The Yale School of the Environment: The First 125 Years

In her address to the Class of 2024, the Dean of the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) reminded the new graduates, “You will be leaders for change, and soon.” It’s a message every YSE student has heard since 1900, when forester Henry S. Graves and botanist James Toumey opened the first graduate school of forestry in the Western Hemisphere at Yale University. The original mission was training men to lead America’s forest conservation movement. What the two professors created, though, quickly became the foremost school for educating leaders in forest and environmental sciences, policy, and practice around the world, and the model for many other schools to emulate. It remains so 125 years later. YSE faculty and graduates have been successful by adapting to ever-changing conditions in the classroom, on campus, in the field, and in the laboratory, and in state legislatures and national governments. They’ve staffed, founded, or led schools of natural resources, nonprofit conservation organizations, governmental agencies, and forest-product corporations, and served the needs of urban neighborhoods and those living in the remotest corners of the planet. The goal for faculty and students alike has been to increase and our understanding of the natural world and the built landscape while serving the public good. From the moment the school’s founding director Henry Graves called the first class to order and for every succeeding generation, YSE has had—and continues to have—a global impact unlike any other.

James G. Lewis has been the staff historian at the Forest History Society, located in Durham, NC, since 2003. He is the author of The Forest Service and the Greatest Good: A Centennial History (2005); and Lands Worth Saving: The Weeks Act of 1911, the National Forests and the Enduring Value of Public Investment (2018). He has served as editor of the Society’s magazine Forest History Today since 2006.

Char Miller is the W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College. His most recent books include Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, From Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning (2024), Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril (2022), and West Side Rising: How San Antonio’s 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement (2021).

Mark S. Ashton is the Morris K. Jesup Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology, the Senior Associate Dean of The Forest School, and the Director of the Yale Forests at the Yale School of the Environment. He has conducted over thirty-five years of research on the biological and physical processes governing the dynamics of natural forests and on the creation of their agroforestry analogs.

Rachel D. Kline is a public historian of women, the environment, and public lands. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles, public history reports, and community histories. Kline is the 2024 recipient of the National Archives Foundation Cokie Roberts Fellowship, which will facilitate research for her 2026 book, We Feminine Foresters: Women and the USDA Forest Service.