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By Root 3926 0

irrigation projects, national monuments, and conservation commissions. He quadrupled America’s forest reserves and, recognizing the need to save the buffalo from extinction, he made Oklahoma’s Wichita Forest and Montana’s National Bison Range big game preserves. Others were created to protect moose and elk. To cap it off he established five national parks, protecting such “heirlooms” as Oregon’s iridescent blue Crater Lake, South Dakota’s subterranean wonder Wind Cave, and the Anasazi cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado. Courtesy of an executive decree, Roosevelt saved the Grand Canyon—a 1,900-square-mile hallowed site in Arizona—from destructive zinc and copper mining interests. The doughty scrawl of his signature, a conservationist weapon, set aside for posterity (or for “the people unborn”* as he put it) over 234 million acres, almost the size of the Atlantic coast states from Maine to Florida (or equal to one out of every ten acres in the United States, including Alaska.) 54 All told, Roosevelt’s acreage was almost half the landmass Thomas Jefferson had acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.55

Full of environmental rectitude, Roosevelt turned saving certain species into a crusade. Unafraid of opposition, always watchful of political timing, and constantly ready with a riposte, Roosevelt acted with the prowling boldness of a mountain lion on the hunt. Suddenly, before people knew what hit them, strange-sounding place-names like Snoqualmie, Nebo, and Kootenai were national forest reserves. Because Florida was known as a bird haven, perhaps turning Pelican Island and Passage Key into Federal Bird Reserves wasn’t too shocking. But imagine how perplexed people were when Roosevelt ventured into the supposedly arid desert territories of Arizona and New Mexico, establishing federal bird reservations at Salt River and Carlsbad. Roosevelt believed there was no type of American topography that posterity wouldn’t enjoy for recreational purposes and spiritual uplift: extinct volcanoes, limestone caverns, oyster bars, tropical rain forests, artic tundra, pine woods—the list goes on and on. As Roosevelt noted when dedicating a Yellowstone Park gateway in 1903, the “essential feature” of federal parks was their “essential democracy,” to be shared for “people as a whole.” 56

With the power of the bully pulpit, Roosevelt—repeatedly befuddling both market hunters and insatiable developers—issued “I So Declare It” orders over and over again. Refusing to poke at the edges of the conservation movement like his Republican presidential successors, Roosevelt entered the fray double-barreled, determined to save the American wilderness from deforestation and unnecessary duress. The limited (though significant) forest reserve acts of the Harrison, Cleveland, and McKinley administrations were magnified 100 times over once Roosevelt entered the White House. From the beginning to the end of his presidency, Roosevelt, in fact, did far more for the long-term protection of wilderness than all of his White House predecessors combined. In a fundamental way, Roosevelt was a conservation visionary, aware of the pitfalls of hyper-industrialization, fearful that speed-logging, blast-rock mining, overgrazing, reckless hunting, oil drilling, population growth, and all types of pollution would leave the planet in biological peril. “The natural resources of our country,” President Roosevelt warned Congress, the Supreme Court, and the state governors at a conservation conference he had called to session, “are in danger of exhaustion if we permit the old wasteful methods of exploiting them longer to continue.”57

Wildlife protection and forest conservation, Roosevelt insisted, were a moral imperative and represented the high-water mark of his entire tenure at the White House. In an age when industrialism and corporatism were running largely unregulated, and dollar determinism was holding favor, Roosevelt, the famous Wall Street trustbuster, went after the “unintelligent butchers” of his day with a ferocity unheard of in a U.S. president.