ENV 695a () / 2025-2026

Yale Forest Forum Series: A History of People, Forests, and Forestry

Credits: 1.5 Fall 2025: Th, 12:00-2:00, Marsh Rotunda/Classroom

Seminar Hosts: The Forest School continues its series on a history of forests, people and forestry for  Fall 2025. This Fall’s series will focus on Scientific Forestry from sustained yield to ecosystem management.  It will again be co-hosted by The Forest History Society but this semester we will be joined by The Society of American Foresters. The seminar series will include a weekly public webinar hosted by the Yale Forest Forum (YFF).
Seminar Description:  The second part in this series explores the history of “scientific forestry,” tracing its origins in early-modern European views of nature, where scientific expertise was seen as a tool for dominion over the natural world and its colonial expansion. The course examines how European forestry practices influenced the development of forestry in the United States during the nineteenth century and how the profession gained ground in North American universities (including with the founding of the Yale Forest School in 1900). Focusing on the twentieth century, we will trace the transformation of forestry from its early focus on protection and recovery of forests in the West to timber and sustained yield forest management particularly in the South and far West to the development of an ecosystem and ecological approach to managing our nation’s forests. Through this lens, we will evaluate forestry in the United States by considering its successes and also its problematic legacies in relation to Native American dispossession and settler colonialism. From the Eastern United States in the colonial period to the upper Midwest and eventual expansion to the US South and Pacific Northwest in the early 20^th century, we will follow the roots of land use and forestry and explore how the profession evolved with advances in modern genetics and ecosystem forestry, culminating in the watershed legislation of the 1970s, including NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Forest Management Act, which laid the foundation for a new era in forest management.