FELT NECESSITIES

This is the tenth part of "Felt Necessities: Engines of Forest Policy," a series of essays tracing the history of the conservation movement in the United States, and its influence on the nation's ever-shifting forest policy.

Part 11 of this series is a lecture that Evergreen Founder James D. Petersen presented to a graduate-level forestry class at the University of Idaho in January 2020.

This is the eighth part of "Felt Necessities: Engines of Forest Policy," a series of essays tracing the history of the conservation movement in the United States, and its influence on the nation's ever-shifting forest policy.

I am going to do this by asking all of you a very provocative question - one that I hope you will, in turn, ask each other throughout the course of convention.The question is: Does the logging industry have a future in the New Intermountain West?

Your conference seeks to encourage you to become better leaders. That's a good thing because leadership is sorely lacking in the forestry and forest products manufacturing worlds today. Everyone seems to be going their own way. There are no leaders and there is no script. We are all freelancers doing our own thing in a world in which most now get their news through their favorite social media algorithms.

The Great 1910 Fire, which leveled some three million acres of virgin timber in northern Idaho and western Montana, most of it in a wind-driven 48-hour firestorm that claimed the lives of 87 firefighters – most of them skid row bums recruited from the streets of Spokane, Washington.

On February 1, 1905, the day Pinchot was named Chief of the newly minted Forest Service, a letter bearing the signature of Agriculture Secretary, James Wilson, was hand delivered to the Chief's office. Again, I suspect Pinchot wrote this letter to himself for political purposes.

The term “felt necessities” is taken from The Common Law, a book of essays assembled in 1881 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in which he explains the historic underpinnings of the nation's legal system. President Theodore Roosevelt thought to much of Holmes’ essays that nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1902.