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Benton MacKaye ( ; March 6, 1879 – December 11, 1975) was an American forester, planner and conservationist. He was born in Stamford, Connecticut; his father was actor and dramatist Steele MacKaye. After studying forestry at Harvard University, Benton taught there for several years. He held positions in the U.S. Forest Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the U.S. Department of Labor; he was also a member of the Technical Alliance where he participated in the Energy Survey of North America.
MacKaye helped pioneer the idea of land preservation for recreation and conservation purposes and was a strong advocate of balancing human needs and those of nature; he coined the term "geotechnics" to describe this philosophy. In addition to writing the first argument against urban sprawl, MacKaye also authored two books, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning and Expedition Nine: A Return to a Region. Thirteen of his essays were published in the collection From Geography to Geotechnics. A co-founder of The Wilderness Society, he is best known as the originator of the Appalachian Trail, an idea he presented in his 1921 journal article entitled "An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning." The Benton MacKaye Trail, some portions of which coincide with the Appalachian Trail, is named after him.
In order to escape the bustle of city life, the family took to visiting Shirley Center, Massachusetts, a quiet village 30 miles from Boston that Benton would continue to visit throughout his life. In 1888, his brother William purchased an estate in Shirley that the family would come to call "The Cottage". Eight-year-old Benton was enamored with the beauty and freedom of the country, proclaiming he enjoyed it far more than urban existence. Shortly after William died of a sudden respiratory disease in 1889, the family moved to Washington, D.C. An indifferent student, MacKaye once described school as "a place that boys like to run away from". Drawn to the study of the natural world, he often pursued knowledge on his own; he spent much time in the Smithsonian, making sketches of the abundant collections and volunteering to help scientists in their labs. He befriended assistant curator James Benedict and attended lectures given by Civil War hero John Wesley Powell and arctic explorer Robert Peary.
His early immersion in nature helped him cope with tragedy that eventually struck the MacKaye family; his frequently absent father died in 1894, when Benton was fourteen. While attending high school in Cambridge, he began charting the landscape around Shirley Center, documenting vegetation, landforms, rivers, and roads in numbered notebooks. Lewis Mumford, a close friend of MacKaye and his future biographer, wrote that "This direct, first-hand education through the senses and feelings, with its deliberate observation of nature in every guise—including the human animal—has nourished MacKaye all his life."
MacKaye made some important contributions during the early years of national forestry. While working as a forest examiner in the 1910s, he performed groundbreaking research on the impacts of forest cover on surface runoff in New Hampshire's White Mountains. This was during a time in which an intense debate regarding the connection between deforestation and irregular streamflow was occurring, and MacKaye's scientific evidence that forest cover controlled streamflow helped in the creation of the White Mountain National Forest.
In 1913, while living in Washington D.C., Mackaye helped form a social activist group called the Hell Raisers. Composed of government workers, congressional staffers, and journalists, the informal group aimed to raise public awareness about social and political issues. He married the suffragist Jessie Belle Hardy Stubbs in 1915.
The Pinhoti National Recreation Trail is considered the realization of MacKaye's original 1921 vision of a trail extending the length of the Appalachian Mountain chain, connecting several existing trails and sprinkled with permanent camps to "stimulate every line of outdoor non-industrial endeavor," including recreation, recuperation, agriculture and study. MacKaye hoped to spark a "back to the land" movement to relieve the ills of urban industrial life.
On June 17, 2011 he was inducted into the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame at the Appalachian Trail Museum as a charter member.
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