150 Points of Pride

The Iowa State University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has a proud and distinguished history. As part of Iowa State's sesquicentennial celebration, 150 points of pride related to the College - accomplishments, discoveries, contributions, highlights, famous and interesting people - will be posted here. These postings will coincide with 150 days of the 2007-2008 academic year, beginning Aug. 20, 2007 and ending May 2, 2008, with time off for the Thanksgiving, winter and spring breaks. Check back each Monday for five new items.

A forestry first

Iowa State College offered the first course in forestry in 1874. The first bachelor’s degree in forestry at Iowa State was awarded in 1904, making the ISU forestry program one of the oldest in continued existence in the United States. ISU forestry graduates are employed in all 50 states and in more than 25 foreign countries. In 2002, the forestry and animal ecology departments were merged to create the current Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management. Today the forestry curriculum offers courses that are concerned with the management of forest ecosystems for multiple benefits including wood and fiber products, biodiversity, recreation, interpretation, water, wilderness and wildlife. Conservation and preservation of natural resources are emphasized.

Fast fact: Iowa State’s forestry program has been continuously accredited by the Society of American Foresters since SAF began its accreditation program in 1935.

Paul Errington

Paul Errington was born in 1902, in Bruce, South Dakota. He graduated from South Dakota State College in 1929, and earned a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1932. He came to Iowa State in July 1932 as a research assistant professor in zoology and remained at Iowa State throughout his career. He was promoted to research associate professor in 1938 and to professor in 1948. In 1958-59 he was on leave to serve as Visiting Professor at Lund University, Sweden. Errington was known, along with Aldo Leopold, as one of the great pioneers in animal ecology. He was featured in Life Magazine in 1961 as one of the 10 outstanding naturalists in North America, and in 1962 he was awarded the Aldo Leopold medal, the highest honor bestowed by the Wildlife Society. Errington was credited with developing principles of predation in nature and many of the complicated mechanisms that characterize free-living populations, and was considered one of the original architects of the concept of compensation. His explanation of automatic adjustments in natural populations gave a new interpretation to the concept of balance of nature. Errington died in 1962.

Fast fact: Errington wrote more than 200 articles and authored four books. His book Muskrat Populations was awarded the Iowa State University Press award for faculty publications in 1962.

Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit

The first Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit in the nation was established in 1932 at Iowa State College, largely through the perseverance of Des Moines Register political cartoonist Jay Norwood “Ding” Darling. Darling led the fight to divorce Iowa’s conservation activities from political interference and had been named the first chairman of the resulting Iowa Fish and Game Commission, which later became the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. Darling saw there were not enough scientifically trained specialists to do the necessary wildlife management, research and administration. So he negotiated an agreement with Iowa State College and the Iowa Fish and Game Commission to establish the Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit and pledged $9,000 of his own money to the effort. Paul Errington served as the cooperative’s first leader. The cooperative became the first of 43 fish and wildlife units at land grant universities in 40 states. The unit provides administrative support and guidance for cooperative programs of research and education relating to fisheries and wildlife biology and management and to natural resource conservation.

Fast fact: The Iowa Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit celebrated its 75th anniversary October 6, 2007. A banquet in Ames included former and current staff and graduate students, faculty cooperators, and Iowa State, Iowa Department of Natural Resources and federal administrators and biologists.

Forestry camp tradition continues

For 90 years, Iowa State faculty have taken forestry students to every region in the United States to forestry camp. The first forestry camp was held at Cass Island, Minn., in 1914. The first camps were held during the summer and lasted three months. The camps have been held every year except during the war years. In 1918, students contributed 12 weeks of production war work at a lumber company in Wauna, Ore., instead of going to camp. The camp also was suspended from 1943 to 1945 due to low enrollments during World War II. In 1915, and for the next 80 years, the camp was shortened from 10 weeks to six weeks to fit students’ schedules. In 1994, the camp was shortened to three weeks and moved to the fall. A fall curriculum that includes the camp is offered to sophomores to allow students to get early field experience. Twenty-two students attended the 2007 three-week camp based at the Solon Dixon Forestry Education Center near Andalusia, Ala. The campus, surrounded by 5,350 acres of forestland, resembled a hunting lodge.

Fast fact: Visiting a nursery with 26 million 6-inch pine trees, touching a 400-year-old tree, learning about pine cone harvesting, walking barefoot on a seashore in a national park and watching particleboard slide down a factory assembly line — those are a few of the things students did at the 2007 forestry camp.

A tale of two chiefs

Since its beginning in 1905, the U. S. Forest Service has been led by 16 different chiefs. All have held degrees from a college or university. Some have served with a bachelor’s degree, some with a master’s and some with a doctorate. Seventeen different universities or colleges have contributed to their academic education — it’s relatively common for a chief to hold a bachelor’s degree from one university and an advanced degree from another. Two of the chiefs have been graduates from programs now housed in Iowa State University’s Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management. Lyle Watts (B.S. 1913 and M.S. 1928, both in forestry from Iowa State) served as chief of the U.S. Forest Service from 1943 to1952. Mike Dombeck (Ph.D. 1984 in fisheries biology from Iowa State) served as chief of the U.S. Forest Service from 1997 to 2001.

Fast fact: Only Yale has helped educate more chiefs for the U.S. Forest Service than has Iowa State University.

*Some historic photographs courtesy of the University Archives.

150 Points of Pride Archives