Film documents Forest Service history

Who would have thought a government agency could produce a compelling and artistic documentary film?

That's what a team of U.S. Forest Service audio-visual specialists managed to do with "The Greatest Good," a film that captures the mercurial saga of the agency's 100-year history.

The documentary, part of the Forest Service's Centennial Celebration, was shown for the first time in the Flathead Valley last week in a screening in Whitefish for Forest Service employees and retirees.

Screenings open to the public will be in months to come.

The documentary may be most interesting to those who know little about the Forest Service, because it conveys a history far richer than one would suspect from today's behemoth bureaucracy.

It shows a history, particularly in the West, where society and the Forest Service have grown up hand-in-hand.

The film dives back to the turn of 20th century when the Forest Service was mostly made up of rangers stationed at remote outposts across the country, in charge of everything from establishing national forest boundaries to regulating grazing and predators.

The thematic figurehead of the documentary is Gifford Pinchot, the man who founded the agency in 1905 and expanded its influence with President Theodore Roosevelt at his side.

Pinchot and his ongoing influence get considerable attention, starting with his upbringing in a family that became wealthy liquidating forests of the upper Midwest. It follows his conversion to conservation forestry and later pursuit of "sustainable" forestry practices when he became head of the Department of Agriculture's tiny forestry bureau.

"He gave birth not just to the Forest Service, but to the entire profession" of forestry, a Pinchot historian explains in the film.

Other notable figures such as Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall come to life through an impressive range of photographs, along with commentary from experts on the history of the Forest Service.

The documentary has a lineup of 43 on-camera interviews that are interspersed throughout the two-hour film. They include academics, authors, activists, Forest Service retirees, and past and present chiefs of the Forest Service. There are interviews with the first women to advance in the agency, and colorful commentary from old-timers such as former smokejumper Fred Brauer and Bud Moore, the iconic Swan Valley forester who started with the agency as a smoke chaser in the 1930s.

Considering the project was completely produced by Forest Service public relations technicians who typically produce training videos, a viewer might expect to see a jaunty commercial that glorifies the Forest Service, glossing over its controversial history.

Instead, the film shows that controversy has been with the Forest Service since its inception. It has been plagued with conflict in nearly every era since then.

It shows, using political cartoons and newspaper clippings, how forest reserves were initially hugely unpopular in the West.

It goes on to cover political fallout that followed the fires of 1910 and how that resulted in decades of fire suppression that led to today's forest-health debates.

The fires of 1988 and "tragedy" fires in which many lost their lives also are covered.

But the film still manages to present the Forest Service in a holistic fashion, reflecting on accomplishments and even providing a glimpse into a Forest Service culture where employees held barbecues and raised families at remote ranger stations and administrative compounds.

The film chronicles the agency's transition from sustainable forestry to "production" forestry in the years that followed World War II. This era culminated in the 1980s, when the agency became a slave to its own timber budgets and timber targets and "getting out the cut" had become a political priority that left clearcuts across the landscape.

"We went to the dark side," recalls Orville Daniels, a former Bitterroot and Lolo national forest supervisor. "We were driven by our budgets and we were driven by politics."

The aftermath has been no less controversial. Litigation over the northern spotted owl is highlighted to show how the agency was rapidly driven into retreat, with drastic reductions in timber production. The agency was "again looked at as the enemy," narrator Charles Osgood intones, as the economies of many rural communities were devastated.

Serving the "Greatest Good" is what the agency has strived for since its inception, but it's been an elusive goal over the years because of changing and increasing demands on public lands.

As the Forest Service continues a painful transition from its production era to an era aimed at restoring national forests, the film suggests that finding and serving the greatest good will continue to be difficult.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com