In 1885, just before I went to college, my father asked me if I would like to become a forester. It was an amazing question. When he asked it, not a single American had made forestry a profession, nor were the principles of forestry being practiced anywhere in America. On the contrary, the most appalling wave of forest destruction in history was then swelling to its climax in the United States. And the American people were glad of it. Most regarded forest perpetuation as ridiculous. There would always be plenty of everything for everybody. Before I share with you this letter, I want to briefly tell how forestry and conservation came to America. For history told from documents often does not bear even a distant family resemblance to the essential truth. And that is because a document may represent a fact or it may represent the concealment of a fact. So I shall now give you the frozen truth as I lived it. My grandfather, Cyril Pinchot, a soldier in Napoleon's army, was expelled from France upon the emperor's defeat and settled in Milford, Pennsylvania in 1816. He became a leading merchant. His son James, my father, went to New York City at the age of 19 and began as a clerk in the dry goods store. But he soon formed a partnership that sold fine wallpaperings and became very wealthy. He later married my mother Mary Jane, you know, also prosperous. And they had four children together. I was one of them born in 1865. At the age of 44, my father retired and maintained homes both in Milford and New York City. My father was a man of vision and concerned about the future of America's forests. Well, I had no more conception of what it meant to be a forester than the man in the moon. But I love the woods and everything about them. Whatever forestry might be, I was for it. But there were no schools where forestry could be studied in America, so I proposed to follow the family tradition and go to Yale and pick up what forestry I could. Yet there wasn't even a suspicion of it there. Poor, busy and happy years at Yale passed like a watch in the night. I was twice voted the most handsome man on campus. Although, I must say, some of my competition wasn't particularly sterling. Now, as a sample of my economic views at that time, I wrote of my indignation over government regulation of railroad rates. The railroads own the tracks and cars, don't they? Then why shouldn't they charge what they please? Which wasn't exactly a good start for a forester and a man who was to become and remain a Theodore Roosevelt Progressive. The truth is that I had not yet begun to think. During my senior year, I went to Washington to check my plan to be a forester. Back in 1881, a little organization in the Department of Agriculture had become the forestry division. Dr. Bernard Furno, a trained German forester and chief of the forestry division, advised me to take up forestry only as second fiddle to something else. I think the wise plan would be to so direct your studies that they will be useful in other directions also. The study of the science's underlying forestry will also fit you for landscape gardening, nursery business, botanist work, and so forth. Dr. Furno, through his European eyes, felt that forestry was impracticable in the United States. Others agreed, including my grandfather, Eno, who had made a great fortune and offered me the chance to do likewise. It was pretty unanimous. Nevertheless, my father advised me to stick to my guns, and so I did. I remember a fellow classmate of mine even once asked me, what do you plan on doing after graduation? Well, I'm going to be a forester. I replied, what is that? That, I said, is why I am going to be a forester. Now, at my commencement at Yale, after Mark Twain had delivered a speech about spiders and pulverized lizards fed to medical patients and the not so long ago, I was called upon to speak. There I made to the exalted graduates of Yale my first public statement on the importance of forestry. I have chosen it for my life work, I said. But still I did not know exactly what it was I had chosen. So I went abroad to find out. It was my simple intention to buy a few books and come home, proof enough that I was still lost in the fog. I first went to Paris for special exhibit on waters and forests, and then saw Buffalo Bill, the great American scout who was taking the city by storm. I had been introduced to him years before by General William Sherman, a close friend to my mothers and fathers. As to Buffalo Bill, for him I came to have strong liking and high respect. He remained my friend until he died. Now by good fortune, I managed to arrange for an interview with Sir Dietrich Brandus, founder of forestry in British India. After arriving in Bonn, Germany, I anxiously presented myself before Sir Brandus. He was a tall and formal man who concealed immense kindness behind an old-fashioned manner of great severity. He had made forestry to be where there was none before, something I might hope to have a hand in doing in America. I want to be a forester, but don't know how to go about it, I told him. Well, he asked me many questions, seemed pleased to know that I could chop and plow, and decided that I should go to the French forest school in Nancy. Well, it was almost the luckiest day of my life when Dr. Brandus took charge of my training. Dr. Brandus is splendid, I wrote home. He was more than kind. He was inspiring. As I learned more of forestry, I see more and more the need of it in the United States and the great difficulty of carrying it into effect. I was glad to be going to the French forestry school. It was my grandfather's native land, and I could speak French about as well as English. A year later, when my work at Nancy was done, Dr. Brandus invited me along on his annual field trip into the forests of Germany and Switzerland. He was one of the few great trampers I have known that turned their toes out as they walked. I owe him more than I can ever tell. He taught me that in the long run, forestry cannot succeed unless the people who live in and near the forest are for it and not against it. And when the pinch came, the application of that same truth was what saved the national forests in America. When I got home at the end of 1890, forest destruction was in full swing. Get timbered by Hooker by Crook. That was the rule of the citizen. Get rid of it quick was a rule of the government for the vast Timberlands it still controlled. And forest fires raged unchecked. Now the lumbermen regarded forest devastation as normal and second growth as a delusion of fools whom they cursed on the rare occasions when they happened to think of them. The few friends the forest had were spoken of as impractical theorists or denudetics who were more or less touched in the head. Well, these forward looking men and women were of real use in spreading the doctrine which they called forestry, but which in fact was forest preservation was a very different thing. They hated to see a tree cut down. So do I, and chances are that you do too, but you cannot practice forestry without it. Good forestry also yields streamflow and erosion protection. The purpose of forestry then is to make the forest produce the largest possible amount of whatever crop or service will be most useful and keep on producing it generation after generation. Such were the facts when I came home. Under the circumstances I had to play a lone hand. I could not join the denudetics because they were marching up a blind alley. I could not join the lumbermen because forest destruction was their daily bread. The job was not to stop the axe but to regulate its juice. There was nothing left for me to do but to blaze my own trail. General Sherman wisely advised me to know my country before I started running around and giving it all this wonderful free advice. Well, the chance to do just that soon came along when Dr. Ferno asked me to help him examine some hardwood timber in Arkansas. The Arkansas lumberjacks were tough but willing to talk. I got new light on logging and sign. Now soon after in 1891 I got hired to look over some land holdings in Arizona. Well, that gave me a chance to see the country and come home by way of the Pacific Coast and the Canadian Pacific Railroad. At one point on that trip, while standing for the first time on the rim of the Grand Canyon, awe struck and silent. I strove to grasp the vastness and the beauty of the greatest sight this world has to offer. Meanwhile, my companion, an office boy from the Arizona timber company, stood beside me and kept repeating, ma ain't it purdy? I wanted to throw him in. Now in California, I rode into the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees, the glory and dignity of that sub-pernal forest I shall never forget. And then, the osimity. The osimity falls was worth crossing the continent to sea as the wind waved the falling water back and forth across the face of the great cliff. It left me nearly stunned with amazement and stunned with water too, when like the boy I was, I ran into it and it beat upon me at the end of more than a quarter of a mile fall. It was a great experience. In my first six months back home, I had seen something in the forest in 31 states in Canada and had actually been in the woods in nine of them, not such a bad start, although my apprenticeship was far from ended. Apprentice or not, my new profession attracted attention, as in Kate Fields' syndicated Washington column, where she wrote. It's about time that forestry became a profession and it's infinitely to his credit that young Gifford Pinchel has set an honorable example. I soon had several conferences with George Vanderbilt about putting forestry into practice on his great newest state at Biltmore and in North Carolina. Biltmore House was magnificent. With the terrace and stables, it was a thousand feet in length. But among the one room cabins of the Appalachian mountaineers, it did not belong. The contrast was a devastating commentary on the injustice of concentrated wealth. Even in the early nineties, I had sense enough to see that. Yet here was my chance. Biltmore could be made to prove what America did not yet understand. The trees could be cut and the forest preserved one at the same time. I was eager, confident and happy as a clam at high tide. Also at that time, I met and became very fond of Miss Laurel Holteling of Chicago who was living temporarily near Biltmore. I found her one of the most sincere and intelligent women I had ever met. The best and most refined people in Chicago were her best friends. Habit at Biltmore and everywhere else was to cut out all the young growth that would interfere with cheap logging and leave desolation and fire trapped behind. But we soon found that large trees could be logged with little injury to the young growth and at small added cost. To establish this fact, to which at first no lumberman would admit, was of great importance to forestry in America. To make a long story short, Biltmore forests turned the profit with practical forestry that left a growing forest behind it. Later in December of that year, I opened an office in New York City and put consulting forester on the door. I was kept busy as a bee. Then on February 8th, 1894, my Lady Laura died. Earlier, she had become ill and had been growing steadily weaker. It hit me so hard. Ever since that awful day, I can always feel her presence with me. So I did the only thing I could do and lost myself in my consulting business. Most of this work paid me nothing but experience, but to that extent at least, I was making forestry pay, but forestry would never make me wealthy. My grandfather Eno tried again with a generous proposal to get me to drop it, but I turned it down. No man can make his life what it ought to be by living it merely on a business basis. There are things higher than business. Besides, I didn't need money. I had plenty of it willed to me by my grandfather Pinchot. So having got my wages in advance that way, I was bent on trying to work them out. When our continental expansion was over, the nation owned nearly two billion acres of public domain rich in resources. Eventually, the woodlands were open to the public under a variety of land laws like the Homestead Act of 1862. The purpose of these laws was highly praiseworthy, but fraud enveloped them like a blanket because the general land office under the Department of Interior was dripping with politics to illustrate. One law required a dwelling on a homestead claim. So the claimant would build a toy house. Lumber companies took whole train loads of people on free trips into the Redwood Forest of California, had each claim a parcel of land and then transferred title to the lumber company. The company then paid $2.50 per acre to the local land office, which looked the other way. While millions of acres did go for legitimate purposes, much of the natural resources were transferred to the control of men who developed and destroyed them with only one object in mind, their own personal profit. And while extents and purposes, the government of all the people did nothing about it. Finally, in 1891, a law that formed the basis for our whole national forest system slipped through Congress without question. This rider to a bill authorized the president to set aside forest reserves and President Harrison promptly did so. But the amendment did not allow the practice of forestry on the forest reserves, but merely withdrew and locked them up from every form of use, an impossible situation. So the Western people still took from the reserves what they had to have. Then, five years later, the National Forest Commission was established to study the forest reserves and recommend what to do with them. I was a member. I set out early for the Northern Rockies and took Harry Graves, a former classmate, a friend of mine from Yale, along with me. Harry was the second American after myself to be trained in forestry. Later, we joined the rest of the commission in Montana. To my great delight, John Muir was with him. In his late fifties, tall, thin, cordial, and a most fascinating talker, I took to him at once. It amazed me to learn that he never carried even a fish hook with him on his solitary explorations. He said, fishing wasted too much time. Outside the Sierra Forest reserves, we ran into the gigantically wasteful lumbering of the great sequoias. I resented then and still resent the practice of making vine stakes hardly bigger than walking sticks out of these greatest of all living things. At one point, I spent an unforgettable day alone with John Muir on the rim of the Grand Canyon, letting it soak in. I remember when we came across a tarantula, he wouldn't let me kill it. He said it had as much right there as we did. We spent the night on beds of cedar boughs in a thick stand that kept the wind away. Muir was a storyteller in a million, and we talked until midnight. It was such an evening as I have never had before, or since. I later fell out with Muir. I suppose it was inevitable, since both of us were on fire with a sense of mission. We differed first on sheep grazing. Muir called sheep hoofed locust, and he was right. But I felt we were faced with this simple choice. Shut out all grazing and lose the forest reserves, or let's stock in under control and save the reserves for the nation. But sheep grazing, controlled or not, was detestable to him. Our final clash came over Hetch Hetchie, a then inaccessible valley in Yosemite National Park. I testified at a house hearing. The delight of the few men and women who would yearly go into the Hetch Hetchie Valley should not outweigh the national conservation policy to take every part of the land and its resources and put it to that use in which it will best serve the most people. But Muir did not agree. These temple destroyers and devotees of ravaging commercialism seem to have a perfect contempt for nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the almighty dollar. Damn Hetch Hetchie, as well damn for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man. One of the great mistakes of my life is that I saw the Yosemite Valley only after the Grand Canyon had dulled my sense of wonder. They will see what I meant in time. The initial result of the Forest Commission's work was to prompt President Cleveland to designate 13 more reserves and to influence the passage of the law called the Pettigrew Amendment on June 4th, 1897. The Secretary of the Interior was given charge of the reserves, quote, to regulate their occupancy and use and to preserve the forests therein from destruction. That was the milk in the coconut. It made forest management and forest protection possible, and it is still today the basic law under which the national forests are administered and forestry is practiced upon them. Now the day after the Pettigrew Amendment was passed, I was offered and accepted a job as confidential forest agent at $10 per day plus expenses. I was to examine and report on the Cleveland Forest Reserves outside of California. Well, while doing so, in addition to the enormous damage from fire, one other incident left an impression. I stepped out on the shore of our camp early one morning, and some fool camped across the lake to catch up with his rifle and missed me nearly. Well, he was like other greenhorns in the woods who shoot at a motion or a noise. Well, I rode across and gave him my opinion free of charge. Now, I now knew something about the Western forests on the ground and something about the big men and little men who used or abused them. I also learned to keep my temper and be thankful for half a loaf. Meanwhile, the old division of forestry was going downhill. Cornell University had decided to open a forestry school and Dr. Ferno had accepted their offer to take charge. So somebody had to be found to take his place. The position was offered to me, but I refused on the spot. I wanted to work in the woods instead of an office. But everybody I consulted with said I ought to pitch in and have a try at bringing the government's forest work to life. So did my father. And Harry Graves, who agreed to come with me as assistant chief. Well, nothing could be better than that. So in a week I came to my senses and realized that here was the chance of a lifetime. So in 1898, I became chief of the little old forestry division. Five days after I started, Secretary Wilson gave me the title of forester. Now in Washington, chiefs of division were as thick as leaves on Valum brosus. Foresters were not. The division was in the Department of Agriculture and had all of the 11 people in it, including all the government foresters. The whole two of them, Harry and me. But the government forest reserves still remained under the Department of Interior. Obviously, to bring forests and foresters together was nothing more than common sense. And when they were, I proposed to be the forester in charge. But until then, the government forest reserves still seemed to be out of my reach. Privately owned Timberlands were not, however, which included two thirds of all the forests in America. So I let it be known that the division was prepared to help private landowners harvest their timber with a view to a second crop. This was our major offensive. And the demand for help to practice forestry came back to us with a rush. We slowly began to grow. There also came a momentous change for the better in the attitude of the West toward the forest reserves. And we were all young, eager, proud of the division and fiercely determined that its attack on forest devastation must win. We needed to learn more about trees, their rate of growth, the tolerance of young seedlings for shade and sunlight and all the other necessary, but still unknown facts about forestry. We had to learn that we might practice.  Now in the spring of 99, I gave notice that a limited number of college students who had definitely made up their minds to take up forestry as profession could get $25 a month and expenses in the field and a chance to find out what forestry really meant. Well, we had more applicants than we could use and those student assistants were the wonderer, the natives for the hours they put in and the way they drove themselves. That was the spirit that made the forest service. Later on when the division became a bureau and numbered 179 people, more than half were student assistants and other collaborators. Now it was mainly to help our budding foresters that the Society of American Foresters was formed. The weekly meetings were held at my home and followed by a very moderate feast of baked apples, gingerbread and milk. In such ways the little society was welded together and what was later to become the vital core of the forest service and with the highest morale to be found anywhere in the federal government. But we still needed trained foresters. The College of Forestry at Cornell headed by Dr. Ferna was on its way to closure. What we wanted were American foresters trained by Americans in American ways for the work ahead in American forests. Get me, Harry Graves. Harry, GP. Listen, Harry, the kind of forestry school we need must be established and Yale's the place for it. There's no better school is there. Right, I'll let you know. Bye, Harry. My mother and father agreed to supply the funds. So in the autumn of 1900, the Yale Forest School began. Trained men were so vitally necessary that I was willing to let Graves go and become the first dean of the school. Later on, a summer session for first year students was opened at Gray Towers. My parents' beautiful home in Milford. My father built Forest Hall in the village, a stone office near our home, a mess hall, and numerous wooden buildings. Also, wherever and whenever I could, I gave lectures and published articles. Far more important, however, was the good understanding the division was establishing with the newspapers. Forestry was beginning to be news. But the most important thing about all was that our work in the woods was proving out. Now, I still wish desperately to get all the government's forest work together in one place. Unquestionably, we were succeeding. The new division was forcing people to think. And there is no better way to make enemies. Controversies became as common as hin's eggs. But we raised up friends as fast as foes. We were on our way.  Believe it or not, the division in charge ordered one supervisor to buy a rake for himself and another for his ranger and rake up the dead wood on the Washington Forest Reserves, a front yard of a mere three and a half million acres. Some job. Appointees ranged from run-down relatives of land office commissioners to political appointees who had mostly never seen a Western Forest Reserve. Their quality often fell somewhere between incompetent but better than average to no good. Some were even crooks and blackmailers. Another man made the Forest Reserves a sort of health retreat, recommending the appointment of numerous invalids who had gone to Santa Fe to recover. Good men were scarce, not only because of politics, but also because a ranger had to furnish his own horse and feed himself on the magnificent salary of $60 a month. My and lords, the Interior Department's field force on the Forest Reserves aroused strong opposition to the whole reserve system. On September 14, 1901, President McKinley died, shot by an assassin, and Theodore Roosevelt became president. He are, in his first message to Congress, wisely asserted. The fundamental idea of forestry is the perpetration of forests by use. Forest protection is not an end in itself. It is a means to increase and sustain the resources of our country and the industries which depend on them. The Forest Reserves will inevitably be of still greater use in the future than in the past. Additions should be made to them whenever practicable. Then came the heart and soul of the mess. These various functions should be united in the Bureau of Forestry to which they properly belong. The present diffusion of responsibility is bad from every standpoint. Now, soon after TR became president, he began sending me recommendations for forest reserve boundaries. Had the country been under a different kind of president than Theodore Roosevelt, the area of national forests would have been far less than it is today. And so it would had our boundary men been less determined. On horseback or on foot, the boundary men went where the work led them. And they moved fast, for they were up against as competent a body of land thieves as ere the sun shone on. In those early days, moreover, the forest reserves were not popular, and settlers held indignation meetings. But even so, as a result of the boundary men's work, the area within the forest reserve boundaries tripled. What finally drove the forest reserve transfer through was the American Forest Congress held in Washington in 1905. Nearly every speaker made clear his support in the Bureau. The change in the attitude of the lumber industry was summed up by F.E. Warehauser. Practical forestry ought to be of more interest and importance to lumbermen than to any other class of men. And so it linked. In 1905, the reserves were transferred to the Department of Agriculture. One month later, the Bureau of Forestry was changed to the Forest Service. No one was more pleased than I. Before the forest reserves came into our hands, all we could say was please. Now we could say, do this and don't do that. We had the power and we had the duty to protect the reserves for the use of the people. Now the guide and charter of the new policy was a letter written by me for the Secretary of Agriculture's signature. In the administration of the forest reserves, it must be clearly borne in mind that all land is to be devoted to its most productive use for the permanent good of the whole people and not for the temporary benefit of individuals or companies. The continued prosperity of the agricultural, lumbering, mining and livestock interests is directly dependent upon a permanent and accessible supply of water, wood and forage. In the management of each reserve, local questions will be decided upon local grounds, and where conflicting interests must be reconciled, the question will always be decided from the standpoint of the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run. This letter has since set the standard for the service, and it is still being quoted as the essence of forest service policy. Our first job after the transfer was to handle the forest reserves wisely and well. From the start, authority was delegated to the field, and high standards were enforced by inspection. Because of these changes, public approval of forest reserve policy strengthened from day to day. On July 1st, 1905, a booklet of regulations to govern the forest reserves was in the hands of our fieldmen. Dubbed the use book, it contained less than 100 pages. Those it regulated called it the what's the use book. A ranger could carry it in his back pocket. Its size, however, was no indication whatever the punch it carried. The use book was prefaced by a statement. Quote, to the public, the resources of the forest reserves are for the use of the people. Forest officers have three chief duties. To protect the reserves against fire, to assist the people in their use, and to see that they are properly used. Forest officers are therefore servants of the people. The object should be to prevent mistakes rather than to have to punish them. Information should be given tactfully by advice and not by offensive warnings. The successor failure of forest reserve policy was almost entirely in the hands of the supervisor and his rangers, where it properly belonged. It was radical, but it was right, and it worked. Now the use book required that every applicant for a ranger job, quote, must be, first of all, thoroughly sound and able-bodied, capable of enduring hardships and of performing severe labor under trying conditions. You must know something of surveying, estimating the scaling timber, lumbering and the livestock business. Invalids seeking light out-of-door employment need not apply. That was a slap at the land office, if you like, and certainly, it was well deserved. I remember one ranger examination conducted in Montana. It required the candidate to prove by doing that he could run compass line, chop, pack a horse and find his way by day or night. It also included two other highly practical tests. The first was cook-a-meal and the second, eat it. Now, if a ranger didn't measure up to an assignment, I told him so, as in this letter to a man, I was forced to remove. You have shown your complete inability to get on with the Western people, have absolutely not recognized your position as a tenderfoot and have behaved in a dictatorial and overbearing manner. The chief driving force, which made the service the best organization under the government, was not the desire to earn good money, but the urge to do good work and a good cause. Unfortunately, it was that our morale was high, for we had to meet more kinds of opposition than any government bureau had yet to meet. The Forest Service stood up for the honest small man and fought the predatory big man. At that time, big money control in the West was more raw, more violent, and more effective than anything the East could show. Killings were still common in a land where, outside the towns, every man packed a gun. When you saw a stranger coming down the trail, it was still the habit to take off your glove. Therefore, concentrated wealth, the great mining livestock lumber and railroad outfits used force more in the West than in the East and cunning less. Western bad men were just as easy to buy as crooks back East and politicians even more so. Big money was king in the great open spaces and make no mistake. But in the national forests, big money was not king. Every member of the Forest Service knew that the president was with us. Everyone knew that neither money nor political influence could dictate to the Forest Service or secure or endanger his advancement or his job. On one of my trips to the woods early in 1899, I became better acquainted with Theodore Roosevelt. TR was then governor of New York and while stopping off the executive mansion, TR and I did little wrestling, at which he beat me and some boxing, during which I had the honor of knocking the future president of the United States off his very solid pins. With all due respect, Governor. As I've said many times, Pinchot, it was only because of those long arms of yours. A miserable excuse. Now, as president, TR loved to go on walks and rides. It was TR's delight to try and get away from his two secret servicemen. Well, after my responsibility came home to me, I carried a gun as a regular thing. Thank heaven, I never had to use it. When I could, I loved to sit in the cabinet room watching TR deal with problems and people. In the early days, before they got to know him, a senator or congressman would take him into the embrasure of a window and whisper in his ear. Well, TR would listen a moment and then his voice would ring out. Why, Senator, you know I can't appoint so-and-so to such-and-such a place. You know just as well as I do that he isn't fit for the job. You could just see the job hunter shrivel up. Once, when TR and an ambassador were about to swim the Potomac in the... all together, TR observed that the ambassador was wearing gloves. Why do you wear gloves, inquired the president. Oh, replied the ambassador. We might meet ladies. This was one of TR's favorite stories. The fight for conservation continued throughout TR's term, especially against the water power interests and monopolies who were trying to grab the best water power sites they could. Here, monopoly was an extreme danger to the consuming public. As the end of TR's presidency drew close, the end of the water power fight was by no means in sight. Our monopolies, while less dangerous than they once were, nevertheless are with us still. Theodore Roosevelt would leave office on March 4, 1909 with the TR policies on conservation, flourish or decay, survive or perish. That must depend on the man who came after him. But whatever risk to my modesty and however little I may have deserved it, I cannot refrain from reading to you a letter written by TR two days before he left the White House. Dear Gifford, I have written you about others. I have written you about many public matters. Now, just a line about yourself. As long as I live, I feel for you a mixture of respect and admiration and of affectionate regard. I am a better man for having known you. I feel that to have been with you will make my children better men and women in afterlife. And I cannot think of a man in the country whose loss would be a more real misfortune to the nation than yours would be. For seven and a half years we have worked together and now and then played together and have been all together better able to work because we have played. And I owe to you a particular debt of obligation as part of the achievement of this administration. With love to your dear mother, I am ever faithfully your friend, Theodore Roosevelt. With TR gone, Washington was a dead town. In his place came a man whose fundamental desire was to keep out of trouble. Taft's desertion of the conservation policies, his general swing to the right, and the fundamental causes for his break with TR. America was progressive minded. Well, I did not break with the president because I wanted to, but because as one of the originators of the conservation policy, it was obviously my duty to make the fight for its protection. Taft's conduct against conservation continued to mount. My rift with him came to a head when I, with others, as Secretary of the Interior, as being in on a scheme to turn some rich coal lands in Alaska back into the hands of private profiteers. This blew into a monumental controversy and brought conservation back into the public eye. So, this evening, a messenger from the White House handed me an envelope from the president. By your own conduct, your usefulness is a helpful subordinate to the government, and it therefore now becomes my duty to remove you from your office as the Forester. I walked upstairs and waved the letter to my mother who answered with one word, ra. Tomorrow I am going down to the Forest Service Office to say goodbye. It would be foolish to deny I am sorry, very deeply sorry, to be cut off from the service in which and the people with whom I expected to spend my life. But it would be just as wide of the mark to say that I have repented in the slightest degree what I have done. I have taken the only course I could have taken, and the results are worth it. I plan to tell my colleagues the following. I want every man to stay in the service. I do not want any of you to do anything whatever that will let this service fall or even droop from the high standard that we have built up for it together.  You are serving the people of the United States. Conservation is my life work. In the government service, they're out of it. And this is the most important piece of conservation work there is. Go ahead with it. Exactly as if I were here. Gifford Pinchot was fired as Chief of the Forest Service by President William Howard Taft in 1910. Yet he remained a central figure in politics. The public outcry over Pinchot's firing helped to end Taft's resistance to conservation. Pinchot's close friend, Harry Graves, was appointed as the second Chief of the Forest Service. In 1914, Pinchot married Cornelia Bryce. She was a dynamic and politically astute woman. Her influence broadened Pinchot's progressive platform and aided his successful campaign for Governor of Pennsylvania. She was a tireless fighter for the rights of women, children and workers. Pennsylvania's First Lady does strike duty. Mrs. Pinchot, the governor's wife, marches at the head of New York workers protesting low wages and sweatshop conditions. And she means business. I'm against the sweatshops first, last and all the time. And I won't rest until the last sweatshop is driven out of America. During his two terms as governor, Pinchot continued his fight for natural resources and also for the rights of all human beings. But the American people want his action and the president has been giving us action. More action than we've had in many months. That is the most hopeful thing in the whole situation. Child labor nears its end. Governor Pinchot in a New York hospital adds Pennsylvania to the states ratifying the new federal amendment. My signature to this document personally adds the commonwealth of Pennsylvania as the 20th state to ratify the Child Labor Amendment to the federal constitution. To me personally, this day means a lot. My boy is 18-year-old today and my wife has done such great work in the cause against the sweatshop. Pennsylvania, the state that has the largest number of children working in the factories, is glad and proud to cast the 20th vote to free the children of America from the curse of child labor. Gifford and Cornelia Pinchot had a son and lived for many happy years at the Pinchot family estate, Gray Towers. In 1946, Gifford Pinchot died at the age of 81. One year later, his autobiography Breaking New Ground was published. In the final chapter, he wrote, his own policy has three great purposes. First, to wisely use and renew the natural resources of the earth. Second, to control natural resources and their products in the common interest. Third, to see to it that the rights of the people shall not be controlled by great monopolies through their power over natural resources. The devices by which concentrated wealth controls men and resources are many, complicated and devious. Rule over man by the dollar must end. It is time for America and the world to move on from a social order in which unregulated profit is the driving force. I hope and believe the new order will be based on cooperation instead of monopoly, on sharing instead of grasping. I believe in free enterprise, freedom for the common man to think and work and rise to the limit of visibility with due regard to the rights of others. But in what concentrated wealth means by free enterprise, freedom to use and abuse the common man I do not believe. The rightful use and purpose of our natural resources is to make all the people strong and well, full of knowledge and initiative with equal opportunity for all and special privilege for none.


Hey, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP BuzzChat interview, and I'm talking today with Dara. Hello. Hi, Christian. How are you doing? It's evening over here. I'm sure you're doing fine. It should be afternoon over there. Yeah, it is just after lunch, though I've not, it's like the, you know, forgot that it was time to eat. So I've got another call behind this as it happens of my late afternoon first meal of the day. Yeah. I guess when you're doing something you love, you just forget to it. Yes. It's, and then usually if there's not the stomach pangs or something to, to notice, it's like having notifications. I'm focused. I'm working. If there's not the notifications coming in, I get the body notification. Yeah.  Yeah, sure thing. I'm Dara. I'm a programmer, DevOps dude, well, that's what I call myself. I don't call myself a DevOps engineer. I just love DevOps, but mainly I tag myself as a programmer. Someone who just likes to write code to solve problems. I currently work at Kiwi Limited in the UK as a principal tech learning specialist. Well, that's a mouthful. What that means is that I train people every day on how to write code, how to do DevOps. I'm mainly responsible for creating learning pathways and teaching them to people who just come into the IT industry, fresh from universities, and also doing some specialized courses for trainees coming from different organizations like that. So I mainly teach C-Sharp, ASP.NET, Azure, and DevOps from day to day. Outside of work, I enjoy music, movies, and spending time with family. I'm fun fact, I'm also a saxophonist, so I do that from time to time. Very cool. So where are you in the UK? I'm based in London. Oh, you're in London? Yes. Yeah, it's a love getting over there. It's been two years since I've been able to travel. Well, actually, yeah, it was December of 2019. I was in London. That's about two years plus-ish. Yeah, I'd love to explore the area. So well, so I know that so you're a developer. Technology is MVP. How long have you had your MVP? This is my first MVP award. The reason for that probably maybe because I was at Microsoft until November last year. Ah. Yes, I was at Microsoft, well, in times of timeline, about five years, but living in between here and there. But I left Microsoft November 2020 then months after became an MVP. You know, it's funny. It used to be that you had to be away from Microsoft for a full year before you could even be considered. And but it's not true. I mean, obviously you earned your MVP and I know a couple others that have done the exact same thing. Good friend Ragnar Heil, for example, same thing. It was like within a month, month and a half and he earned his MVP because he had been so prolific in doing community activities, which were not part of his day job. Yeah. Part of his job description. I think what matters most is even after outside of being there's day jobs, just do something that you love outside of work, help people out there. And I think that is what mainly counts generally for me as just just having fun with tech. Right. Well, there's it. Well, that's that's the whole thing too is in and so people understand too, you know, there are plenty of companies, my company, I'm sure your company that are very supportive of like the community activities, but writing for my company blog, like it doesn't count towards that. For MVP, the things that you do are the things that you do above and beyond what you do in your job. Yeah, exactly. So it's yeah, so very cool. So another question for you. So this, some folks might not be aware that Microsoft just talked about maybe just shared it internally that they're actually creating a new focus area specifically around DevOps and GitHub. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's actually showed up. I was doing my contributions few days ago. So part of the contribution areas were DevOps was GitHub. And I think that's one thing I coincidentally, it's one of the things I plan to focus on the next couple of weeks with a friend to actually make some videos doing Kubernetes Docker and Docker Compose and all those kind of funny stuff with DevOps. So I think it's came at the right time. It's funny. It's like I for, you know, about a third of my career. So but many years ago, I was involved in co-authored three books on software configuration management. I was in, I don't know if you remember, rational software. And so Clearcase wrote a book for Clearcase yet IBM bought them. So it's a different platform and everything around that. But we never call it, you know, DevOps is so much of what I did in the IT world in support of engineering organizations would now be slated as DevOps systems in support of engineering. And, and, you know, so that's where your SCM or software configuration management is all around that code management and that kind of, I actually found my way into collaboration technology through that path, through kind of a demo. So you know, interesting space. So what kind of things are you writing about actively talking about? And here's a bunch of videos as well to point out. Yes. I mainly focus on doing videos because, because I'm a visual learner, I try to use my style to teach others also because I realize most folks that I speak to, they love watching the videos. It's good to write a blog, but someone will probably not sit down and read about 50 pages on how to do DevOps, but they would watch a one hour video and how to do that. So I prefer to do a video rather than write on it. Yes. When I make the video, I write a short blog post on it and share with you, put the video embedded right there so you can watch it right from the website.  But mainly I focus on videos. I do two videos every week, one on Tuesdays, focusing on things like programming, Azure, program with Azure, program with DevOps in mind and all that. And on Saturdays, I call it one tech minute, where I just try to share a tech topic within one minute, define it, tell people about it, and we have to go get something. That's hard to do. To do a one minute video, so I know me that trying to do something that's short like that, it takes me as long or longer with the edits and trying to compose it all down there. To do the one minute video, then it would be just to do a 20 minute. Yeah. In 20 minutes you can talk all you like, but in one minute you know you have to be precise, add on point. And one thing I say, and one reason I actually started those one minute series was when I go for some charts, I tell myself, if you cannot explain the tech in one minute at an eye level, it's probably to add a tech. It's probably not what I'm talking about. So I should be able to tell you in one minute and convince you to be able to know more about the tech. And I was like, okay, this is a challenge I want to take on. Then I started it and then for about seven weeks now, I've been on it. Yeah, that's great. And so I know, so you've been, I mean, you have a lot of videos that are out there, a variety of topics. So, so what kind of got you started in doing the videos? I will, I'll probably say it's been an age-long dream. I think I got to start it in tech for officially six each years ago, unofficially maybe about 10, there about years ago when I was still a young boy. But I think one thing that got me started making those kind of videos was because the access I had to technology was a privilege. I grew up in Nigeria. Well, arguably I call it a village where there's not so much in my hand. I asked to go to cyber cafes to actually download stuff to read. I wasn't even quoting them. You just be able to know about the world. I will go with this three and a half, three-quarter inch floppy diskettes and then go to the cyber cafe, download some Wikipedia pages, go on, read about them. The next day go to the cyber cafe and come back. So I was like, okay, this is where I came from. There's a lot of kids who probably think all about complex sciences, fixing motorbots and then assembling stuff. Can I just interrupt you just point out like your experience in talking about like that, you know, the what you had to go through with older technology stuff like, like I'm a little bit older. Like that was my expert. That was like that was for the majority of the technology experience. And I mean, as a Gen Xer and coming up like through that is Atari and having an Apple 2e and then a Mac and kind of going into technology. I started my career in 1990, you know, with seeing it. So carrying around floppies like that was just part of life. That was part of I know we're much more advanced now. But I just want to point that out that that experience was similar to what a lot of us that have come up through this technology being developed. That's interesting because that tech came over to my region where probably after I was born and then I was like, okay, then I was like, okay, I think the kind of access I have is not what I want to do. So well, internet was getting more penetration and people were starting to have smarter devices. I can remember I think I had a Sajem phone back then. But I realized, okay, if I make it in this tech, I want to let others know about it. Mainly people from the grassroots. So I make videos specifically targeted towards them because what I realized is, yes, I could listen to all these videos from people like Scott Hanselman back then, Scott Godfrey used to make videos, Phil Arc, all those kind of guys. I listened to them. I understood what they talked about. But if I tell my friends about the black, meh. So what I try to do was get the stuff translated and digest and then share that knowledge with my kind of audiences. So that was pretty much what got me started. And then I think I've made my first tech video in 2015. I was on the internet, Microsoft. I made some videos on China. Well, I'm not so proud of those videos now. If I look at them, but I know there's a point between them and now. And I think I've seen the impacts because a lot of people just message me and say that I saw your video about getting started with C sharp. I like it. I like to get an internship. Can you guide me this kind of things? I just want me going making such kind of video. So I mainly focus on making beginner level stuff. Of course, I can teach advanced stuff if I want to. But my course is teaching beginners to get started to come into the lights so that they can make their own lives better by doing the tech that I do. Well, that's it. It's a great space. And I mean, I mean, obviously you have a much broader audience of brand new people into the technology arena versus those that are looking for the more focused and a lot of the people that once they get past a certain point, they're more self directed. They know where to go for the information. They can take advantage of a lot of the other like the Microsoft resources for training with that. But for that, the broad user base, it really is up to the community to develop a lot of that content. One thing I would just point out, like, are you going back? Are you removing those old videos? Are you leaving it all in place? I live the videos there. Well, I'm not so proud of them, but hey, it shows growth. Exactly, right? So I've had this argument with some people like, so I've been blogging on the same site since 2002. And I have gone through and because it does impact your performance and SEO to have all this old content if there's no traffic. And I've gone through and I've removed, like if I do a blog post where I'm talking about doing a conference in a week and coming up, I'll remove those, which there's no value. But an article that's written or I will walk through where I explain a piece of technology, I'm leaving it there because it's part of the history. It's having the archives, having that path. And same thing with video. I think it's important to leave that history out there. Yeah, definitely. One thing I learned also is as I improve on myself in making these videos, I like to go up and just say, oh, that is a good job. Put myself on the back. And then also, if someone comes and tells me that I want to start making videos, I only have a phone and a very crappy laptop. I'll tell you, go watch my videos from six years back. My audio was terrible. Terrible is an understatement. I was like, I'm telling you before we started recording is like, I was using one of those, what was it? A little flip phone. The camcorders. Not even a flip phone, it's just a flip camera.  And I would do that stuff on the road and I'd just turn it around and interview myself or interview people. The microphone was on the opposite side. So it was great if I was filming you and narrating it, but if I flipped it around, then I'd sound like I was off in the distance. So the sound was terrible, usually. Yeah. But, hey, you have to start somewhere and capture the conversation. Definitely, definitely. And now I make videos, I do podcasts, I do lots of stuff. I even get to review microphones now. So I get lots of toys. I got mics here. I got some in the box over there. It's just fun now. For those that haven't seen like on your site and stuff, there's some pictures, and I think you had on Instagram, like a picture of your studio, your setup there. You know, and I know a lot of people are really good about that. I think that they're just a suggestion. There should be more sharing, more content about how to set up like your rig, like your setup. For there's a lot of people like, I do a tremendous amount of videos, but I do it one way. I want to improve the quality of the things that I go and do. But I just haven't made the time to go and research and figure the stuff out. And I would be much better. Like if you had a video that walked through, here's my setup, I'm gonna walk you through each of the pieces and why, like I would watch that video. Okay. Okay. I made an old one that was way back in Nigeria, but of course, because it's improved, I need to make an updated version of it. But of course, now that you remind me, I'll definitely make one just because of you. Awesome. Yeah. Let me know when that's live. Because I want that. Well, other stuff. So here we are at the beginning of Microsoft's fiscal year. And so they've got like the announcements and things that are out there. And of course we've got Ignite that's happening later in the year. So what's the stuff that you're excited about that you're most passionate about? What's coming up? Obviously be aware of NDAs are in place. Definitely. Definitely. Your point you're talking about, yeah. I ain't gonna talk about it if I'm public. Right. Yeah, I think the thing I'm most excited for, even though I've not gotten my hands on it yet, is get up cool pilots. That A.I. direct code for you. I don't see how cool it is. Code species is another thing I really wanna see. I've been to just think of not having a super powerful computer. And then just having to write that code on the cloud. Windows 365, I think I'm gonna love it because my machine is crying for a change and I don't wanna change it. So I can have a powerful machine in the cloud, maybe take two gigabytes of RAM, one terabyte of drive, just sitting there. I can remote from literally any device. I'm excited for that. I think those three, then of course, GitHub Actions is one thing I'm really excited about. I've been learning about it and making some practice with it. In coming weeks, I'll probably make some videos or blog posts about it. But I'm enjoying it right now. I'm little by little moving it from Azure DevOps, kind of, I'm moving to the GitHub Actions because I think that is where the focus is going. I might be wrong, but it's fun to learn anyways. And having that kind of mix in between the old Azure DevOps and the new GitHub Action, I think it's fun for me. And of course, co-pilot, I wanna see that. I wanna actually put my hands on it and actually write code with it. Yeah, pretty much Windows 365, Windows 11 is actually more fun to work with. I actually based the bullet and installed it on all my machines. Oh, wow. All of it. Yes. Problems or has it been? No problems. It's been smooth and on points. I use it for my actually, because my work machine is a personal build each kind of machine. So I actually installed on my work machine too. No issues whatsoever. All my work apps do fine. If there is any issue, I create a VM in the cloud and I remote into it and then life is back to normal. That's the worst that could happen. That's, you know, I have, so I also worked at Microsoft. I was there for three and a half years and I'm back in the, when I was, you know, we were required to dog food and I had a lot of customer facing meetings all the time. It constantly broke things. I couldn't get into meetings that I was the host of and just a lot of different problems with that. And I've always been, I like being out ahead, trying things out, but for my production system, you know, I'm always a little wary. I'm like one phase behind that. I pay attention to those blog posts that compare, you know, and talk about gaps and iterations. I've read a couple of two, two articles, two blog posts that try to do a comparison. Hey, here's what you lose by, with the stage that Windows 11 isn't like, it really wasn't much of a difference though. Yeah, because mainly the tools I use, I probably never ever see some of the stuff they complain about cause my tools are just my tools. I probably never see the stack menu more than twice a day. Yeah, it's an awesome stack menu. Don't get me wrong, I don't say it, I do my Windows R, type in my command, boom, off I go. And then I'm up every day. So, and I think for me, being a developer, I want to actually be there to give the feedback to Microsoft. I want to be part of it, but I make Windows better for me. Right. I'm not doing it because, not because I like Microsoft, but because I want to make Windows better for me. That is why I'm using it. The logs have been sent to Microsoft. Even if I don't give the feedback to get the logs anyways, because I opted in for that diagnostic data. And even though I was a Microsoft, I dug for the logs because since Windows 10, no, Windows 8 10 car preview was the time I set the dog food in Windows.  I would ping the DX guy then, she know, I'd be like, hey, my Windows is not working. It was my only laptop, the only thing I had in the entire world. And I was still install that stuff on it. And I think for me, it was just fun. I don't mind breaking stuff. What's that call upon restore Windows? Well, again, that's one of the things as an MVP. I mean, being able to go and find things that are broken. If there's a workaround, or if there's not a workaround and to talk about that stuff, it's providing the feedback back to Microsoft, of course. But it's also providing that feedback, that guidance on how I worked around that problem for the community as well. And to talk through that stuff. So, well, very cool. Well, listen, I really appreciate your time getting to know you. And yeah, we'll definitely have to talk. And let me know when that blog post goes over the video. If it goes live, I'll be watching that for sure. But folks that want to be able to follow you or get in touch with you, what are the best ways to reach you? I am there a lot of people on social media. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, where else? TikTok, yeah, I'm on TikTok. YouTube. Are you doing videos on TikTok? Is that? I do tech. Sometimes I just do a random, nice video. But mainly I just post on TikTok. I think there's an opportunity to work in whatever the latest dance move is with tech. So somehow, you know. Yeah, those dance things I do with my wife on all of our accounts. And then we just have a bit of fun moving the body. Well, hey, it was great getting to know you. And we'll connect soon. Definitely.


Ken, you want to go next? Thanks. Hi, my name is Ken Chenus. I'm a chief architect at ACI Worldwide. ACI Worldwide is the payments company. You may not have heard of them, but there's a good chance each of you used them today when you checked into your hotel. We process payments and banking for over 5,000 financial institutions, merchants, intermediaries, and billers worldwide. We do about $14 trillion a day in payments through our software, so it's a pretty extensive environment. So I'm here to talk to you a little bit about real-time payments analytics and real-time fraud detection that we were able to achieve on the OpenShift platform. So first I just wanted to talk a little bit about ACI's universal payments platform Because we support so many different types of financial modes of moving payments from point A to point B, we have a wide variety of software applications. Those applications cover a plethora of areas, including retail payments, merchant payments, bill payments, and so forth, so like when you pay your charge card, you're probably going through ACI's bill pay service, or when you charge something you could be using a retail payment authorization service that we run, or when you use an ATM machine, you're probably going through ACI rails to get money out of the machine. So we do all of that. And what's really key to us is fraud detection and payments intelligence. So everything that runs in our cloud environment goes through a centralized universal payments platform which is hosted in the ACI cloud, it's a private cloud that's geo-distributed in multiple data centers across the world. And so we have these challenges that we have to deal with, and one of the biggest ones is payment latency. When you process a payment, there's very little amount of time to make decisions on what to do with that payment. And during that decision making time, that's when we have to make the determination as to whether or not it's a fraudulent transaction or a good transaction, and what other payment intelligence we want to tag on to that payment. So a little bit about how we do this, there's a tremendous amount of data science that goes on behind the scenes, but ultimately we have to make real-time decisions because from the time the payment comes in to the time the payment goes out, we only have about 80 milliseconds to figure out what we want to do with it. And so for those of you that are working in microservice land or working with services in general, hopefully you'll recognize 80 milliseconds is not a tremendous amount of time to do everything that you'd have to do with this. So we start off with machine learning and data science working on data in a big data repository on a Hadoop cluster, and what ultimately comes out of that is features, rules, and models. Those features, rules, and models are what we apply real-time to each transaction that's flowing through the system. So in parallel of sending the data to the historic repository so that we continue to do continuous machine learning on it, we send it to a real-time decision engine where we apply the features and the rules and models in real-time and we make a decision on what to do with the payment. We had some challenges with early versions of this product as our payments started to increase in volume and fraud detection started to increase with complexity. And so as we set out to design a next-generation platform for payments, analytics, and fraud detection, we actually looked to containerization as a vehicle to achieve some of our non-functional requirements around performance, scalability, and latency. And so we moved to a microservice architecture and we broke the solution up into small microservices that we were able to then dockerize and deploy on OpenShift. And this gives us a tremendous amount of power because we can scale the environment up and down as the needs be and we have a very low latency between the microservices within the platform. We moved from a relational database model to a Cassandra cluster model so we're using a Cassandra cluster for our persistence layer and of course we still are using our Hadoop cluster for all of our machine learning. We used a lot of open source technologies and then expanded them to meet the ACI's non-functional requirements. We are very stringent about security and we're very stringent about ensuring that a payment gets from point A to point B without getting lost and we have about a 40-year history where we've never lost a financial transaction and that means a lot to ACI. So here you can see our transactions come in through our universal payments platform. It's kind of like a universal adapter. Then they go into our event receiver. Everything's defined through metadata so as the data evolves we can just do configuration changes into the environment and it automatically updates. We never have to experience any downtime in the environment because we can roll service updates throughout the environment simply by deploying new containers. A little bit about the real-time analytics and our performance characteristics. We come into an exec. The exec runs into a microservice which is running a complex event processor. We can spin up any number of these. During Black Friday weekend we'd probably have six or seven of these running in parallel. We execute our models the same way. We'll have multiple model executors running in parallel. We'll go to the Cassandra data store to retrieve all of the feature information and then we make a decision and we rode through the Black Friday weekend which is basically Black Friday and Cyber Monday and maintained a 30 millisecond latency time for all of our decision making. So we were pretty proud to hit that metric on the OpenShift platform. What we'd like to do in a future direction is really where we originally intended to be which was running our Cassandra cluster also on OpenShift and running our Hadoop infrastructure on OpenShift. We've encountered some challenges and we're working with the vendors. We're working with Hortonworks and Datastacks and Red Hat to try to tie these platforms together so that we can maintain the low latency and the same scalability and flexibility that we have within the container platform to what we have outside the container platform. So that's where we're hoping to get to with the environment. So I'll pass it on.