I had no more conception of what it meant to be a forester than the man in the moon. ... But at least a forester worked in the woods and with the woods - and I loved the woods and everything about them.
Gifford's thoughts, when upon entering Yale (1885) his father asked 'How would you like to be a forester?'

If a man walked in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer, but if he spends his whole day as a speculator shearing of those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is estimated as an industrious and enterprising citizen—as if a town had no interest in forests but to cut them down.

When I came home not a single acre of Government, state, or private timberland was under systematic forest management anywhere on the most richly timbered of all continents. ... When the Gay Nineties began, the common word for our forests was 'inexhaustible.' To waste timber was a virtue and not a crime. There would always be plenty of timber. ... The lumbermen ... regarded forest devastation as normal and second growth as a delusion of fools. ... And as for sustained yield, no such idea had ever entered their heads. The few friends the forest had were spoken of, when they were spoken of at all, as impractical theorists, fanatics, or 'denudatics,' more or less touched in the head. What talk there was about forest protection was no more to the average American that the buzzing of a mosquito, and just about as irritating.