In the summer of 1957, the Western Conservation Journal published a special "Redwood Region Issue" that celebrated the redwood logging industry’s remarkable progress. The number featured glossy photos of nine-ton diesel tractors skidding immense redwood trunks, numerous technical articles on uses for former logging "wastes" like bark and immature trees, and full-page advertisements that celebrated company-owned tree farms. To add academic authority to the issue, the editors hired a guest editor, Emanuel Fritz, a well-known emeritus professor of forestry at the University of California, Berkeley. Journal editors and loggers throughout California also knew him as consulting forester to the California Redwood Association, and as, simply, "Mr. Redwood." Throughout his long career as a forester and forestry professor, Fritz repeatedly exhorted his colleagues to get "out of the swivel chair and into the woods." While in the woods, the forester would inevitably run into the lumberman, and the "Redwood Region Issue" glorified what Fritz believed could happen when the two collaborated to create private forestry.

Even though Fritz’s call to action seemed simply a matter of applying forestry principles to logging, his insistence on cooperation was a highly controversial stance within the forestry profession. Faculty members in the UC forestry school regarded him as a dissenter, and at least one historian noted that Fritz’s critics considered him "a stalking-horse of industrial interests." But to Emanuel Fritz, the natural affinity of forestry to logging seemed manifestly obvious. He learned forestry at Yale in the 1910s, and joined the UC forestry faculty in 1919, following a tour in the U.S. Forest Service, and then in the U.S. Army, during World War I. His education brought him into close contact with the founding fathers of professional forestry in the United States, who insisted that foresters were the soul of the conservation movement, and upon whose success or failure the future prosperity of the nation rested. By the time Fritz retired from teaching in 1954, he had absorbed, but re-fashioned the conservation gospel. He harbored grave doubts about the saving power of public forestry, and instead advocated private forestry as the most efficient way to conserve the timber supply.

Scholars have noted that during the 1950s the conservation gospel lost its mass appeal, and that its reformers began to split off from the main church to launch the environmental movement. Environmentalists reviled private forestry and also criticized their conservationist ancestors, insisting that wilderness preservation should replace sustained-yield management and logging. As an orthodox conservationist, Emanuel Fritz kept the old faith alive by promoting a vision of privatized forestry, from his early teaching days in the 1920s until his death at the age of 102 in 1988. As a professor and consultant, he urged forestry schools to abandon their antipathy toward lumber companies. His work in support of the New Deal NRA and the California Forest Practices Act, and his opposition to Redwood National Park demonstrated that the utilitarian purpose of conservation remained a viable philosophy years after environmentalists rose to challenge it. The anti-environmentalism that erupted during the 1980s in the form of the Sagebrush Rebellion, the Spotted Owl controversy, and the Forest Service’s promotion of "New Forestry" had deep roots in the ideas of conservationist foresters like Fritz. From his position at the University of California, Fritz mediated the lumber industry’s demand for a sustainable future with policy-makers’ increasing interest in preservation. Fritz’s career linked the pro-business conservationists of the early 1900s and the quasi-libertarian anti-environmentalists that gained notoriety in the 1980s. In trying to sell private forestry to state and federal policy-makers, Fritz promoted a vision of enlightened free enterprise as the solution to, rather than the cause of, the problem of dwindling natural resources.

When Emanuel Fritz arrived at the Berkeley campus in 1919, American forestry schools were in their second decade of existence, and California’s was in its fifth year. In the first decade of the twentieth century the U.S. Forest Service’s dynamic and influential founder, Gifford Pinchot, used his considerable influence and wealth to launch forestry programs at Yale, Cornell, and Michigan. Pinchot felt that European forestry, the management of forests for their continuous growth, had failed to take root in the United States because the 19^th century logging industry operated in a laissez-faire business climate that encouraged wanton destruction of forests. His forestry schools trained men to protect the public’s interest in perpetual forests from industry’s interest in short-term profits. The first generation of foresters who taught at Berkeley had graduated from Pinchot’s institutions institutions, including Fritz (Yale) and the school’s first dean, Walter Mulford (Cornell).

Fritz was slightly younger than Mulford, Pinchot, and the first crop of American forestry graduates, and his background training was in mechanical engineering, instead of botany, geology and biology. Further setting him apart, his interest in forestry started as a hobby. As an engineering graduate student at Cornell, Fritz spent his Sunday afternoons on long hikes through the woods outside Ithaca, where he and his friends would have long discussions on tree-identification. In his spare time Fritz began reading at Cornell’s forestry library, and even took a few botany courses during the summers. Returning home to teach at his secondary school alma mater, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Fritz whetted his appetite for more forestry education by studying the technical properties of wood as a building material. He enrolled in Yale Forestry School in the fall of 1912. Fritz ended his education with a forestry degree, but his engineering training instilled a belief that learning and research that lacked practical application was worthless.

After graduating from Yale’s forestry school with a Master’s degree in 1914, Fritz flowed through the job-pipeline that supplied Gifford Pinchot’s Forest Service with a steady stream of graduates from Pinchot-founded forestry schools. Fritz spent a year-and-a-half working in district research offices in Montana, Idaho, and Arizona. When one of his Forest Service supervisors took a job at Berkeley, he recommended Fritz to UC Forestry Division Dean Mulford, who offered Fritz a teaching position in the summer of 1917. Fritz accepted the job, but deferred it for two years while he served as a captain in the U.S. Army Air Service as a mechanical engineer during World War I. When the war ended, Fritz received a job offer from the Forest Service for exactly the same salary that UC had offered, $2,000. As a self-described "private enterpriser," Fritz decided against continuing his career with the rapidly expanding federal agency, which he felt was already over-reaching itself. Fritz’s former Forest Service peers approved of his career change, telling him that he should use his new position to "spread the gospel" of forestry. They felt that Fritz should use his teaching position to teach the coming generations of foresters that it was their primary objective to halt industry’s advance into the nation’s shrinking forests. The former mechanical engineer proved to be a less-than-reliable promulgator of Pinchot-style forestry, because he felt that the true-believers were straying far from the original teachings of conservation.

Pinchot’s, his own conception of conservation, "the use of the earth for the good of man," lay at the heart of public forestry. His 1947 autobiography retold the story of his revelatory horseback ride in Washington, DC’s Rock Creek Park, and the enthusiastic Teddy Roosevelt had for conservation. In 1901 Roosevelt appointed Pinchot, a member of his "Tennis Cabinet" to head the Bureau of Forestry. Since Pinchot’s death, historians have rightly noted that an earlier generation of policy makers, like Bernard Fernow, W.J. McGee, and John Wesley Powell, had argued for decades that the federal government should play an active role in the disposal of the nation’s natural resources. They argued for conservation-type policies long before Pinchot claimed to have invented the term. The late-19^th century generation embarked on a semi-holy mission to improve and retool nature so that it would more efficiently serve humans. Protecting forested watersheds, harvesting timber as a crop, and using irrigation to make the desert bloom would all hasten the advancement of society to a higher stage of evolution.

As prodigal of the next generation of policy-makers, Pinchot did not add any original ideas to his predecessors’ vision. Like the venture capitalists of the turn-of-the-century, Pinchot’s genius lay more in an ability to organize, streamline, and systematize than to invent. By making conservation the top priority of federal resource agencies, and increasing their capacity to acquire and manage public land, Pinchot’s conservation policies exemplified the hallmarks of the Progressive Era, which favored national control over local, scientific management over customary practice, and public regulation over free enterprise. Despite Pinchot’s growing influence, it was reading the books by the 19^th century generation of conservationists that Fritz made his hobby in the Cornell library, and it was their conception of resource management that he most favored. Unlike Pinchot, they did not define conservation as the antonym of private industry. Pinchot insisted on federalized conservation and public forestry, which remained Fritz’s ideological sparring partner for the rest of his career.

A dissident in an era dominated by public foresters, Fritz broke many of the molds cast for him by his contemporaries and by historians of forestry. Supposedly a "forestry fraternity … a remarkably homogeneous group of men," foresters and lumbermen of the early twentieth century were said to be united by a common goal. The forestry techniques Pinchot learned in Germany and France were intended to assure the continuous growth and continuous harvesting of America’s timber reserves. The concept of "sustained yield" appeared to satisfy industry’s need for short-term profits and long-term timber-supply, and to fulfill the Forest Service’s mission of stewardship and responsible management. In reality, this common interest did not always result in a brotherly understanding between federal foresters and lumberjacks. Early foresters like Pinchot aggressively courted Congress’ and the public’s opinion by lambasting the lumber industry for its short-sighted, wholesale destruction. By the end of the 19^th century, the ever-migratory lumber industry was shifting its geographic center. Loggers foresaw the appraching exhaustion of virgin pineries in New England and the Lake States, and began to turn their attention to the colossal stands of Douglas Fir and Redwood on the west coast. As large, national firms moved into the west coast region and greatly increased its productivity, Pinchot empahsized the role of the federal forester to protect and reserve national forests in a disinterested, scientific manner. But where Pinchot and his allies asserted reason and public spirit, Emanuel Fritz saw over-zealous sensationalism that needlessly politicized forestry and turned foresters into self-righteous missionaries crusading against the lumber industry. "Private forestry," he countered, "is a cold-blooded business enterprise," not a matter of faith.

Fritz saw the history of American lumbering differently from Pinchot. Instead of dismissing all 19^th century logging as a wasteful catastrophe , Fritz discovered that some loggers in the 19^th century had inadvertently practiced selective logging, a technique that could make lumbering sustainable in the 20^th century. The Redwood region, Fritz’s bailiwick, had for several decades provided lumber to San Francisco, which developed an insatiable demand for building supplies during the Gold Rush. While federal foresters charged that hoards of saw-wielding capitalists were heedlessly slashing through the Pacific northwest’s virgin forests, Professor Fritz spent the 1920s and 1930s surveying and measuring the effects Redwood logging conducted during the Gold Rush era. He admitted that present-day logging practices he witnessed were every bit as destructive as Pinchot alleged. The typical logging company was small-scale (a "gyppo"), and operated on a narrow profit-margins, which gave it great incentive to liquidate its timber investment in short order. The technology of the 1920s mandated clear-cutting. "Yarding," the process of gathering felled trees for transport, relied on steam-powered engines, or "donkeys," which were bulky and stationary. Dragging the massive redwood trunks across the ground was the only way to yard trees to the landing area, where trucks or railroad cars took them to the mill. Preventing damage to younger, less-valuable trees was a practical impossibility. In the process of procuring the big, salable trees, the logger had no choice but mow down and plow under smaller trees that held little present value. When he moved the donkey engine to the next stand, the logger left behind a barren clear-cut of churned soil, mangled and broken trees, and unchecked exposure to the wind and sun. Such clear-cuts had slim chance of reforesting themselves, and cash-poor loggers had little ability to plant or restock. Federal foresters’ accusations that logging jeopardized future forests was not without merit.

The clear-cutting practices of the 1920s provided federal foresters with ample ground on which to attack the lumber industry. But Fritz discovered that clear-cutting had not always been the industry standard. Before the mechanical steam-donkey, 19^th century loggers had to rely on teams of oxen, the only animals strong enough to budge redwood trunks. Compared to the donkey-engine technique, yarding trees by ox-team required days of preparation and transport to move just a single log to the mill. Lumberjacks logically selected only the finest, most mature redwoods for felling, and tried to get those out of the woods with a minimum of clearing for the skidding-road. Smaller, immature redwoods stayed behind, and when Fritz analyzed their growth-rings eighty years later, he found that their rate of growth accelerated rapidly after logging. He found that redwoods grew at 1% per year before logging, and 8% per year after logging. Moreover they achieved this feat in the absence of forestry techniques like thinning and fire protection. Operating in a forest of seemingly unlimited virgin timber, 19^th century redwood loggers had inadvertently stumbled upon a technique that could save a nervous 20^th century industry just beginning to see end of its old-growth supply.

By rejecting all 19^th century lumbering as wasteful, Pinchot and the federal foresters had overlooked an important lesson. Fritz’s revisionism was based on a historical philosophy that further set him apart from many of his contemporaries. Pinchot-school foresters told a progressive history in which the light of modern science could triumph over the dark vestiges of unrestrained free enterprise. Referring to this narrative, Fritz warned a popular magazine audience that "we have been taught to look upon logging as anti-social." These teachers overlooked the fact that "we have some of the finest second growth in the world despite our mishandling." Hardly an apologist for the lumber industry, as his critics alleged, Fritz criticized the present while finding reason for optimism in the past. He agreed with public foresters to the extent that "the progress of man, and of his works has always been positive." "But," he cautioned, "it was not always uniformly positive." Selective logging by private operators had proven itself to be a viable conservation technique, and Fritz sought to implement it as a more conscious forestry program—private forestry.

By publishing articles in forestry journals, lumber industry trade journals, popular conservation magazines, and through congressional testimony, Fritz expressed the opinion that private industry could save itself. Most importantly, though, he directed his efforts at persuading the UC forestry students and faculty to stop crticizing the lumber industry and learn to cooperate with it.

The topic of forestry education itself became the subject of an official Society of American Foresters inquiry, headed by one-time Forest Service Chief Henry S. Graves, a colleague of Pinchot. The Society concluded that the chief crisis facing forestry schools, in addition to finding funding and finding qualified teachers, was the potential misperception that forestry schools were simply professional training programs, not academic departments. Since the turn of the century, foresters took pride in the fact that some of the most prestigious universities in the country had been the first to offer forestry schools. The Society noted that small minority of the its membership criticized forestry schools for being overly academic, providing students with little in the way of practical experience. In Fritz’s terms, students and faculty spent too much time in the swivel chair and not enough time in the woods. The Society’s 1931 final report on education disagreed, claiming that the profession’s integrity was at stake. "The college cannot offer training of trade school level," the report contended. Training students for industry employment would merely hasten "the descent of forestry to a semi-professional status." The report offered some rough guidelines for schools to teach better forest economics, forest policy, and forest administration, but discouraged them from teaching hard industry skills like lumbering or wood utilization. In short, the Society wanted forestry schools to keep churning out public foresters, not private foresters.

Emanuel Fritz challenged the Society’s and the forestry profession’s "one-sided preparation of only training for public service." Fritz had traveled through the pipeline from Yale to the U.S. Forest Service, when government jobs were plentiful and industry jobs were scarce. In the 1930s he saw too many forestry graduates following the same path, largely because the schools and forestry’s official association, the Society, still clung to an anti-industry definition of forestry. "The schools haven’t progressed with forestry," he wrote to Yale forester H.H. Chapman, "They are still handicapped by the inhibitions of the 1900-1910 period." The lumber companies that Fritz knew were well aware of this fact, which biased them against hiring forestry school graduates who had "no conception of the problems of the private owner of timberland and … still have an adverse and superior attitude toward private owners and operators." If forestry schools seriously wanted to change the way companies harvested timber, Fritz argued, they should train students to be informative assets to logging companies, rather than their antagonists.

Fritz tried to change forestry school culture at Berkeley from the bottom-up. He actively promoted private employment to his students, and spoke informally to the Forestry Club and to the forestry student fraternity, challenging them that it "takes a much bigger man to make a go of it in industry than in public work." During the 1930s, Fritz offered one of the only courses in the school—Forestry 124: The Lumber Industry—that covered logging techniques, logging finance and taxes, and business administration. Forestry 124 studied the trends of consolidation and vertical integration occurring in lumbering. Fritz stressed that the days of the migratory, liquidation-minded gyppo operator were numbered, and that logging was beginning to catch up with other industries that had centralized near the turn of the century. Larger firms like Weyerhaeuser and Pacific Lumber were buying up the gyppos’ mills and acquiring large tracts of timberlands, laying the basis for permanent production.

Historians have confirmed Fritz’s assertion that lumber companies became more centralized and began to see forestry research as a way to ensure production after virgin timber stands disappeared. Unlike gyppos, large west coast firms purchased expansive timber tracts, and began experimenting with sustained-yield techniques like selective cutting as early as the 1920s. Since the beginning of the century, most timber companies had deployed small private armies of fire wardens and fire crews to protect their investments. By the 1950s, many had hired a full-time forestry staff to oversee company tree farms, recognizing that well-managed second growth would be an essential source of future timber supply. Hiring private foresters also provided a way for lumber companies to integrate vertically. Like many other large-scale businesses after the 1920s, logging companies created internal research departments whose job it was to help the firms fully utilize supply and increase demand. Loggers needed forestry research to find ways to make forests last longer, and to find uses for inferior second-growth timber. Rather than wait for a second-growth lumber to develop its own market, loggers sought foresters’ expertise in creating new techniques for pulping and making plywood.

Many of Fritz’s UC forestry students answered his call for private foresters, and sought him out to write letters of recommendation to lumber companies. Since his extensive research in the redwood region brought him in frequent contact with loggers, Fritz was able to address his recommendations to his personal industry contacts. Fritz often received letters of thanks from former students who had found their first jobs in the lumber industry. They praised the "non-theoretical teaching" of Forestry 124, and recalled Fritz’s Wood Technology class for the practical knowledge it gave them. When Fritz arrived in 1919, the UC forestry school produced foresters almost exclusively for public service. By 1965, just a few years after he stopped teaching, 44% of all past UC forestry graduates were government employees, but 26% worked in private industry.

Attempting to bridge the gap between forestry schools and loggers, Fritz campaigned among the companies as well. He frequently addressed industry trade associations, trying to allay their fears of hiring "college boys." Forestry schools were adding more courses in business administration and economics to their curricula, and he urged them to give young forestry graduates "a chance to ‘show their stuff.’" In 1940, he chaired the Committee on Apprentice Training for the Pacific Logging Conference, which pointed out that other manufacturers, like auto and steel makers, already ran well-developed employee education programs. Loggers needed to recruit on campus at forestry schools to increase the slope of their employees’ learning curve. Unfortunately for Fritz, the curriculum at Berkeley did not match his claims. While the 1924 forestry school required courses in economics, accounting, business administration, labor relations, and lumbering, by 1934 the school had dropped these requirements.

The decision to drop business and economics requirements reflected in part the declining enrollment during the 1930s; it also reflected the forestry faculty’s desire to avoid the appearance of a trade-school. The faculty’s values resembled those of the Society of American Foresters, which supported an academic status for forestry schools, not a lower pre-professional standing. The school began as a division within the school of agriculture, but forestry deans Walter Mulford and Frederick Baker continually campaigned for department status, which the school achieved in 1968 in the formation of the School of Forestry and Conservation. Fritz protested the school’s new binomial because it implied that the two were separate ideas.

Fritz also criticized his colleagues’ swivel-chair propensities, claiming that "less than half have any real understanding of their subject, i.e. they have a purely academic and foreign understanding." In 1955, the school opened a forest products laboratory, modeled on the Forest Service’s Madison, Wisconsin lab. Fritz had a mixed reaction to the new UC lab. Several of its experiments in wood drying, young growth grading, and pulping had substantial industry application. At the same time, the Richmond lab was off-campus, and tended to isolate faculty from forestry undergraduates. Most of the lab’s funding came from the University, although 43 lumber companies and 3 trade associations contributed $250,000 to forest products research during the lab’s first decade of operation. In Fritz’s view the lab represented a step in the direction of private forestry but at the same time he worried that the lab would simply help faculty pursue research and neglect teaching, since "at the UC, research has become a fetish and a god." From its creation in 1955 through the 1980s, the lab’s stated purpose was to facilitate faculty and graduate research, not teaching. The lab’s expense also highlighted the failure of the school to invest in a sizable school forest. The Blodgett forest (a lumber company donation) was located several hundred miles from campus in the Sierra foothills, and Fritz noted that the school passed up several opportunities to purchase adjacent lands that would have made the forest large enough to carry out definitive experiments. Getting faculty in the lab seemed to have priority over getting future foresters in the woods.

During the annual summer camp, however, UC forestry students did have the opportunity to study in the woods, but few professors other than Fritz were willing to put in the strenuous work summer camp required. Berkeley administrators did not provide any extra incentive, offering no additional pay to summer camp professors, and denying Fritz’s requests to earn teaching credits for summer camp instruction. The administration’s stated reason for denial was simplification and standardization of teaching requirements. The forestry school’s policy that summer camp was not totally mandatory for all forestry students contributed to the confusion over whether Fritz’s instruction in the woods counted as actual teaching. Summer camp instruction fell into an un-quantifiable gray area between official instruction and voluntary teaching. Although Fritz stressed the importance of getting his students in the woods, his efforts ran into numerous procedural obstacles.

As he neared retirement from teaching in the early 1950s, Fritz revealed his frustrations to professors Myron Krueger, Joseph Kittredge, and Percy M. Barr. The school was continuing to indoctrinate students into the old anti-industry party-line "that lumbering is per se destructive and that a forester should think only of growing trees and not of harvesting them." He saw intense resistance to change: "I used to try to get a more clear understanding of American forestry and lumbering into our faculty and staff meetings," he lamented, "but I have given it up as hopeless and have therefore shifted my energies to more promising fields." Fritz had more success promoting private forestry in his work with the federal and state governments than through his work at the University of California.

His first involvement with government policy-making came during the Great Depression, when he served as the Redwood Division Coordinator of the National Recovery Administration’s Lumber Code Authority. During the 1920s, lumber manufacturers across the country formed trade associations that Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Secretariat helped encourage. By the time the NRA went into effect in 1934, lumber companies had formed the California Redwood Association (CRA) and hired Emanuel Fritz as its forestry consultant. Like other lumber associations, the CRA tried to control the overproduction and rapid liquidation that characterized the region’s logging. Fritz and the CRA interpreted the NRA as an opportunity to stabilize a chaotic and overly competitive industry. Lumber industry associations authored the NRA’s Lumber Code Authority forest practices guidelines, and expected voluntary compliance from individual companies. After Congress issued the 1933 Copeland Report, however, the lumber industry had a strong motivation to follow its own rules. Written almost entirely by Forest Service personnel, the Copeland Report presented an extensive argument for federal government regulation of all forest uses—from logging, to wilderness protection, to recreation. With the sword of federal control looming over the redwood industry’s head, Fritz and the CRA inspectors presented to loggers a persuasive argument to cooperate voluntarily with the NRA.

During the NRA’s brief period of constitutionality, Fritz made over a quarter of the CRA’s inspection visits, filing Forest Practices Reports on well over one hundred operators. What he found confirmed the lessons he had been teaching his students. Larger companies that owned their own timber land seemed very willing to cooperate by the CRA guidelines, while gyppo operators seemed suspicious and less-inclined to conserve any trees that might bring a price, however low. In his mid-1930s inspections, Fritz found greater cause for optimism than he expected to find. In 1930, he had reported to the Society of American Foresters that logging in California—with its rampant clear-cutting, liquidation mentality, and prices that seemed bottomless—was "a sick industry." With experimental data on reforestation and closer utilization, foresters could make it "at least convalescent." But by 1936, the patient was on the mend. Redwood loggers were heeding the Lumber Code Regulations for burning slash (woody debris left after cutting), and they were moving away from clear-cutting.

Technological change played a large role in the industry’s rapid recovery. By the late 1930s, technological change made sustained yield economically feasible, and with the outbreak of World War II, demand for lumber finally raced past supply. Early trials of diesel tractors proved successful, which meant that loggers could abandon the wasteful donkey-engine yarding method. The tractor’s maneuverability allowed lumberjacks to practice selective logging by letting young trees stand to grow to maturity, and leaving seed trees to aid natural re-growth. The Code called for loggers to leave all trees smaller than thirty inches diameter, breast-height (the standard measurement of a tree’s width). Among larger companies that could afford tractors, Fritz found widespread compliance with selective logging. Among the smaller gyppo operators, liquidation and the use of steam donkeys persisted.

Technology alone did not explain the redwood region’s sudden, mid-1930s embrace of selective logging. The CRA also estimated and publicized the expected future supply of virgin redwood timber to be 50 billion board feet. With industry cutting 500 million board feet each year, the region had only a one hundred-year supply of forest left, and even less if the economy improved. Fritz’s research in selective logging seemed to provide a profitable alternative to inevitable depletion. His measurements of second growth redwood stands that 19^th century loggers had left behind showed that young redwood trees rapidly accelerated their growth rates once loggers removed older, larger trees that blocked out sunlight and used up soil moisture. Even though redwoods were notoriously slow-growing trees, his comparative measurements showed that a 1,000 board-foot redwood could sprout prodigiously to 2,500 board-feet just twenty-five years after selective cutting. For a company with large timberland holdings, a twenty-five year cutting rotation was feasible, and would place the company on a sustained-yield basis. With tongue in cheek, Fritz noted that selective cutting fit perfectly with the Roosevelt era’s reforming spirit. "In New Deal language," he joked, "release from competition is a case of an underprivileged tree suddenly being permitted to self-determination of its destiny, and being given the freedom of full opportunity toward realizing and abundant life."

The apparent success of NRA-coordinated selective logging confirmed Fritz’s belief the free enterprise system produced the best results in the woods, and that private forestry was not a contradiction in terms. At Fritz’s request, the aging Gifford Pinchot toured the redwood region in 1937, telling a Humboldt County audience that he was impressed with loggers’ willingness to comply with the CRA’s forestry guidelines. On a national level, however, the Forest Service still doubted private forestry. Under the directorship of Ferdinand Silcox and Lyle Watts, who began their careers under Pinchot’s tutelage, the agency continued to press for public regulation of the lumber industry. The aggressive Forest Service chiefs shared a strong belief in planning, as did the cadre of New Dealers who comprised FDR’s second administration. When Roosevelt charged Congress with the task of investigating the nation’s forest lands, he asked for an assessment of the need for increased federal land ownership and logging industry control, and secondarily about the possibilities for private forestry.

Fritz joined national lumber trade groups in a massive organizing effort to convince Congress that industry could harvest timber responsibly, and did not need federal oversight. He helped call meetings of representatives from the CRA, the Pacific Logging Conference, and the National Lumber Manufacturers’ Association. Fritz and the industry leaders agreed to adopt a gracious tone when testifying before Congress, and to ask only for increased funding for research on universal lumbering problems like fire protection, slash disposal, and sustained yield practices. Congress and the Forest Service should serve as "a facilitating medium or catalyst to business," Fritz testified to Congress, and should act as "a lubricant for smoother business operation." Following Fritz’s lead, the lumber industry presented a united front to Congress.

Fritz also rallied foresters to oppose federal regulation, publishing broadsides that accused the Forest Service of conspiring to discredit private forestry for its own gain. Since its birth in 1905 the agency had vilified private timber practices, a tradition that Fritz saw as evidence that "there is a group of foresters, both in and out of public service, which does not want private forestry to succeed." Furthermore, the agency did not have any empirical basis for its attacks. "If there is one single national forest," Fritz charged, "that is successfully on sustained yield in the woods, and not only on paper in the office file, I have yet to find it." Private foresters needed to circle their wagons to fend off the attacks from "the pistol-packin’ anti-industry boys who are in control and want more power." For Fritz, the hearings represented a long-awaited showdown with the public forestry establishment.

At the hearings, Fritz’s organizing efforts seemed to have real results. Lumber trade groups testified calmly that tractor-based selective logging and voluntary compliance with NRA rules—even after the Supreme Court shot down the blue eagle—were assuring companies’ and forests’ permanence. Semi-public foresters, including UC faculty members Fritz, Mulford, Woodbridge Metcalf, and Myron Krueger, added credibility to the trade groups’ testimony. They argued that the Pinchot legend that public forestry saved the nation’s timber supply from the lumberjack’s villainous axes had outlived its usefulness. Reality was more complex. Wasteful gyppo operators cut trees right alongside larger, more farsighted, selective companies. The situation defied a simple panacea like public regulation, and called instead for aggressive federal action to decrease uncertainty in the industry. Congress could best help by funding research that would give loggers the knowledge to make informed decisions on which trees to cut and which to leave. Congress could also play a role by finding markets for surplus lumber, which would encourage the industry to invest in long-term harvest rotations. Congress took no action on public regulation, and shelved most of the Forest Service’s recommendations in the Copeland Report.

The root cause of most industry woes, overproduction, disappeared almost immediately after the hearings, though wartime demand and the postwar housing boom may have been more responsible for this than was Congress. By the end of World War II, the public regulation threat had passed, and Fritz’s lobbying had played no small role in its demise. Standardizing and implementing private forestry should have been the easy part, since Fritz assumed economic necessity would compel its widespread adoption.

But beginning in the early 1950s, the environmental movement began to capture national attention, and managed to make Fritz’s old-fashioned conservation rhetoric seem like industry propaganda. Grounded in the emerging discipline of ecosystem science, the environmental movement drew strength postwar fears that human potency was having a drastic, irreversible impact on natural systems. Environmental protection became a public priority because of highly visible threats, such as the atomic bomb, the population bomb, pesticides in the food chain, and most importantly for private forestry, the postwar housing boom’s exploding demand for lumber. The attack on private forestry shifted from government agencies to private interest groups. Private forestry itself produced frustrating results for Fritz and the CRA in the place where it should have worked—in the woods.

From 1943 to 1945, Fritz served as advisor to the California Forestry Study Committee, chaired by State Senator George M. Biggar. Fritz arranged for the members of the committee to tour California logging operations in the all parts of the redwood and Sierra regions, and he wrote the committee’s final report. Biggar’s committee succeeded in the passage of the 1945 California Forest Practices Act, which created a decentralized system of regulating logging. The state Board of Forestry divided California into four regions, each governed by "local forest committees," comprised of timber owners, logging companies, and county officials.

With the Biggar Committee’s regulatory structure in place, Fritz helped enact the rules for the redwood region’s local committee, which called itself the Redwood Region Conservation Council. Fritz combined his consulting role for the RRCC with his consulting for private companies, using his dual public/private position to demonstrate the profitability of private forestry. Returning to seventy-year-old stand of redwoods along the Mendocino River, he found robust second growth that had accelerated so much since he first measured it that he called it "the wonder plot." His survey of the Union Lumber Company’s timberlands depicted a forest crying out for management. Union could improve the lands’ 2.78% annual growth rate to well over 10% with selective logging, careful thinning, and vigilant fire protection. Pacific Lumber Company improved annual growth from 9.9% to 18.5% on some of its intensively managed stands. Although second growth redwoods grew rapidly, Fritz candidly admitted their drawbacks. The wood was inferior to virgin redwood, and the necessity of thinning young stands and guarding against fire entailed considerable costs. For all the advantages of virgin timber, Fritz was quick to remind loggers that it was a finite resource, whereas second growth was a perpetual supply. Timber owners could still find reliable markets for low-grade redwood, which made excellent pier pilings, construction studs, fence rails, and pulp wood. Even after he retired from teaching in 1954, Fritz continued researching effective and profitable methods for reforesting cut-over lands. For all his promotion and research, however, lumber companies did not always, to Fritz’s dismay, apply forestry, a point the environmentalists emphasized.

Senator Biggar himself was one of the first to complain that his own legislation had gone awry. When the State Board of Forestry adopted its rules for cutting practices in 1945, it relied on the same enforcement body—the California Redwood Association—that had overseen out NRA regulations. The postwar housing boom changed the business landscape, however, replacing chronic overproduction with a seemingly insatiable demand. Small operators that were headed toward extinction now stormed back into the woods, especially in the redwood region’s Douglas Fir backcountry. Biggar was skeptical that such a climate would result in loggers’ strict observance of the state’s rule that they should leave at least four trees of a minimum of eighteen-inch diameter for each acre cut. Fritz tried to reassure him that companies would see it in their own interest to exceed those limits, but Biggar was less optimistic. "I will feel that everything we have done will be a farce and a hoax," he wrote to Fritz, "I am completely heart-sick over the whole thing." Fritz tried to remind loggers that the forestry rules were essential, and mobilized the CRA, the body that rescued the industry from public regulation. He told them that "since trees of this size are not profitable to cut, log and mill anyway, more than the required number should be left whenever they are available." RRCC inspectors continued to visit logging operations on an annual basis, and found violations on anywhere from one-fifth to one-half of their visits. But enactment of private forestry was running into difficulty in the woods as well as in the boardrooms.

While selective logging produced impressive growth rates in young redwoods, it also caused unforeseen problems that hindered continuous production. For one, it made slash-disposal a labor-intensive undertaking. When loggers clear-cut, they usually burned the leftover slash with a controlled fire. Protecting residual trees from selective logging required loggers to collect carefully and broadcast slash before burning so that it would not damage immature growth. All of this piled additional costs on the operation. Furthermore, guarding against the chance that an exogenous forest fire might wipe out the precious residual trees meant increased costs for fire patrols. Even companies that took these precautions were discovering problems with selectivity. No longer surrounded by massive mature redwoods, young trees were vulnerable to blowdown during wind storms. "You made an excellent start on the program," Fritz told the Arcata Redwood Company, "and it is therefore regrettable that local conditions are unfavorable to residual trees and cause them to be vulnerable to the winds of your area." After inspecting the Hammond Company’s cut-over land, Fritz recommended that the firm save itself the future expense of trying to re-seed and try selling the land to the State Board of Forestry.

Despite the disappointments, Fritz and the CRA maintained the Tree Farm certification program, which recognized and praised firms that utilized forestry techniques. Environmentalists caught wind of the Tree Farm Program and dismissed it as window-dressing. Their description often was accurate, as lumber companies left narrow "screens" of uncut timber along the sides of highways (especially U.S. 101, the "Redwood Highway") to make forest-destroying logging less visible from the road. The Save-the-Redwoods League purchased and preserved many of these screens, as well as "superlative" redwood stands along river banks and flood plains. Fritz supported the efforts of the Save-the-Redwoods League, since it advocated preservation of stands that had inspirational, rather than commercial value.

During the 1950s, however, more radical preservationists, especially the Sierra Club, called for more aggressive action that confronted industry practrices, rather than fronting for them. The Club began calling for an end to logging in the redwood region and the establishment of a national park there. The Sierra Club congratulated the CRA for actively certifying tree farms and proudly displaying tree farm signs; but the Club criticized the lack of further enforcement. CRA tree farm guidelines, and Fritz’s philosophy of sustainable harvesting, were "based on the fallacy that the profit motive per se will solve all the problems." Even the conservative Save-the-Redwoods League moved closer to the Sierra Club position in the 1960s, throwing its considerable weight behind LBJ’s national park proposal in 1966 because it felt the park would better protect the forest’s ecology. Long retired from teaching, the octogenarian Fritz roused himself to oppose the national park, which environmentalists defined as a repudiation of his past four decades’ work to get private forestry into the woods.

During the 1960s debates over a redwood park, grass roots citizens groups added increased political pressure and increased press coverage, which had been missing from earlier proposals in the 1920s and 1940s. The Izaak Walton League, the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, and especially the Sierra Club launched massive publicity campaigns and took their case to congressional hearings. The Sierra Club led the charge, publishing in 1964 a large, photo-enhanced book, The Last Redwoods, which closely resembled The Place No One Knew, the Club’s photographic essay of Glen Canyon, Utah before an eponymous dam flooded the gorge.

Fritz defended the policies he helped to create against withering Sierra Club accusations that tree farms were a façade, selective cutting a failure, and the Forest Practices Act an industry-backed swindle. Charging that the Sierra Club was pretending to know "more about forestry than foresters," Fritz conceded that "none of the three is perfect, but each has been brought closer to perfection each year." The Save-the-Redwoods League’s support for the park particularly galled Fritz, since it had for so many years quietly raised money to purchase showcase groves of redwoods and donated them to California’s state parks system. At the same time that Fritz urged Congress to let private philanthropy protect redwoods, three current and former League officers, Horace Albright, Newton Drury, and Ralph W. Chaney (the former two also served as Park Service chiefs), testified to Congress in favor of creating a national park. A long-time League member, Fritz waged his own internal battle from within to convince the League’s leadership to withdraw its support, but to no avail.

When Fritz appeared before the Congressional committee in Crescent City, CA in July 1967, he claimed to be representing no one but himself. He was not a lone voice of dissent, however. The CRA, the Pacific Logging Conference, the West Coast Lumberman’s Association, and scores of municipal leaders, county officials, and chambers of commerce packed the hearings room to voice their opposition to a national park. They tried to convince Congress that the economic loss to northern California would far outweigh any advantages gained by increased tourism. Indeed, to Fritz the image of a crowded national park campgrounds packed with cars and strewn with litter represented more of a desecration than any logging operation. Having spent much of his lifetime hiking through the redwoods, he harbored private resentment for tourists who "take a quick look at a particularly good stand and remark, ‘Well I’ll be damned’ and then move on." The arguments he gave to Congress were less aesthetic a more pragmatic. The proposed national park would cost nearly $25 million, and would accomplish little more than replicating the functions of California’s state parks. Fritz warned Congress that it would set a dangerous precedent if it listened to the Sierra Club’s "manufactured pessimism," for which the Club had already spent nearly one million dollars "and not saved one acre of redwood." In contrast to the Sierra Club’s unseemly and shrill public propaganda campaign, Fritz preferred the established, genteel philanthropy of the Save-the-Redwoods-League, which had saved 150,000 acres of redwoods in state parks. In comparison, the Sierra Club only saved 78,000 acres, and required a national park to do so.

When Lyndon Johnson signed the Redwood National Park Act in 1968, it represented a victory for none of the parties involved. The compromise process had whittled initial proposals for an 82,000-acre park down to a 58,000-acre park, most of which was carved out of three pre-existing California state parks. The final version of the park consisted of an archipelago of discontinuous blocks of land, none of which was large enough to contain a natural watershed, and 80% of which bordered on logging company timberlands. It was more a political than ecological unit, and environmentalist battles for its expansion lasted through 1970s. In 1978 Congress added nearly 20,000 additional acres, finalizing "the most costly land purchase in American history." To Emanuel Fritz, the act’s passage proved that strident environmentalism had gained a solid foothold in national policy making, and had turned out to be an even more potent foe of private forestry than Pinchot-style conservation had been.

In the early 1980s, Emanuel Fritz’s final decade, the strain of conservation he had nurtured and promoted since beginning his forestry career in the 1910s took root and spread across the western United States in the meteoric movement known as "The Sagebrush Rebellion." Initiated by state legislatures that tried to snatch federally-owned lands away from the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, the rebellion’s spokesmen advocated a doctrine of "wise use." Frustrated with Washington, DC land agencies that had suddenly turned hostile to loggers, miners, and grazers, the sagebrush rebels concluded that an unholy conspiracy between environmental groups and federal bureaucrats threatened the free enterprise system. Encouraged by the states’ rights rhetoric of the Reagan Revolution, the Sagebrush Rebellion flared up in western state capitals in 1979, died in federal courts a few years later, but left lingering suspicions. Legally, it was a court battle over states’ rights, but the sagebrush rebellion also exposed a deep ideological rift between the public and private sectors over the meaning of conservation. The terms of the debate resembled closely the recurring debates between Emanuel Fritz and the Forest Service, the forestry profession, and the UC forestry faculty. Although he would not have agreed with all of the sagebrush rebels’ demands, Fritz had been an early dissenter from the program of increasing federal timberland ownership. His prescription for enlightened corporate self-interest combined with competent state-level regulation was exactly what the sagebrush rebels claimed to be seeking.

Executive agencies and western businesses clashed again in 1989 when the federal government listed the Spotted Owl as an endangered species, and a federal judge enjoined all logging companies to cease cutting operations in old growth forests. The polite testimony of Fritz and northern California county officials at the 1967 Redwood National Park hearings were only a minor dress rehearsal for the chorus of angry lumber industry and local government voices that protested the owl-listing. The debate received a great deal of news media attention, and the resulting polarization between those who favored "jobs" and those who favored "owls" threatened to widen the gulf between private and public foresters.

But in a plot-twist that would make Gifford Pinchot smile, a hero emerged from the Forest Service. In 1989, Jerry Franklin, a forester and plant ecologist with a team of Forest Service researchers, published a study that coined the phrase, "New Forestry." Franklin’s scientifically supported proposal seemed the ideal compromise between environmentalists’ demands for ecological integrity and logging companies’ demand for sustained yield production. New Forestry called for a phase-out of clear-cutting. Loggers should instead leave residual seed-trees, standing dead tress (snags), and woody debris on the forest floor in order to provide a reasonable facsimile of the old growth ecosystem, upon which owls and other life-forms depended. New Forestry differed from Fritz’s selective logging only in its more rigorous application of ecological methods, including soil samples and wildlife monitoring. Agents of the public forestry profession, New Foresters did show any recognition of Fritz’s private forestry efforts. The policy was virtually the same as selective logging, but since its debut came at a time of intense crisis, it seemed like a precious and innovative patch of middle ground, even though it was essentially a re-tread.

After the initial excitement abated, loggers and environmentalists retrenched their positions. Loggers openly wondered if New Forestry could provide sustained yields and profits simultaneously. The world-weary Sierra Club remained hostile to the New Forestry movement, and to the Forest Service’s New Perspectives program. Environmentalists predicted that all this "New-ness" was another excuse for lumberjacks to fire up "New Chainsaws" and drive "New Pickup Trucks." Like 1930s proposals for public regulation and Emanuel Fritz’s advocacy of private forestry, New Forestry provided a public forum for the conflict between industry’s appeals to market forces and environmentalists’ appeals to state coercion, but left the conflict essentially unresolved.

The private forestry techniques and practices that Fritz promoted in the 1930s and 40s ironically re-emerged in the 1980s as public forestry’s solution to the logging impasse. While Fritz was ineffective in stopping the preservationists behind Redwood National Park, his consulting for the California Redwood Association, and his unconventional teaching at the University of California forestry school strengthened the position of the lumber industry in its conflicts with the environmental movement. Fritz’s rhetoric helped foster the belief among loggers that wilderness advocates and federal agencies were in a conspiracy. His conception of private forestry bridged the gap between late 19^th century conservationists and late 20^th century advocates of "wise use." New Forestry represented the Forest Service’s tacit admission that public foresters could not expect logging companies to cease and desist, and that loggers had gotten private foresters in the woods.