Pinchot, Gifford (1865–1946)

US forester, conservationist, and public official. In 1896, as a member of the National Forest Commission, he helped prepare a conservation plan for government woodlands. Two years later he became chief of the US Agriculture Department's Division of Forestry, but was fired in 1910 in a dispute with his superior, a foe of conservation; this break with President William Taft's administration was among the chief causes for Pinchot's old friend Theodore Roosevelt's leaving the Republican Party, and in 1912 Pinchot helped form the Progressive Party that nominated Roosevelt for president. A nonresident member of the faculty at Yale's School of Forestry (1903–36), founded with a grant from his father, he was free to enter politics and served two terms as a reform governor of Pennsylvania (Republican, 1922–26, 1931–35). His autobiography, Breaking New Ground, appeared the year after his death.

Pinchot was born in Simsbury, Connecticut. The son of a well-to-do merchant, raised in a cosmopolitan atmosphere, he studied forestry in France after graduating from Yale in 1889.