Roosevelt's Forest Army · Episode 4 of 14 · 49 min
How the CCC Planted 3 Billion Trees
The Tree Army planted roughly three billion trees, built thousands of fire lookout towers, and waged a national war on tree disease. This episode admires the work but is honest about the fire-exclusion doctrine and monoculture planting that later forest science came to question. The CCC supplied the labor that made total fire suppression feasible.
Who's who
- Ferdinand Silcox+3 more episodesForest Service chief who formalized the 10 a.m. fire policy in 1935
Where it happens
- Blackwater Fire, Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming1937 fire that killed 15 men
- Griffith Park, Los AngelesSite of a deadly 1933 fire
- Idaho and MontanaScene of the 1910 Big Burn that shaped suppression doctrine
Timeline
- 1910The Big Burn entrenches fire as the Forest Service's enemy
- October 1933Griffith Park Fire kills roughly 25 men
- 1935Forest Service adopts the 10 a.m. policy
- August 1937Blackwater Fire kills 15 men
- 1942Congress ends the CCC; trees, towers, and roads remain
Still debated
Tree counts range from about 2.3 to 3.5 billion, and casualty figures from fires are defined differently by source. Modern fire scientists see fire exclusion as one cause of today's fires, not the sole cause, and the blister-rust campaign worked in the East but largely failed in the West.
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