The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [225]
IV
Governor Roosevelt’s second annual message to the New York state legislature on January 3, 1900, was the most important speech about conservation ever delivered by a serious American politician up until that time. Everything from illegal hunting to forest fire protection and watersheds was covered. The governor tried hard to persuade the legislators that forest preservation was of “the utmost importance to the State.” Disposing of land abusers as parasites, Roosevelt stated—insisted, really—that the “Adirondacks and Catskills should be great parks kept in perpetuity for the benefit and enjoyment of our people.”62 His speech led to what Conservation Biology later called a “revival of democracy” through the nature movement.63 Like a sentry standing watch, Roosevelt was going to protect New York’s wilderness from despoilers of every stripe. “As railroads tend to encroach on the wilderness,” Roosevelt warned, “the temptation to illegal hunting becomes greater, and the danger of forest fires increases.”64
Although Governor Roosevelt gave a small compliment to the Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission for the propagation of hatcheries producing valuable food, his address was essentially a litany of woes he wanted corrected. Lumbering in state forests, Roosevelt declared, had to be placed “on strictly scientific principles no less than upon principles of the strictest honesty toward the state.” Both lakes and rivers, he said, needed to be protected from the indiscriminate effects of hyper-industrialization. Game wardens, he claimed, weren’t doing their jobs correctly. He wanted “woodsmen” with a background in science to take over these posts. State forests had to be consistently treated with the utmost respect by lumber companies. “The subject of forest preservation,” he said, “is of the utmost importance to the State.” And then he took up specific issues of birds’ rights:
The State should not permit within its limits factories to make bird skins or bird feathers into articles of ornament or wearing apparel. Ordinary birds, and especially song birds, should be rigidly protected. Game birds should never be shot to a greater extent than will offset the natural rate of increase. All Spring shooting should be prohibited and efforts made by correspondence with the neighboring States to secure its prohibition within their borders. Care should be taken not to encourage the use of cold storage or other market systems which are a benefit to no one but the wealthy epicure who can afford to pay a heavy price for luxuries. These systems tend to the destruction of the game: which would bear most severely upon the very men whose rapacity has been appealed to in order to secure its extermination.
The open season for the different species of game and fish should be made uniform throughout the entire State, save that it should be shorter on Long Island for certain species which are not plentiful, and which are pursued by a greater number of people than in other game portions of the State.65
Never before in U.S. history had a governor championed forest preservation and bird rights with such forthrightness.66 As Roosevelt wrote to Grant La Farge, he had done this without a “particle of popular backing of the effective kind.”67 Pinchot, who had been somewhere out West at the time the speech was delivered, would later memorize passages as if it were the Gettysburg Address. Overnight, the ornithologists praised Roosevelt’s second annual message to the skies; it was a fulfillment of a dream. Frank M. Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History, for example, considered January 3 one of the greatest days of his life—Roosevelt’s hard-hitting, visionary defense of birds in his second annual message was, Chapman believed, the tipping point for the Audubon Movement, the wave which crashed down on an entire new generation anxious for preservation to triumph over annihilation. A governor of New York, for the first time, took on both the lumber and the cold storage lobbies.
Not that Chapman