President Roosevelt

This is a special year for rural electric cooperative utilities. Eighty years ago, Congress passed and President Roosevelt signed the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. The REA brought electricity to rural America, ultimately making the United States the source of the world’s food, fuel and fiber...

Eight years ago this month, the US economy went into free fall. The crash of the housing market led to a chain of historic levels of bankruptcies and layoffs. The stock market would eventually lose 20% of its value; family incomes, investments, and home values were being crushed. Along with that...

Have you ever wondered why your favorite National Park is surrounded by a National Forest? Well, it didn’t happen by accident or guesswork. The fact is, it was all started over 100 years ago by two men I like to refer to as the founding fathers of America’s public lands. Back at the turn of the 20...

The life in which US Forest Service founder Gifford Pinchot was born into wasn’t much different than what millions of Downton Abby fans have come to know through that popular PBS period drama: huge homes, servants and vast expanses of lands where the accoutrements of many in Pinchot’s class. And, on...

In the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7037 on May 11, 1935 establishing the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), a temporary agency tasked with deciding how to fund rural electric systems. The following year, Congress passed the Rural...

Yesterday, we officially launched the International Year of Soils here at USDA. Most people don’t realize that just beneath their feet lies a diverse, complex, life-giving ecosystem that sustains our entire existence. I’m talking about soil. There are more living organisms in a single teaspoon of...

Confronting climate change will be substantially cheaper and easier if we conserve forests, and the key to that is expert knowledge and science, Undersecretary of Natural Resources and the Environment Robert Bonnie told thousands of attendees at the recent 24 th World Congress of the International...

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio. The language on the 1930s poster for the Prairie States Forestry Project was downright plaintive: “Trees Prevent Soil...

Too often, it’s treated like dirt. But this week our living and life-giving soil is finally getting some of the respect it deserves today, for World Soils Day. While soil may not enjoy the media attention of Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s, it can be argued that it shares importance with all...

On a recent cool, crisp spring morning in the mountains of Virginia, the Boy Scouts of America Troop 88 followed in the footsteps of the first “boys” of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC. The first CCC camp, Camp Roosevelt, was established April 17, 1933 at the George Washington and Jefferson...