Gifford Pinchot (August 11, 1865 - October 4, 1946) was an American forester and politician. Pinchot served as the first Chief of the United States Forest Service from 1905 until his firing in 1910, and was the 28th Governor of Pennsylvania, serving from 1923 to 1927, and again from 1931 to 1935. He was a member of the Republican Party for most of his life, though he also joined the Progressive Party for a brief period. Pinchot is known for reforming the management and development of forests in the United States and for advocating the conservation of the nation's reserves by planned use and renewal.

In 1896, the National Academy of Sciences formed the National Forest Commission. Pinchot was the only non-Academy member. President Grover Cleveland later asked Pinchot to develop a plan for managing the nation's Western forest reserves.  In 1897, Pinchot became a member of Boone and Crockett Club one of North America's first conservation organizations, which was founded by Theodore Roosevelt.  In 1898, Gifford Pinchot succeeded Bernhard Fernow as chief of the Division of Forestry, later renamed the United States Forest Service in 1905. Thus, management of the federal forests changed from the United States Department of the Interior to this agency within the Department of Agriculture. Pinchot introduced better forestry methods into the operations of private owners, large and small, by using new forestry school graduates to demonstrate good practices and help make working plans.  In 1900, Pinchot established the Society of American Foresters. This helped bring credibility to the new profession of forestry, and was part of the broader professionalization movement underway in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Until 1900, only two American schools trained professional foresters, the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell and the Biltmore Forest School. The Pinchot family endowed a 2-year graduate-level School of Forestry at Yale University (now the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies), and at Pinchot's urging, fellow Yale alumnus Henry S. Graves, along with James W. Toumey, left the Division in 1900 to start the school. By the fall of 1900, Cornell's forestry program had 24 students, Biltmore 9, and Yale 7. One unique feature of the Pinchot/Yale approach was requiring students to first experience the forest at a camp at Grey Towers before beginning their academic studies.  Pinchot sought to turn public land policy from one that dispersed resources among private holdings, to one that maintained federal ownership and management of public land. As a progressive, Pinchot strongly believed in the efficiency movement. Waste was his great enemy, and he well knew the tragedy of the commons, the destruction of resources for short-term gains. His successes, in part, were grounded in the personal networks that he started developing as a student at Yale and continued developing throughout his career. His personal involvement in the recruitment process led to high morale in the Forest Service and allowed him to avoid partisan political patronage. Pinchot capitalized on his professional expertise to gain adherents in an age when professionalism and science were greatly valued.

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