderness advocacy in the United States, a movement that culminated in the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the creation of a national system of wilderness areas. Conventional wisdom had long been that wilderness advocacy was hostile to the utilitarian conservation of federal foresters, who believed that the national forests should be developed for their timber and other resources, and yet four of the eight founders of the Wilderness Society were trained foresters who valued both wilderness protection and sustained yield forestry. How are we to make sense of this apparent paradox? To find out, historian Paul Sutter, author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement, revisits this classic history of modern wilderness advocacy twenty years after its publication.

Paul is also author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (2015), and he is the co-author or co-editor of three other books on the environmental history of the American South. He is also the series editor for Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books, published by the University of Washington Press.

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For more than half a century, historians have told us that the first calls for forest preservation and an ecological and moral approach to land management were made in Henry D. Thoreau’s Walden (1854), George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864), and Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic” essay in 1949. But a century before Leopold published his essay, Susan Fenimore Cooper made the same arguments in her book Rural Hours. She began an ongoing pattern of women initiating calls for including ethical and cultural aspects of environmental management—two cornerstones of forest management today—which would be overlooked until men repeated them. How do we recover the voice of Cooper and so many other women to tell a more comprehensive history of creating a land ethic? Join historian Rachel Kline to discuss how we can rethink our land ethic narratives by listening to what women have been saying all along.

Rachel Kline is a historian with the U.S. Forest Service and holds a PhD from University of New Hampshire.

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On Earth Day 2017, Ruth Anna Stolk and Dr. Nancy Knowlton co-led an international team that introduced Earth Optimism Alliance to the world. Their goal was to collect and amplify stories of what’s working in conservation across disciplines and geography to improve the environmental situation and conversation. In this webinar they talked about how some of the exemplar projects they have featured from multiple countries have coped with setbacks like a global pandemic and social justice, and then retrenchment through creative approaches to solving problems. They shared examples of success stories, and also how optimism-related efforts are sprouting across individual organizations and groups. They offered examples and thoughts about how such efforts serve as a counterweight to the cumulative bombardment of negative messaging all around us—particularly the next generation of conservationists.

Ruth Anna Stolk is Founding Executive Director of the Smithsonian Conservation Commons, a community serving more than 21 museums, libraries, and research centers to sustain a biodiverse planet. Nancy Knowlton is a distinguished author, public speaker, marine scientist, and conservation biologist whose use of state-of-the-art molecular approaches has led to the recognition that the biodiversity of the ocean is far greater than previously recognized.

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(80 minutes)

Productive agricultural land remains elusive for many landowners and agricultural professionals are often limited in helping them due to complicated legal and social issues. This is particularly true for land owned as heirs' property—property with multiple owners, each of whom inherited their shares. Forester Sam Cook and attorney Mavis Gragg will demystify a legal and social quandary that limits agricultural land from being used productively. According to Mavis Gragg, "I think people have heard more and more about heirs’ property in the last couple of years because of the tremendous land loss that has been experienced by the Black community. But it’s an issue that impacts many Americans, because most families that have land will transfer it by inheritance."

Sam Cook is the executive director of Forest Assets and VP of the Natural Resources Foundation for the College of Natural Resources at NC State University; and is Vice President of the Society of American Foresters. Mavis Gragg is director of the Sustainable Forestry & African American Land Retention Program with the American Forest Foundation.

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(90 mins.)

Laurence has provided an annotated list of resources, including books and other films to watch. Download the PDF HERE.

April 26, 2022, marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederick Law Olmsted, the master designer of public parks and a founder of the field of American landscape architecture. Public historian and filmmaker Laurence Cotton explored the remarkable life and career of Olmsted—writer, philosopher, social reformer, conservationist, and creator of some of the most beautiful public and private parks and gardens in all of North America and that of his sons and their legacy.

Laurence Cotton is a practicing public historian, and writer/producer of historical films for PBS including Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America. He was trained as a cultural anthropologist and brings that lens to bear on much of his work.

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Tim Palmer, an award-winning environmental photographer and writer, shared his awe-inspiring photos of these two tree species while explaining how exotic insects and pathogens are decimating them, and discusses the promising work that scientists and managers are undertaking to correct the problems and restore these extraordinary woodlands. Visit Tim's website to see all of his work and purchase his books.