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When did the U.S. government authorize its first forest reserves?
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forestry
Trucks on a road transporting recently harvested logs near Sabah's border with Kalimantan in Borneo.
The United States government authorized its first forest reserves in 1891, when Congress passed a bill granting the president the authority to set aside forested land from the public domain.12
These reserves were established following advocacy from figures such as Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz. Later, in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt created the U.S. Forest Service to manage these lands, and in 1907, the reserves were officially renamed national forests.21