Gifford Pinchot's fight to save America's timberlands led to the establishment of the United States Forest Service and the first conservation program in our history.

As a child of wealth he roamed his parents' Pennsylvania estate through miles of woodlands and imagined he could talk with the trees about which he felt strangely protective. During all the years of growing up his love of trees and woods persisted, and he knew that he wanted a career that had something to do with forestry. He graduated from Yale, and because no one in America knew very much about conservation and reforestation, he went to Europe to get first-hand information.

He realized that the tide of western expansion had stripped thousands of acres all the way to California and Oregon; that our forests were being devastated faster than seedlings could replace them. By 1890 our fast-growing nation was consuming wood for housing, furniture, fuel and railroads at such a rate that catastrophe lay ahead. Gifford Pinchot became the first American to take an active interest in saving our trees and in awakening America to this colossal waste.

Traveling at his own expense, he made surveys for the Department of Agriculture. Then as Chief of the Bureau of Forestry he had the staggering job of bringing six million forest acres under proper management. His long-range plan for controlled grazing proved invaluable to the ranchers and sheepmen of the west. Because he fought to prevent greedy interests from controlling our resources, hostile factions sprang up everywhere. But his close friend and powerful ally, President Theodore Roosevelt, helped develop Pinchot's conservation program and alerted the nations to the perils of waste. To encourage other young men with similar interests, Gifford Pinchot established a school of forestry at his Alma Mater, Yale University. And as Governor of Pennsylvania he instituted remarkable reforms.

Dale White creates a vital portrait of a young and selfless crusader whose vision was as vast as the land he loved.

From the book