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Roosevelt is widely seen as one of the founders of the American environmental movement. “The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life,” he told Congress in 1907. In the same year he also said that “[t]he nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value.” These remarks presage two important contemporary ideas: that conservation can be central to good economic performance, and that we should see the environment as an asset, as natural capital on which we can earn a return if it is well managed. Roosevelt seems to have understood this a century ago, long before it was clear to the environmental community.

On its website the environmental group Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) lists Roosevelt as an Environmental Hero. Roosevelt proclaimed that “ [a] nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. . . . Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people” and backed up these words by protecting 150 national forests. In all, according to EDF, Roosevelt protected some 230 million acres of national land. He also founded the National Park system, creating five National Parks and the National Park Service to manage them.2

Roosevelt’s role in environmental conservation is widely known; Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s roles are not, and so deserve to be set out in more detail. Johnson commented that

[t]he air we breathe, our water, our soil and wildlife, are being blighted by poisons and chemicals which are the by-products of technology and industry. The society that receives the rewards of technology must, as a cooperating whole, take responsibility for [their] control. To deal with these new problems will require a new conservation. We must not only protect the countryside and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities. Our conservation must be not just the classic conservation of protection and development, but a creative conservation of restoration and innovation.

Johnson’s administration was responsible for the following items of legislation:

• Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments

• Wilderness Act of 1964

• Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966

• National Trails System Act of 1968

• Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968

• Land and Water Conservation Act of 1965

• Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965

• Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965

• National Historic Preservation Act of 1966

• Aircraft Noise Abatement Act of 1968

• National Environmental Policy Act of 1969

Many of these were the predecessors of legislation that today still forms the backbone of America’s environmental policy: The Endangered Species Preservation Act is the forerunner of the Endangered Species Act, and the Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments set the framework for the air and water quality legislation that we have today. At times, Johnson was passionate on environmental issues: He commented that “[t]here is no excuse for a river running red with blood from slaughterhouses. There is no excuse for paper mills pouring sulfuric acid into the lakes and streams of the people of this country. There is no excuse—and we should call a spade a spade—for chemical companies and oil refineries using our major rivers as pipelines for toxic waste. There is no excuse for communities to use other people’s rivers as a dump for their raw sewage.”3

Nixon continued this torrent of environmental legislation and, on occasion, was almost as passionate in his comments. I quote here at length from his 1973 State of the Union Address, because to a generation that thinks of Nixon largely in terms of Watergate, it is so surprising. Here are some parts of