Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies | |
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Established | 1900 |
Parent institution | Yale University |
Location | New Haven, Connecticut, United States41°19′01″N 72°55′25″W / 41.31694°N 72.92361°WCoordinates: 41°19′01″N 72°55′25″W / 41.31694°N 72.92361°W |
Dean | Indy Burke |
Academic staff | 47 |
Postgraduates | 280 |
Doctoral students | 75 |
Website | environment |
The Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) is a professional school of Yale University. It was founded to train foresters, and now trains environmental leaders through four 2-year degree programs (Master of Environmental Management, Master of Environmental Science, Master of Forestry, and Master of Forest Science) and two 10-month mid-career programs. F&ES strives to creates new knowledge that will sustain and restore the health of the biosphere and emphasizes the possibility of creating a regenerative coexistence between humans and non-human life and the rest of the natural world. Still offering forestry instruction, the school has the oldest graduate forestry program in the United States.
The school was founded in 1900 as the Yale Forest School, to provide high-level forestry training suited to American conditions. At the urging of Yale alumnus Gifford Pinchot, his parents endowed the two-year postgraduate program. At the time Pinchot was serving as Bernhard Fernow's successor as Chief of the Division of Forestry (predecessor of the U.S. Forest Service, USFS). Pinchot released two foresters from the division to start the school: fellow Yale graduate Henry Solon Graves and James Toumey. Graves became the School's first dean and Toumey its second.
When the school opened, other places in the United States offered forestry training, but none had a post-graduate program. (Both Pinchot and Graves had gone to Europe to study forestry after graduating from Yale.)) In the fall of 1900, the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell had 24 students, Biltmore Forest School 9, and Yale 7. Despite its small size, from its beginnings the school influenced American forestry. The first two chiefs of the USFS were Pinchot and Graves; the next three were graduates from the school's first decade. Wilderness and land conservation advocate Aldo Leopold graduated in the class of 1908.