Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

The School was founded in 1900 as the Yale Forest School, to provide high-level forestry training suited to American conditions. At the urging of Yale alumnus Gifford Pinchot, his parents endowed the two-year postgraduate program. At the time Pinchot was serving as Bernhard Fernow's successor as Chief of the Division of Forestry (predecessor of the USFS). Pinchot released two foresters from the Division to start the School: fellow Yale graduate Henry Solon Graves and J.W. Toumey. Graves became the School's first dean and Toumey its second.

When the School opened, other places in the United States offered forestry training, but none had a post-graduate program. (Both Pinchot and Graves had gone to Europe to study forestry after graduating from Yale. In the fall of 1900, the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell had 24 students, Biltmore Forest School 9, and Yale 7. Despite its small size, from its beginnings the School influenced American forestry. The first two chiefs of the USFS were Pinchot and Graves; the next three were graduates from the School's first decade. Wilderness and land conservation advocate Aldo Leopold graduated in the class of 1908.

In, 1915, Yale School of Forestry's second dean, James W. Toumey, became one of the "charter members", along with William L. Bray of the New York State College of Forestry, by then reestablished at Syracuse University, and Raphael Zon, of the Ecological Society of America. In 1950, the 1917 "activist wing" of that society formed today's The Nature Conservancy.

The school changed its name to the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies in 1972. The school's newest dean is Sir Peter Crane, the English evolutionary biologist who formerly served as Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London.