Once upon a century: a magazine for the ages - American Forests magazine

American Forests, Jan-Feb, 1994 by Bill Rooney

Now in its 100th year, American Forests celebrates its storied lineage as the mouthpiece of the group that kick-started the conservation movement in this country.

Effective with this issue, the magazine you now hold in your hands enters its 100th year of continuous publication. Only a handful of other national periodicals can make that claim, and the editors, staff, and Board of Directors of AMERICAN FORESTS, the parent organization, do so with great pride. In an age that seems to pride itself on how quickly it can make its products obsolete, there is some sentiment that anything 100 years old has got to be an anachronism, a has-been, a throwback. But as the wild winds of change whirl around us, we find ourselves seeking something solid to grasp, a foothold that won't crumble, a reliable source of information, direction, and support to help us understand and adapt to those changes.

AMERICAN FORESTS has filled that role for tree- and forest-minded people for 119 years since its founding in 1875, and this magazine has been its flag-bearer and mouthpiece for 100 of those years. Over nearly 1,000 issues, in a business in which casualties are high, American Forests magazine has endured for a string of years almost unheard of today. To borrow the words of my predecessor, James B. Craig, editor for 26 years, this magazine "provides the longest, uninterrupted chronicle of conservation successes and failures in existence." This article is an attempt to present the highlights of that remarkable and illustrious record.

A few road signs may help as we make the trip across a century of forest conservation: To distinguish the organization from the magazine of the same name, throughout this article we will use the organization's name in capital and small-cap letters -- AMERICAN FORESTS--and the magazine's title (there have been seven of them over the years) in bold-face italics--American Forests. Occasionally, you will see AFA, an acronym for the American Forestry Association, the organization's name until 1992.

In 1875, physician/horticulturist John Aston Warder and a small band of like-minded people meeting in Chicago formed the American Forestry Association, announcing its singular goal as "protection of the existing forests of the country from unnecessary waste." Their concern was driven by widespread destruction of forests by exploitive lumbering done in the name of a young nation hungry for wood, unprecedented fires, and the clearing of land for agriculture. Political indifference to the sorry state of the nation's forests convinced Warder and his companions that citizens would have to take action. AFA's birth marked what forest historian Henry Clepper called "a turning point in history. It inaugurated the conservation movement, one of the truly glorious triumphs of society over intolerable events."

It is fascinating to note that at the time, there were no national forests, no major schools of forestry, and very little policy or practice to oversee the most vital natural resource of all.

It is such issues, plus the concern about an impending "timber famine" and the need to plant trees following harvest, that dominated the content of the early issues of the magazine.

THE HEADWATERS

THE MAGAZINE that would become American Forests after a series of early iterations had its beginnings in the then still largely forested state of New Jersey. The New Jersey Forester, its first issue dated January 1, 1895, was the bimonthly organ of the South Jersey Woodsmen's Association, issued under the auspices of the Avalon Summer School of Forestry in Cape May. John Gifford of Mays Landing was editor and founder. Subscription price was $1 a year. Despite its name, the magazine was not terribly provincial. Its first issues contained such articles as "Fires in the Far West," "Pure Water for Philadelphia," and a profile of Bernhard E. Fernow, chief of the Forestry Division of the Department of Agriculture, who would later be a prime mover in the American Forestry Association.

After just three issues, the magazine's name was changed to simply The Forester, and, interestingly, the signup price was reduced to "Fifty cents a year in advance; single copies ten cents (free to all members of the New Jersey Forestry Association)."

In January 1897, Gifford began publishing The Forester on a monthly schedule, and though the subscription rate was bumped up to 75 cents and shortly thereafter to $1, it was being published at a financial loss--the first of many parallels with the times today that you will read in this article. It was the only illustrated, nationally distributed periodical devoted to forestry. An editorial in the January 1898 edition proclaimed that The Forester had become the official organ of the American Forestry Association. To run the magazine, an editorial committee was appointed, chaired by Bernhard Fernow. But at the Association's annual meeting that following December, Gifford Pinchot, chairman of AFA's executive committee, who was about to become the first chief of the Forest Service, reported that the editorial committee had not been able to function well and thus had engaged one Joseph B. Thoburn of Denver as editor. However, Thoburn's name never appeared on the masthead, and he was never further mentioned. A notice in the May 1899 issue reported that a change in the editorship had taken place during the month, but unaccountably, neither the new nor the previous editor was identified.