The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [14]
With that one sweeping “I So Declare It,” President Roosevelt, the big game hunter, had entered John Muir’s aesthetic preservation domain. And Pelican Island wasn’t a passing whim of a president showing off to ornithologist colleagues. It was an opening salvo on behalf of the natural environment. No longer would slackness prevail with regard to conservationism, for Roosevelt—the wilderness warrior—would coordinate the disparate elements in the U.S. government around a common “great wildlife crusade.” Perhaps the historian Kathleen Dalton in The Strenuous Life summed up Roosevelt’s evolved attitude toward biota circa 1903 best: “Despite his official commitment to the policy of conservation of natural resources for use by humans he held preservationist and romantic attachments to nature and animals far stronger than the average conservationist.” 45
On March 14, 1903 President Roosevelt officially signed the Executive Order saving Pelican Island. By slipping the federal bird reservation into the domain of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as Charles DuBois of the Interior Department had suggested, T.R. was hoping to avert the notice or controversy that keeping it in the Interior Department would have generated. Whenever he was faced with an obstacle, Roosevelt liked figuring out a way to circumvent it. Remarkably, T.R.’s Executive Order sailed through the bureaucracy in just two weeks. Legally it had to be approved by both Agriculture and Interior before the president could sign it.46 Without any note of toughness—and only fifty words long—the order was a seminal moment in U.S. Wildlife History: “It is hereby ordered that Pelican Island in Indian River in section nine, township thirty-one south, range thirty-nine east, State of Florida, be, and it is hereby, reserved and set apart for the use of the Department of Agriculture as a preserve and breeding ground for native birds.”47
The first unit of the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System was now a reality. And Sebastian, Florida—the hamlet closest to Pelican Island—was its birthplace. Eighteen months later, Roosevelt created the second federal bird reservation, at Breton Island, Louisiana. By 2003, when Pelican Island celebrated its centennial, the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System comprised more than 540 wildlife refuges on more than 95 million acres. Taken together, this woodlands, bayous, desert scapes, bird rocks, tundra, prairie, and marshland make up 4 percent of all United States territory.48 At the time, however, the Pelican Island declaration garnered very little national attention—the New York Times never mentioned it, nor did the Jacksonville Florida Times-Union.49 But future generations took serious notice; the impetus for a National Wildlife System had sprung to life. Saving Pelican Island initiated Theodore Roosevelt’s evolving idea of creating greenbelts of federal wildlife refuges everywhere the American flag flew. Very quickly these refugees grew exponentially in numbers under Roosevelt’s influence until the map of the lower forty-eight states was vastly altered. From this single small island in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon grew the world’s greatest system of land for wildlife. In the remaining six years he was in office, Roosevelt created fifty more wildlife refuges. Writing in his well-received An Autobiography (1913), Roosevelt explained how his ambition hardened to create these refuges without his ever making an on-site inspection trip:
The establishment by Executive Order between March 14, 1903, and March 4, 1909, of fifty-one National Bird Reservations distributed in seventeen States and Territories from Puerto Rico to Hawaii and Alaska. The creation of these reservations