America’s Forests at 250: A Story Still Being Written
As Americans celebrate the 4th of July across the United States, many of us turn to our forests and wild places. We camp, hike, fish, play in mountain lakes, and explore the nation’s public lands. This year we mark the 250th anniversary of American independence, with special celebrations and campaigns honoring both our history and our present. In that spirit, Women’s Forest Congress looks at 250 years of America’s forests: where we’ve been, where we stand, and what we’re working toward together.
America’s forests are easy to overlook and hard to overstate. Roughly 765 million acres of woodland, approximately one third of the United States, are woven through the history of this country. They are the source of the timber that built its cities, the watersheds that supply more than half of its drinking water, the carbon sinks that offset a meaningful share of its annual emissions, and the landscapes that have shaped American culture, identity, and economy for as long as people have lived here.
The First Forest Stewards
The forests that America celebrates this summer predate the nation by millennia. For thousands of years before European settlement, they were actively managed by hundreds of Indigenous nations whose land stewardship practices shaped the ecological character of the continent. Cultural burning, selective harvest, seed cultivation, and landscape-scale management were not primitive practices. Rather, they were sophisticated, place-based systems of ecological knowledge developed and refined across generations, producing the forest landscapes that settlers encountered and that ecologists are still working to understand.
Tribal nations manage millions of acres of forest land across the country today. They bring traditional ecological knowledge to real, present-day challenges: wildfire management, watershed protection, biodiversity conservation. Federal co-management agreements are expanding, and Indigenous-led conservation efforts and commercial forest operations are growing. The broader forestry community is starting to recognize what it has to learn from the stewards who were here first.
WFC has seen this firsthand. In 2025, WFC partnered with the Intertribal Timber Council to co-host Advancing Women’s Leadership in Forestry and Fire Management: A Tribal Perspective. The event grew out of Canopy & Ember, a network founded by Nicole Stiffarm and Dr. Serra Hoagland to support Indigenous women in forestry and wildland fire. We were proud to help create space for that conversation.
This work goes well beyond conservation in the way that word usually gets used. Federal trust lands alone cover approximately 19.2 million acres of tribal forest across 33 states. That figure doesn’t capture the full picture. Alaska Native corporations manage millions of additional acres of forested land under fee title granted through the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, and many tribes hold fee simple lands outside the trust system as well. Tribes manage working forests, run timber harvest operations, and build forest-based economies for their communities, alongside their work on habitat, water, and fire. The scale of that stewardship is larger than most people in the broader forest community realize.
This is part of the story we want to help tell this year. Long before the nation existed, and all through the 250 years since, these forests have been tended by many hands and many traditions. We’re grateful for that history, and we see real promise in what it can mean for the next 250 years.
How America Learned to Tend Its Forests
The original forest cover of what would become the continental United States is estimated at 950 million acres, comprising a landscape of almost unbroken canopy from the Atlantic Coast to the Great Plains, and again in the mountain ranges and coastal zones of the West. The first century of the new republic was, in large part, a century of clearing. Forests were felled for agriculture, for charcoal and fuel, for the timber that built homes and ships and railways, and for the simple reason that settlers understood the continent’s forest wealth to be effectively inexhaustible. By the late 19th century, the evidence that it was not had become impossible to ignore.
The conservation response that followed was defining for the nation and its forests. Early forestry conservation organizations began to emerge, such as the American Forestry Association, now American Forests, in 1875. In 1891, the Forest Reserve Act empowered the president to set aside public reservations, initiating what would become the National Forest System. The U.S. Forest Service was established in 1905 under Gifford Pinchot, and Theodore Roosevelt expanded the National Forest System from 40 million to more than 200 million acres. These moments were a cultural shift, a society beginning to understand that its forests required active stewardship rather than passive extraction.
Working Forests, Working America
America’s working forests have been at the center of the nation’s economic life since its earliest days. Private owners hold 70% of US working forests, and the products those forests have generated — the lumber, paper, pulp, and fiber that supplied a growing nation — built regional economies and supplied American households for generations. The industry also drove significant innovation along the way. Intensive plantation management and improved seedling science transformed the South into the dominant US timber supply region by the late 20th century. The development of engineered wood products, from plywood to oriented strand board to the mass timber systems now reshaping sustainable construction, expanded what forests could build and how efficiently fiber could be used.
Beginning in the 1980s, corporate timberland ownership gave way to a new era of diversified private ownership, as institutional investors and timber investment management organizations took on an expanding share of the nation’s working forest base, bringing long-term stewardship expectations and new standards of management accountability with them. Between 1953 and 2017, during a period of significant population growth, the total volume of trees in the US increased by 60 percent. Today private forest owners grow 53 percent more than they harvest each year, a testament to what sustained investment in working forests has made possible.
The second half of the 20th century also brought a new wave of ecological sophistication to public forest management. The Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960 formalized the principle that national forests should be managed for a range of values simultaneously, including timber, water, wildlife, recreation, and range. The National Forest Management Act of 1976 brought comprehensive forest planning into the modern era, requiring science-based management plans across the National Forest System.
The launch of the Forest Stewardship Council internationally in 1993, followed by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative for North America in 1994, expanded the third-party certification frameworks that today cover hundreds of millions of acres across all ownership types, linking responsible management to market access and meeting growing consumer and investor demand for transparency in how forests are run.
The most recent chapter of this story is still being written. Forest carbon brings maturing market infrastructure, which now presents new management optionality for small private landowners and scaled timberlands alike. Private working forests account for approximately 80% of total net carbon sequestration and 51% of the carbon stored in all US forests, making them central not just to the timber economy but to the nation’s climate strategy as well. The emergence of climate-smart forestry, the continuation of mass timber construction as a low-carbon alternative to steel and concrete, the development of ecosystem services markets, and the growing recognition of natural capital as a dimension of forest value have collectively transformed what forestry’s potential means in the 21st century. The field that began with the axe and the survey chain now encompasses remote sensing, carbon accounting, biodiversity finance, and community co-management. It is broader, more complex, and more consequential than at any point in its history.
Writing the Next Chapters
The forests that have given America so much, from its timber, its water, its carbon, its wildness, and its sense of place, now face a set of pressures that have no real precedent in the nation’s history. Wildfire regimes are shifting. Species ranges are moving. Bark beetle outbreaks, drought stress, and invasive pathogens are compromising forest health across millions of acres. The social and economic fabric of rural forest communities is under strain in ways that policy has not yet fully addressed. At the same time, the opportunity has never been clearer. Forests are foundational to the most important work of the coming century: carbon storage and sequestration, watershed protection, biodiversity conservation, climate adaptation, and the supply of sustainable building materials. The question is not whether forests will matter in the next 250 years. The question is whether the people managing them, investing in them, studying them, and advocating for them will be equal to what that work requires.
Meeting that challenge will require the full breadth of knowledge, perspective, and experience that the forest community has not always drawn upon: Indigenous ecological knowledge alongside the latest advances in remote sensing and forest modeling, community-based management alongside institutional investment, and diverse voices in research, policy, and leadership alongside the established centers of the profession. The next 250 years of American forest stewardship will not be written by a narrow field. They will be written by all of us: the communities that live within and beside these forests, the professionals who manage and study them, the investors and policymakers who shape the conditions under which they are tended, and the next generation of practitioners finding their way into this work right now.
Our Place in the Story of America’s Forests
WFC was built on the conviction that the forest community is stronger when it draws on the full breadth of human knowledge, experience, and leadership within it. Women have always been part of America’s forest story, as Indigenous stewards, as early naturalists and conservationists, as researchers whose work built the scientific foundations of modern forestry, as community leaders, and as practitioners across every sector of the field. That history is not yet fully told. The work of making visible what has been overlooked, and honoring the contributions that have gone unrecognized, is part of what WFC is here to do.
As America marks 250 years this summer, we celebrate these forests and the full community of people who have tended them. The forests we have today got here because generations of people, imperfect and determined, chose to tend them. As we look at the next 250 years, WFC recommits to that same determination, drawing on the collective strength, knowledge, and purpose of our community to help shape a future worthy of what we have inherited.
Sources referenced:
[1] U.S. Department of the Interior, “Tribal Forest Management.” Available at https://www.doi.gov/ocl/tribal-forest-management.
[2] Douglas W. MacCleery, American Forests: A History of Resiliency and Recovery, Forest History Society, revised edition 2011. Available at foresthistory.org.
[3] American Forests, “Our History.” Available at americanforests.org.
[4] Forest History Society, “Highlights in the History of Forest Conservation.” Available at foresthistory.org.
[5] Forest History Society, “Early U.S. Forestry Leaders and Chiefs of the Forest Service.” Available at foresthistory.org.
[6] National Alliance of Forest Owners (NAFO). Available at nafoalliance.org.
[7] NAFO, “Sustainability.” Available at nafo.org/sustainability.
[8] Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960, Pub. L. 86-517.
[9] National Forest Management Act of 1976, Pub. L. 94-588.