The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [258]
Following these cautionary swipes at corporations President Roosevelt launched into his conservation plank, based on the philosophy of Pinchot and Grinnell. Nothing would palsy his resolution regarding wilderness protection. The West had 6 million inhabitants in 1901; by the time Roosevelt left office there were over 10 million citizens and the population was still growing. Much of Roosevelt’s conservationist thinking in the annual message was directed toward this region. With the West so much in the forefront, he was, as Morris noted in Theodore Rex, “striking a note altogether new in presidential utterances.”34 Nothing about Roosevelt’s conservationist rhetoric could have been misconstrued as give-and-take. He was telling Congress the new lay of the land. Disgusted that the United States had cut down almost 50 percent of its timber, and that valuable topsoil had been washed away, Roosevelt was sending a wake-up call.35 He wanted Congress to save pristine American land while it still existed. Whether they were coniferous forests in the Pacific Northwest or strands of Douglas fir far older than the republic in the Front Range of the Rockies, forests had to be saved. His far-reaching conclusion, after much consideration, was that he wanted the western reserves vastly increased. Decades of study had taught him the symbiotic relationship between timber, soil, and water conservation. “The preservation of our forests is an imperative business necessity,” the address stated. “We have come to see clearly that whatever destroys the forests, except to make way for agriculture, threatens our own well being.”36
And the conservationist creed—albeit carefully modulated—didn’t stop there. It would be up to the federal government—not big business—to lease lands for logging or mining, and not just near the famous destinations like Yellowstone and Yosemite. Throughout the West, the prettiest scenery not deforested or contaminated would be on the table for consideration as national parks or forest reserves. Not on his watch would such lovely Pacific Northwest ranges as the Cascades and Olympics be turned into heaping mounds of slag as in Appalachia. No western state would go unaffected. Praising the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Roosevelt promised to sponsor even more science-based studies pertaining to trees, plants, and grasses through its Biological Survey division run by Dr. Merriam. Roosevelt’s address was pure radical Americanism—especially the ten paragraphs dealing directly with conservation. That November, just a few weeks before the First Annual Message, John Muir had published the essay collection Our National Parks, which included his classic Atlantic Monthly articles “The American Forests” and “The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West.”37 Roosevelt had found them highly stimulating and persuasive. Roosevelt did not mention Muir in his annual message but nevertheless sided with Muir’s ecologically sensible crusade to save the great forests of the Pacific Slope. Roosevelt, in fact, liked to quote Muir, who wrote in 1897: “The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted.”38
Roosevelt was the new Delphic oracle of conservation, the political authority of the forestry movement,