Gifford Pinchot

Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), noted American forestry expert, conservationist, and public official. Born in Simsbury, Connecticut, Pinchot graduated from Yale University in 1889, and studied forestry in several European countries before returning to the United States in 1892. From 1898 to 1910 he served as chief of the Division of Forestry (now the Forest Service) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture under presidents William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft.

Pinchot believed that forests and other natural resources should be protected from depletion through government regulation of commercial land use. Under Roosevelt, who was also a conservationist, Pinchot's strategy for protecting natural resources became national policy. During Taft's presidency, however, Pinchot felt that the government was moving away from the conservation strategies that he and Roosevelt had established. Pinchot filed charges against Richard Achilles Ballinger, Taft's secretary of the interior, accusing him of abandoning the nation's conservation policies. Ballinger was upheld by President Taft, who in 1910 dismissed Pinchot for insubordination.

From 1923 to 1927 Pinchot served as governor of Pennsylvania. During his first year as governor he helped settle a strike that had paralyzed the anthracite coal mines. He served a second term as governor of Pennsylvania from 1931 to 1935.

In addition to his duties at the Department of Agriculture and his two terms as governor, from 1903 to 1936 Pinchot was a professor of forestry at the Pinchot School of Forestry, which he helped found at Yale University. Pinchot's writings include Primer of Forestry (1899), The Fight for Conservation (1909), and Breaking New Ground (posthumously published in 1947).