Interior Department Changes
As instructed by the new law, a Division of Geography and Forestry was set up within the USGS. Henry Gannet was the new division's chief and produced surveys of the reserves that were of high quality and provided basic information necessary for effective management. These surveys, which included an atlas, were impressive, even today.
The Interior Department's Land Office section tried for a brief period to develop its capability to manage the reserves. Filibert Roth became the head of the General Land Office's "Division R"-the Forestry Division on November 15, 1901 and resigned two years later, in 1903.
Gifford Pinchot, of the United States Department of Agriculture's Division of Forestry at this time, advocated for the removal of the reserves from Interior and placed under the Agriculture Department so that the forest reserves and the foresters would all be under one department. He also had a poor opinion of the Land Office due to "land office routine, political stupidity and wrong-headed points of view. " A campaign was mounted toward this goal by Pinchot as well as the American Foresters Association and the Sierra Club. Finally, the effort paid off on Feb. 1905 when President Roosevelt signed into law the Forest Transfer Act.
Read more about this topic: Organic Act Of 1897
Famous quotes containing the words interior and/or department:
“It cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bankers, and others, which penetrate up the innumerable rivers of our coast in the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the sun; and again, of the fry which in still greater numbers wend their way downward to the sea.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Anonymous Parent. As quoted in Women and the Work Family Dilemma, by Deborah J. Swiss and Judith P. Walker, ch. 2 (1993)