Mason,

Of course there was this important group
of US economists who got their Ph.D.s in
Germany, including some of the founders of
the AEA, especially Ely.  But, that does not
mean that they read Faustmann, who was fairly
obscure, although perhaps some of them read
von Thunen.

Note that I said "a German language tradition,"
not "the" German language tradition.  I do not
know, but in the English language tradition, the
economics of location, land use, forestry, regional
economics, economic geography, and so on, which is
what is going on in this particular German language
tradition, gets ignored by most economists who do
not know it.  This explains how part of Paul
Krugman's Nobel could be for publishing a paper
on economic geography in the JPE in 1991 that
applied the Dixit-Stiglitz model to the subject,
without citing a 1988 paper by Masahisa Fujita
that did so in 1988 in Regional Economics and
Urban Economics, who was not mentioned in the
awarding of the prize, much less sharing it.

Even if Ely or Clark or some of those read
von Thunen (but very unlikely read Faustmann),
Irving Fisher got his Ph.D. in the US and very
likely read none of this literature, with his
forestry example simply part of his own putting
together his theory of interest, with other
examples being aging bottles of wine and so on.

Regarding Faustmann as ecologist, well, I know
nothing about his personal life or views.  However,
he was arguably more ecological than Fisher given
that at least he thought about the long term
future and thought about replanting the trees
after they would be cut down, whereas for Fisher
it was cut and run, destroy the forest and leave
it lying there as a wrecked nothing.  It was
Hartmann in 1971 who provided the broader model
that allowed for non-timber uses, whether marketed
(such as grazing animals) or broader externality
sorts of things such as biodiversity or avoiding
soil erosion and flooding or aesthetics of the
trees or carbon sequestration, and so on and on.

Barkley Rosser