The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [222]
And Roosevelt considered the Palisades Park between New York and New Jersey a landscape masterpiece. Getting Andrew H. Green (his go-to guy at the Bronx Zoo) to help him establish a 700-acre refuge from Fort Lee (New Jersey) to Piedmont (New York), in order to preserve the sill cliffs (commonly called “Palisades sill”) on the west bank of the Hudson River, had become a priority for Roosevelt. He sought to halt the unsightly mining that was ravaging the local scenery of the world’s greatest city. As Roosevelt envisioned it, a thirteen-mile stretch of the preserved Palisades along the Hudson River would become a forerunner of other interstate parks nationwide. To damage the cliffs was sacrilegious. Every month Roosevelt grew more and more disquieted, knowing that New Jersey’s quarry operations were destroying the scenic backdrop to the city.47 The view from Riverside Drive, for example, would be forever ruined if the Jersey side of the Hudson was marred with only factories, storefronts, and houses.
Besides getting the right men onto the New York State Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission (which today is the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation) and establishing Palisades Park, Roosevelt wanted to find ways to educate New York citizens about nature. On May 2, 1899, when he had been governor for only four months, Roosevelt signed into law an educational initiative very dear to his heart. After looking into the curricula of the public schools, Roosevelt was horrified to learn that natural history and geography weren’t being taught. Immediately, he sought appropriation funds so that classes presenting men like Audubon, Darwin, Burroughs, and Marsh could be offered in every county.48 Young citizens, he believed, needed to understand the evolutionary process and learn why dumping sewage and refuse into the Great Lakes and Hudson River was unacceptable. In a sense, promoting Earth Day seventy years ahead of time, Roosevelt believed that humans couldn’t afford to recklessly poison their own environment without incurring a heavy toll in ill health, environmental ugliness, and corrosion of the spirit.
A quick look at Governor Roosevelt’s time line for 1899 clearly shows that he wasn’t a stationary executive. Even mundane talks about tax law became moments for impassioned theater. Although forestry and wild-life issues didn’t monopolize his engagements, these topics were a high priority for him on the speaking trail. Refusing to weaken the conservationist plank in his first annual message, Roosevelt overcame a drubbing from the timber industry for extending state forest reserves in Delaware, Green, Sullivan, and Ulster counties. In May he hiked around the Adirondacks, preaching Pinchot’s gospel of forestry science to people living around the McIntyre Iron Works. Seizing the initiative from Robert B. Roosevelt, T.R. got the New York legislature to pass Amendment (Ch 729) to the Fisheries Law, which forbade the pollution of any rivers, lakes, or streams used by the state fish hatcheries.
At one juncture Roosevelt went to inspect Niagara Falls to see if it could become a national park. The Transcendentalist philosopher Margaret Fuller had once stated that the great falls were “the one object in the world that would not disappoint.”49 Roosevelt disagreed. Doing a good amount of fast walking, he spent days surveying the cataract, exploring the cliffs of Goat Island, refusing to ride the new electric streetcar, and upset that a suspension bridge promoted by Boss Platt was going to mar the natural view of the thundering falls. (Wasn’t the steamer Maid of the Mist enough?) The saga of Niagara Falls had begun 600 million years ago, Roosevelt lamented, and now a group of transportation hotshots, after dollars, wanted to demote the natural wonder into a tourist trap. The garishness of their plans sickened him. In the spirit of Ripley’s Believe