The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [13]
Recognizing the need for scientific wildlife and land management, every U.S. president in the gilded age considered himself conservationist-minded to some limited degree: certainly Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley did. Each, in fact, had landmark “forest reserves” accomplishments in his portfolio to showcase for history. Yet they all lacked long-term vision, concerned instead with only the forestry issues and water-shortage emergencies of the moment. But Roosevelt was vastly different; nature was his rock and salvation. Refusing to be hemmed in by the orthodoxies of his time, he burst onto the national stage—first as civil service commissioner and governor and vice president and then as president—promoting the Gospel of Wilderness. Bridging the gap as a naturalist-hunter, he deemed songbirds liberators of the soul and bison herds incalculably valuable to the collective psyche of the nation. Even though local communities across the American West complained about federal land grabs, Roosevelt insisted he was preserving wilderness for their own good, for the sake of the American heritage.
With nationalistic optimism, Roosevelt’s patriotic summons essentially called for deranking the Louvre, Westminster Abbey, and the Taj Mahal as world heritage sites. The United States had far more spectacular natural wonders than these worn and tired man-made spectacles: it had the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, the Petrified Forest, Key West, the Farralon Islands, the Tongass, Devils Tower, and the Bighorns. American bird flocks, he insisted, were far more glorious than those found in the steppes and forests of staid Old Europe. The implicit assumption was that Roosevelt’s utter love of “American Wilderness” always had a heavy component of raw nationalism. When asked as ex-president in 1918 why he loved wildlife so much, Roosevelt had a characteristically direct yet unreflective answer: “I can no more explain why I like natural history,” he said, “than why I like California canned peaches.”41
Now, with this imperious decree of March 1903, the irrepressible naturalist was saying that a part of wild Florida should be saved for the sake of imperiled birds and endangered animals. President Roosevelt’s guiding eco-philosophy was that habitat preservation for animals mattered, completely. Any reasonable person, he believed, should understand this. In the new century, market hunters had an obligation to stop their rampage and bow to the forces of biological conservationism and utilitarian progressivism as far as land and wildlife management were concerned. Forests needed to be treasured as if life-giving shrines. Citizens had to rally to save remnant populations of wildlife everywhere before species extinction became epidemic. Biodiversity was apparent and essential in nature, Roosevelt believed, wherever open minds looked. A huge cornucopia of wild creatures and plants, diverse in purpose and structure, with beauty and utilitarianism beyond the most fertile imagination, was an omnipotent God’s blessed gift to America.
A relieved Chapman rejoiced when he heard Roosevelt’s verdict—“I So Declare It”—realizing this was a new precedent for wildlife protection. He vowed to convey to future generations that March 1903, was the turning point in the birds’ rights movement. True to his word, Chapman would laud Roosevelt in Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist (1908) and Autobiography of a Bird-Lover (1933). Filed away in Chapman’s personal papers on the fifth floor of the American Museum of Natural History, in fact, is the letter he wrote to Roosevelt in 1908, claiming that “The Naturalist President” had, “more than any other person,” inspired him to write Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist.42