When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
Up for sale "Father of Agroforestry" J. Russell Smith Hand Signed 3X5.5 Card.
ES-9549
Joseph
Russell Smith (February 3, 1874
– February 26, 1966) was an American geographer. He worked in the Department of
Geography and Industry at the University of Pennsylvania and
later the Columbia Business School where
he chaired the economic geography program. From 1941 to 1942, Smith
served as President of the American
Association of Geographers. He
is considered the father of the field of Agroforestry. Smith was born in the Piedmont region of
Virginia and raised in a Quaker household that focused on farming. He attended
the Wharton School for
his Bachelor's degree, but had
an extended degree period lasting for five years from 1893 to 1898 due to him
having to teach on the side in order to pay for his university attendance. His
graduate degree studies afterward were conducted under Emory Richard Johnson and
he was assigned in 1899 to work with the Isthmian Canal Commission in
order to research how the canal would impact commercial enterprises across the
new Central American shipping route. He spent later parts of his education
looking into the importance of geographical research, which was not offered as
a main course of study at the time in schools. A year abroad in Germany and time spent researching the country's port
cities alongside Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Sapper allowed him to further understand that more
than physical geography was
required for general student understanding of such topics. Not long after, he
completed his Ph.D. defense in 1903 with his thesis titled "The
Organization of Ocean Commerce". After graduating, Smith was given an
instructor position at the Wharton School and this resulted in him having to
develop his own textbooks for the courses he taught, leading to many of his
literary releases on a variety of industries. His official and main college
text was titled Industrial and Commercial Geography, which was the
first US collegiate text on the subject of economic geography, and it
was through the success of this text that he was able to formally organize the
Geography and Industry Department at the university. By 1919, the failure of the Wharton School to
properly pay the salaries of his ten assistant students led to Smith resigning
from his position and taking up a new job as the head of the economic geography
department that was formed at the new Columbia School of
Business. During that same year, Smith removed himself
from direct academic research so he could work on his upcoming book, Influence
of the Great War Upon Shipping, as requested and funded by the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. He also took a trip to Russia
alongside Herbert Hoover in
order to assist the American Relief
Administration in their efforts to manage and combat the Russian famine of 1921–22.
Afterward, he continued traveling around the world throughout the 1920s in
order to continue gathering materials for future books. He retired from his
head departmental position at Columbia University in April 1940. In 1929, he released his book Tree
Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, which would serve as one of the earliest
sources and motivators for the field of agroforestry, though it would not be made into a true
scientific field until the 1960s. The impetus for the book came about from his
global travels whereby he saw the negative impacts of soil erosion in multiple
countries. So he focused his book on the idea of tree breeding and the
development of genetically superior cultivars that could be grown in poor,
often mountainous, soils so as to improve them. He also suggested the creation
of many national branches of a "Institute of Mountain Agriculture" in
order to maintain upkeep of these endeavors. Smith discussed his research on general
agricultural improvement at the seventeenth international congress of the International Geographical
Union in 1952 and presented hypothetical ideas on future
technologies, including methods for removing the salt from ocean water and
using solar power to help in the irrigation of deserts and arid lands by
pumping river water from mountainous regions.