Yale School of the Environment (YSE) is a professional school of Yale University. It was founded to train foresters, and now trains environmental students through four 2-year degree programs (Master of Environmental Management, Master of Environmental Science, Master of Forestry, and Master of Forest Science), two 10-month mid-career programs, and a 5-year PhD program. Still offering forestry instruction, the school has the oldest graduate forestry program in the United States. The school changed its name to the Yale School of the Environment in July 2020. It was previously the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. History The school was founded in 1900 as the Yale Forest School, to provide high-level forestry training suited to American conditions. At the urging of Yale alumnus Gifford Pinchot, his parents endowed the two-year postgraduate program. At the time Pinchot was serving as Bernhard Fernow's successor as Chief of the Division of Forestry (predecessor of the U.S. Forest Service, USFS). Pinchot released two foresters from the division to start the school: fellow Yale graduate Henry Solon Graves and James Toumey. Graves became the School's first dean and Toumey its second. When the school opened, other places in the United States offered forestry training, but none had a post-graduate program. (Both Pinchot and Graves had gone to Europe to study forestry after graduating from Yale.) In the fall of 1900, the New York State College of Forestry at Cornell had 24 students, Biltmore Forest School 9, and Yale 7. Despite its small size, from its beginnings the school influenced American forestry. The first two chiefs of the USFS were Pinchot and Graves; the next three were graduates from the school's first decade. Wilderness and land conservation advocate Aldo Leopold graduated in the class of 1908. In 1915, Yale School of Forestry's second dean, James Toumey, became one of the "charter members", along with William L. Bray of the New York State College of Forestry, by then reestablished at Syracuse University, and Raphael Zon, of the Ecological Society of America. In 1950, the "activist wing" of that society formed The Nature Conservancy. Besides the school's own forests, Yale has used a number of other sites in the eastern United States for field education over the years. From 1904 to 1926, the summer session leading to a master's degree in forestry was held at Grey Towers and Forester's Hall in Milford, Pennsylvania. Beginning in 1912, Yale classes