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By Root 3104 0

Alaska was a huge part of this problem. Market hunters were devastating Alaska’s largest migrant birds. Throughout the territory the prevalent attitude was “If it moves, shoot it.” Two-thirds of all trumpeter swans—the largest waterfowl in the world—nested in Alaska. In all the Lower Forty-Eight, only the Yellowstone ecosystem was a stronghold for swans. For hundreds of years trumpeter swans had been slaughtered for their feathers, which made the best quill pens in the world. The British royal crown, for instance, signed every document with a trumpeter swan pen.

To the surprise of President Roosevelt, the duck stamps designed by Darling were a hit with Congress and the private sector. Capitalizing on his celebrity as a cartoonist, Darling raised millions to help protect migratory birds. The term “duck stamp,” however, was misleading: Darling’s program also printed stamps of geese and swans. Although Darling designed the first stamps, an annual art contest was soon instituted. Every year new winners were chosen.

When scholars write histories of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the duck stamp program is usually considered ingenious, and a high-water mark. The stamps became coveted collectors’ items. During Darling’s tenure revenues from the duck stamp were $635,001 in 1934 and $448,204 in 1935. In 1953, long after Darling had retired from government, he reflected on why the duck stamp program had worked. “Of course you understand that I am not nearly so much interested in the preservation of migratory waterfowl as I am in the management of water resources and the crucial effects of such management upon human sustenance,” he told Reader’s Digest. “Wild ducks and geese and teeter-assed shore birds are only the delicate indicators for the prognosis for human existence, just as sure as God made little green apples.”42

Despite the fact that the nation was at war between 1941 and 1945, Roosevelt did his best to protect the flyways and nesting areas of Darling’s beloved American birdlife. Glacier Bay was just one of a number of examples. Around the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, when America was focused on military preparedness, he received a blueprint for a major new U.S. Army artillery range to be constructed in Idaho. A lifelong bird-watcher, Roosevelt rejected it. He sided with the bird-watchers over the army. “Please tell Major General Adams or whoever is in charge of this business that Henry Lake, Idaho, must immediately be struck from the Army planning list for any purposes,” he wrote to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. “The verdict is for the trumpeter swan and against the Army. The Army must find a different nesting place.”43

Groups like the National Audubon Society, Sierra Club, CFCA, and Izaak Walton League had an ally in Franklin Roosevelt. No longer was saving wild places considered fringe philanthropy. Also, John D. Rockefeller Jr. became the greatest conservationist capitalist of all time (only Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, comes close). Regularly, Rockefeller donated multimillion-dollar checks to help create Acadia National Park in Maine and the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. He considered this a Christian, gentlemanly thing to do. His family had taken something (oil) from mother Earth, and therefore he wanted to give something back to her.44 Working closely with Horace Albright of the National Park Service, Rockefeller would pay for cleaning up environmental eyesores and industrial blight. He wanted America’s special wilderness places to be roadless. “I never had any doubt about the existence of a divine being,” Rockefeller said. “To see a tree coming out in the spring was enough to impress me that the fact of God existed.”45

With impressive political acumen, FDR brought together Bob Marshall (a democratic socialist), Harold Ickes (a Bull Moose), Ira Gabrielson (a bird enthusiast), and John D. Rockefeller Jr. (a capitalist) to protect America despite the ordeals of the Great Depression and World War II. When Louis Brandeis retired from the Supreme Court in March 1939, Roosevelt appointed Douglas