Conservation, environmentalism and rationality.

****Current "environmentalism" often seems to elevate the environment over people and conveys the idea that humans are the enemy of The Earth. A founder of the conservation movement had no such fanaticism.Gifford Pinchot believed the environment should serve Man and that, in turn, Man should be a good steward of it.****
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... "The Big Burn" should be commended for shining a light on the real hero of the story, Gifford Pinchot, as important a figure in the protection of wildlands as his better-known contemporaries Roosevelt and John Muir...He founded the Forest Service in 1906 and, with President Roosevelt's help, made the term "conservation" known across the world.
Pinchot is at his most interesting when his views clash with current environmentalism. He hated forest fires, none more than the Big Burn, while most environmentalists today agree that fire helps keep forests healthy. Pinchot was certainly aware of fire's benefits: An article he wrote in 1899, when fire was making its annual foray through the West, was among the first to describe the salutary effects of forest fires. He noted, for instance, that tree seedlings such as those of the giant sequoia in California flourish only on burned ground. Pinchot nonetheless believed in combating forest fires at all costs. He considered the national forests large tree farms, and if fire had once ruled the grasses of the Great Plains, only to be thwarted and supplanted by intensive farming, there was every reason to think the same fire-conquering success might be made in the forests of the West.
Pinchot took other positions that might make today's environmentalists choke on their trail mix. In addition to being an implacable foe of forest fires, he favored logging in California's Yosemite National Park, as well as the damming of one of Yosemite's most beautiful valleys. ...I found it bracing to return to Pinchot's own writing, the expressions of a man with an interest in protecting the land yet with none of the religious feeling that today's environmentalism so often evokes. For him "conservation" simply meant "the use of the natural resources for the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time." An inspiring creed in the early 20th century and a challenging one today.