ABSTRACT
The United States has been the setting over sustained yield forestry practices. Most of the attention has focused on the assumptions underlying sustained-yield policies and the presumed causal linkage between sustained yield and community stability. The brief interpretation of sustained yield's adoption in the United States is obviously insufficient for evaluating the hypothesis that sustained yield serves as an instrument for promoting social order. The technological, political-economic, social and geographic features of Germany were such that sustained-yield was an ingenious and wholly sensible solution to the forestry problems that Germany faced. The social history of sustained yield is marked by two distinct phases: its original development in Germany, and its subsequent adoption by foresters in other nations. The task of explaining the adoption and persistence of sustained yield in the United States is much simpler than answering the questions about German origins of sustained yield.
