Resilient Goshen: How Trees Will Save the Nation

GOSHEN, Ind. — Recently, my wife brought home from the Goshen Public Library a copy of a book originally published in 1927 titled “Common Trees of Indiana.” It was co-written by Charles Deam, the first state forester of Indiana. Nearly 100 years later, the book raises a provocative question: How will trees save the nation?

There are a number of remarkable things about the book, a slim “pocket” reference book filled with drawings and details about native trees of Indiana, intended to educate and inspire people to care about them.

There is a short introduction at the beginning of the book written by Charles Lathrop Pack. This name didn’t mean anything to me until I did a bit of research and discovered that he was one of the five wealthiest men in the United States at the time, the son and grandson of timber barons who made fortunes by cutting down the forests of North America. One hundred years ago, his name would have been as well known as today’s tech barons.

In his introduction, Pack writes, “Our country is the greatest in the world. In wealth, in standards of living and in comforts it stands alone.” Sounds like a familiar set of claims we still like to make. He continues, “The trees in our forests have been our greatest resource; they have made possible what has been accomplished.” That’s a bold claim with which we are not familiar in 2026.

Why Pack Believed Trees Will Save the Nation

Some context helps. At the end of the 1800s and into the 1900s, there was a growing sense that the so-called unlimited natural resources of the United States, in fact, had a very finite end and that it was quickly coming into sight. A person like Pack would have had a very keen sense of this, along with a very unique and privileged understanding of just how valuable these resources, especially timber, were.

For example, loggers literally cut down Indiana’s forests in the span of two generations, roughly 1830-1900, reducing forest cover from 87% of the state to less than 7%.

Pack wasn’t the only person who saw disaster coming. Indiana, and many other Midwestern states, created a Forestry Division and appointed Deam in 1909.

Deam went to work trying to salvage what remained. He also created a series of publications, including this little book, to broadcast his efforts. And he enlisted Pack, with his money and name recognition, to help.

Both Pack and Deam, and lots of other people up and down the economy of the early 20th century, were trying to come to terms with unprecedented ecological changes brought on by land development. Those changes were in part responsible for the Dust Bowl calamity of the 1930s.

Deam was trying to build the science to explain why trees are important in Indiana, and Pack was trying to find language to describe how valuable trees were to every person and, presumably, especially to himself.

So, the very first piece of text in “Common Trees of Indiana,” before the introduction, on a page all by itself, in ornate script, with a border placed around it, is this quote, attributed to Pack:

“If the Nation saves the Trees, the Trees will save the Nation.”

That’s a very striking assertion. It has religious undertones and prophetic overtones. At the time, in the wake of the closing of the western frontier a generation earlier and in the aftermath of World War I, it probably struck a certain pragmatic chord. I wonder how it sounds to us today.

A Question of Values

This past Monday, about 20 first-year students from Goshen College helped us pot the first trees at the new City Nursery. Before we started working, I mentioned this small book and the curious quote from Pack, and I asked these folks what they thought it meant. They were quiet for a short moment before one of them spoke up.

“I think it has something to do with our values, like, what’s important to us,” she said.

I am impressed with that answer. So I pushed it out a bit further and asked what kind of values would save trees and a nation. Another person pointed to ecological values, such as caring for land and water. The person who answered initially piped up again and said, “Compassion.”

Compassion. Ecological values. Saving trees and saving a nation. I don’t know what all Pack and Deam envisioned or hoped for. I don’t know what “compassion” and “ecological values” would have meant to them in their work, at their time.

But almost 100 years later, Indiana’s forests now cover 21% of the state, three times the amount they covered when Pack and Deam published their book. It’s dramatic, given our commodity-driven consumer economy, but is it dramatic enough? Is it enough to save a nation? If we extended compassion to other-than-human creatures, like trees, might we find more compassion for each other also?

Aaron Sawatsky-Kingsley serves as Goshen’s director of Environmental Resilience and joined the City as its first urban forester in 2006. Readers can find this column bi-weekly on Saturdays in The Goshen News.