When Jack Ward Thomas was named chief of the U.S. Forest Service in
1993, only twelve men had ever known the staggering responsibility,
political pressure--and extraordinary opportunities to influence the
future of America's natural resources--that came with the job. Theodore
Roosevelt had created the agency in 1905, appointing Gifford Pinchot as
its first chief. Now Thomas would shoulder the load once borne by two
icons of the conservation movement. Forks in the Trail is a collection
of stories about the experiences that shaped the values, knowledge,
skills, and decisions of a field biologist who came from a hardscrabble
Texas farm and eventually rose to the pinnacles of natural resource
leadership in Washington, D.C. Thomas arrived at his new post with a
unique set of perspectives and experiences. His formal education and
decades of forest, range, and wildlife research had prepared him
academically. His rural upbringing and passions for nature, hunting, and
sustainable use of natural resources had prepared him pragmatically. But
it was basic moxie that ultimately equipped Thomas to confront the most
controversial conservation topics of the day, from protecting old-growth
timber and spotted owl habitat to the deaths of fourteen wildland
firefighters in 1994. Thomas's life is the story of how conservation and
natural resources management happened in America during the second half
of the twentieth century. But more than just old war stories, timelines,
and reiterations of his curriculum vitae, Forks in the Trail offers
intensely personal reflections of life lessons--of the "foibles, fears,
mistakes, adventures, misadventures, successes, failures, and comedies
of errors and ego"--learned along the way to a full, remarkable career.
"During my life," Thomas writes, "I had many adventures, good and bad;
achieved beyond my wildest dreams; and, to my lasting chagrin, too often
fell short. In the process I learned much; lost often but won some too;
suffered the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'; helped foment
some troublesome quandaries; and helped in the resolution of others."
With tales well told, Forks in the Trail reveals a distinctive life and
an illustrious career.
