Most of us associate Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt as the big 4 names of the early 20th Century Environment renaissance in the USA..............In fact, George Bird Grinnell, Publisher of Forest and Stream(later Field and Stream) Magazine was a 5th "engine of instrumentation" in establishing the first Audubon-type clubs for wildlife preservation and having a profound influence on Teddy Roosevelt............Getting Roosevelt to buy in to his earnest belief that "Americans must take responsibility for the natural world upon which they depend, not only in a practical, economic sense, but in a spiritual one as well. Once that sense of responsibility took root in the public's collective mind, the only sure way to have conservation succeed was to have the state and federal governments adopt a program of continuous, apolitical, scientific management"...............We need a few more Grinnell's around today to get our Congressmen to understand the a strong and prosperous America starts with a optimum biological diversity and clean air and water

http://www.foresthistory.org/publications/fht/fhtspringfall2005/fht05_grinnell.pdf

  Pathbreaking

Conservationist(by John Reiger)

GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL (1849–1938)

  Interested in all things natural, George Bird Grinnell was a powerful force in shaping the late-nineteenth-century conservation movement. Publisher of Forest and Stream, he established the first Audubon Clubs and co-founded the Boone and Crockett Club, and through these means fought to preserve Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks.His energetic commitments and political savvy blazed the way for Theodore Roosevelt,Gifford Pinchot, and Progressive Era conservationism ……. Grinnell gave Roosevelt a more sophisticated, broader grasp of

"conservation."

Grinnell gained control of the New York hunting and fishing weekly, Forest and Stream, and became its editor-in-chief on January 1, 1880. That was a momentous event in the history of American conservation. Until 1911, Grinnell would use his unique position to wage one editorial crusade after another in behalf of "conservation," a term that he was one of the first to use in regard to natural resources. And from the beginning of his 30-year tenure at Forest and Stream, it is obvious that he defined conservation in its modern sense, as the preservation and management of the natural world for—as he put it in an 1882 editorial— "generations yet unborn."

To achieve that goal, Grinnell understood that conservation should have utilitarian and aesthetic components, depending on the issue at hand.He was an "aesthetic conservationist" when it came to his editorial campaign to eliminate hunting, timber cutting, and all forms of commercialization from the recently created, but inadequately protected, Yellowstone National Park. But he was a "utilitarian conservationist" in his crusade to have the state and federal governments adopt a system of European scientific forestry for the management of the nation's timberlands. In a simila rvein, Grinnell would fight to create national wildlife refuges, where hunting was forbidden, and public shooting grounds, where it was encouraged.

What tied together all of his editorial campaigns, and his extensive private efforts, was his earnest belief that Americans must take responsibility for the natural world upon which they depended, not only in a practical, economic sense, but in a spiritual one as well. Once that sense of responsibility took root in the public's collective mind, the only sure way to have conservation succeed was to have the state and federal governments adopt a program of continuous, apolitical, scientific management. This approach would become the basis of the Progressive conservation creed under President Theodore Roosevelt in the early years of the twentieth century, and as a formula for dealing with all sorts of environmental issues, it is just as effective today as it was then.

By the time Grinnell took over the helm of Forest and Stream, American sportsmen had, for many years, been developing a European-derived code of behavior and "world view" that separated them from the great majority of hunters and fishermen. Game animals, birds, and fish could only be taken with "appropriate" methods that tested the skill of the sportsman before he could make a kill. In addition, he had to have at least some sense of responsibility for the future of the game and the habitat upon which it depended.

After Grinnell became editor, he not only continued to work to inculcate the code and accompanying world view, but extended them to encompass a sense of responsibility for the total environment. As illustrated in his 1882 editorial, "Spare the Trees," it would not be long before Grinnell acquired a sophisticated understanding of how land, forests, wildlife, and water were intimately interconnected.

Through his insightful editorials, Grinnell influenced, for the better, the thinking of countless hunters and fishermen, among them Theodore Roosevelt.  The friendship that developed between the two men would have profound consequences for the history of American conservation, the first of which was the founding of the Boone and Crockett Club, named after the hunter-heroes Daniel Boone and David Crockett. After Grinnell became intimately associated with Roosevelt, he stressed the need for an effective, national sportsmen's organization, to do for the larger game animals what the Audubon Society, which Grinnell founded in 1886, was doing for birds. To work for the preservation of the large game of this country, and, so far as possible, to further legislation for that purpose, and to assist in enforcing the existing laws." Immediately, the club, with Forest and Stream as its "natural mouthpiece," turned its attention to Yellowstone National Park and other natural issues of the day.

George Bird Grinnell died of pneumonia at his New York home on April 11, 1938. In cataloguing his many achievements, the anonymous author of an obituary in the New York Times referred to him as the "father of American conservation." Whether or not we agree with the Times writer, one thing is certain: Grinnell showed the way for a new breed of Americans, those whom philosopher and ecologist Aldo Leopold applauded in his 1933 book, Game Management. This new individual was "the Crusader for conservation…who insisted that our conquest of nature carried with it a moral responsibility for the perpetuation of…threatened forms of wildlife" and, by implication, the habitats upon which they depend. This acceptance of responsibility, Leopold argued, "constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution."  As a pathbreaker for this new world view, as relevant for our times as it was for his, George Bird Grinnell deserves to

be remembered.

SPARE THE TREES-by George Bird Grinnell 1882

"It is strange that the Yankee, with his proverbial thriftiness and forecast, should, when it comes to the proper and sensible management of woodlands, entirely lose these gifts. Why can he not understand that it is more profitable to keep a lean or thin soil that will grow nothing well but wood, growing wood instead of worthless weeds? The crop is one which is slow in coming to the harvest, but it is a sure one, and is every year becoming a morepaying one. Furthermore, it breaks the fierceness of the winds, and keeps the springs from drying up, and is a comfort to the eye, whether in the greenness of the leaf or the bareness of the bough. Under its protective arms live and breed the grouse, the quail, and the hare, and in its shadowed rills swim the trout. If we would have these, we must keep the woods a-growing. No woods, nogame; no woods, no water; and no water, no fish."