Vast woodlands and towering trees have impressed successive generations of American explorers and pioneers, and have also provided resources for building and fuel for these settlers as they cleared forest lands for agriculture and settlement. Nevertheless, the United States remains surprisingly wooded—roughly one-third of the nation’s total land surface. This entails extensive coverage in both the urban Northeast (New England and the Mid-Atlantic) and the Pacific Northwest, while the Great Plains have relatively minimal tree coverage. Western forests tend to be dominated by evergreens, including pines, firs, spruces and the gigantic redwoods of the Pacific Coast. Eastern forests tend to be hardwoods or mixtures of types, including the panoramas of oak, maple, beech and other trees that make autumnal leaves an event throughout New England each year.

America’s diverse forests have shaped historical narratives of humans and nature, whether tales of Native Americans or heroic woodsmen like Paul Bunyan or Daniel Boone. They have also shaped American representations of landscape and are fundamental to mass media as diverse as Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) and Disney’s Pocahantas (1996). They have been recognized and preserved as important components of urban parks and local identities, as well as beloved and highly visited national parks and forests from the Smoky Mountains to Yellowstone and Yosemite. Forests, for many people, are “nature.” In the twenty-first century trees and forests represent not only a renewable resource, but also an expanding one. Yet, that resource is also the source of bitter fights over management and ownership of forests and parklands. These controversies often reflect differences between economic perspectives, environmental perspectives and sentimentalideological construction of the forest. Ownership of forest lands is divided between government proprietorship, which dominates the West and Alaska, and private management. While much of this private ownership does not involve logging per se, large corporate owners have developed extensive single-species, regularly planted tree farms that worry environmentalists because of their lack of diversity and flexibility Federal forests have become controversial because of their openness to leased commercial cutting, which has meant the loss of old growth forests as wood is sold to Asian markets. As in private “tree farms,” this logging can destroy unique environments, which has pitted environmentalists and measures like the Endangered Species Act against loggers and their families as well as corporate interests, producing violent confrontations on both sides. Various strategies of ecological management, however, have emerged in the Pacific Northwest to reach a compromise between employment and environment.