But this pervasive resistance from bureaucrats might also be understood as a part of a history of conservation professionals thinking of themselves as participants in a movement, not just as dutiful or self-interested government apparatchiks. Because many are committed environmentalists, and view their jobs as serving those beliefs, they have resisted the dramatic change in course from the Trump administration with creativity and vigor. Since the founding of federal environmental bureaucracies in the in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of their staffers have looked on their jobs as much as a crusade or movement as a duty. Gifford Pinchot, the founder of the U.S. Forest Service and the materialist, institution-building St. Paul counterpart to John Muir’s prophetic witness, animated his calls for efficiency and order with the appeal that conservation was a part of taming capitalism in order to protect democracy. “We have allowed the great corporations,” he wrote in The Fight for Conservation (1910) “to occupy with their own men the strategic points in business, in social, and in political life.” By preventing the monopolization of natural resources, conservation bureaucracies would help to check this power. The scientific expertise and administrative autonomy he struggled for in the Forest Service and sought to extend to other branches of the federal government had a larger purpose, one which animated the work of the first generation of this agency.[1]
Pinchot’s friend Hamlin Garland, best known for his realist fiction and memoirs about Midwestern farm families, lionized the passion of early forest rangers in his Cavanagh, Forest Ranger: A Romance of the Mountain West (1910). Dedicating the book to Pinchot, Garland created a protagonist sensitive to the transcendent beauty of nature. On a midnight ride in the Rockies, Cavanagh “drew a deep breath of awe as he turned and looked about him. Overhead the sky was sparkling with innumerable stars, the crescent moon was shining like burnished silver, while level with his breast rolled a limitless, silent, and mystical ocean of cloud which broke against the dark peaks in soundless surf and spread away to the east in ever widening shimmer.”[2] This passion for nature was an inducement for him to perform his duties, especially in the face of physical violence and death threats from the cattle barons destroying the public range.