Gifford Pinchot, an instrumental figure in modern American conservation, was born 145 years ago today. Although not exactly a household name, the Connecticut native and graduate of New Hampshire’s own Phillips Exeter Academy was the first Chief Forester of the United States Forest Service, working with Theodore Roosevelt to create and expand the National Forest System.

Pinchot can be credited with the rise of forestry – the science and practice of taking care of forests – in the United States. He studied forestry in France because there was no American college with a School of Forestry at the time. Later there were only two, at Cornell and Biltmore, before Pinchot started a third at Yale in 1900; now the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Pinchot’s is the oldest continuously operating forestry and environmental school in the country, and the oldest post-grad forestry program. That year he also formed the Society of American Foresters, further professionalizing the protection and management of forests.

Under Pinchot, the Division of Forestry (part of the Department of Agriculture), renamed the United States Forest Service, protected and managed millions of acres of forest, using its authority to find the best long-term uses for one of the country’s major resources. Constantly at odds with John Muir, who wanted to preserve wilderness strictly for its beauty, Pinchot developed a system to allow such uses as logging, fishing and gaming, and hydropower, for fees and under strict guidelines. As Roosevelt wrote in his 1913 Autobiography, “[Pinchot] led, and indeed during its most vital period embodied, the fight for the preservation through use of our forests.”

After twelve years as the leader of American forestry, Pinchot was fired from his position as head of the Forest Service in 1910, after calling out President Taft’s Secretary of the Interior for favoring private business interests over conservation. One year earlier, Pinchot said something at the Joint Conservation Conference that is worth repeating: “Conservation is the application of common sense to the common problems for the common good.”