“The Compleat Forester”: David T. Mason's Early Career and Character

D avid Townsend Mason was a numberscounter, one of a small but impressive company of quantifiers working within the emerging forestry profession in the 1920s and 1930s. The early years of his long career coincided with a period when calculators and engineers-these new corporate and political empire-builders-were beginning to take control of the nation's progress by measuring and managing natural and human resources. Writing and speaking the language of computation long before the age of electronic computers, they worked with yields per acre, gallons per minute and per mile, and production volumes per operation per day. More importantly, they recognized that their theories and findings had to be applied by government as well as private enterprise. A few were able to use the leverages of wealth or personal power. Others wielded great influence as colleagues, committeemen, and consultants. Mason was one of the latter. He was the honest broker, bringing together diverse and often antagonistic interests to find mutual advantages. He bridged what in his time was an enormous gap between private interests and the public interest. After constructing the first integrated model for sustained-yield forest management, Mason led the movement for its adoption by government and by a doubting, depressed lumber industry. Mason's greatest achievements on behalf of sustained-yield forestry came in the 1930s and 1940s, but the earlier decades of his career saw the formation of the distinctive personal and professional characteristics that prepared the way for his later success. Sustained-yield forestry-the policy of managing harvests for permanent timber production-was a timely idea when Mason arrived on the scene. By the end of the nineteenth century, American foresters were analyzing the applicability of older European forestry techniques to distinctly different conditions in their nation's relatively abundant timber tracts. Lumbermen agreed that some of these theories were impressive, but others were too rigid or costly. Protection of standing timber and planned control of annual production seemed far more practical than the selective logging of forests containing a variety of timber types and ages. For another decade, the subject of long-term forest management seemed purely academic. Lumbermen were far more con-