Paper : A History of Management Practices on the Lewis Farm Woodlot Near Springfield, Maine, 1947

Arthur A. Davis was born on June 20, 1922 in New York City. He received his BA in Forestry from the University of Maine, interrupted by service in the Army as a 1st Lieutenant in World War II. He received his MA in Forestry from Yale in 1949.

For the next 20 years, Davis worked in the US government: first at the Department of Interior, then Bureau of the Budget, then Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 1974 Davis moved to Pennsylvania beginning in Pittsburgh at the Western PA Conservancy, where he worked for 10 years before being named as the first professor to hold the Goddard chair at Pennsylvania State University. He taught forestry and environmental resources and directed a university program on environmental problem-solving.

He held this position until being appointed Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources (DER) in 1987. He served as Secretary through November of 1994. One of his accomplishments was establishing Pennsylvania's mandatory recycling program that is among the most progressive in the nation. He fought for funding for State Parks. DER, under Davis' leadership, was a particularly tough enforcer of illegal pillar removal in old coal mines, and he worked to ensure surface mining clean-up and reclamation. On the 20th anniversary of Earth Day in 1990, he made his way to work by canoeing across the Susquehanna River. This river "commute" made front page news in several newspapers.

Arthur A. Davis passed away in 2014.