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By Root 4322 0

its rain forests. Courtesy of the USDA, Roosevelt had learned that in 1824 Spain had established a forest conservation law, eventually administered by a public forestry commission, to protect the dim, mysterious, green-roofed jungles. Never one to turn down a good idea, Roosevelt felt that America’s forestry service could learn a few things about land management from these old, impressive Spanish laws and regulations. In 1876, only a few years after Yellowstone was established, King Alfonso XII of Spain had officially proclaimed the towering Luquillo forests and masses of vines (approximately twenty-five miles from San Juan), a “forest reserve.” Lush beyond words, the Luquillo forests received over 200 inches of rainfall annually. This meant that the dark-green ausubo trees and the wide variety of ferns received 100 billion gallons of freshwater a year. Commonly referred to by Puerto Ricans as “El Yunque”—which roughly translates as “Forest of the Clouds”—Roosevelt’s first national forest was a tropical paradise of the first order. Four distinctive forest types were here: the Tabonuco, Sierra Palm, Palo Colorado, and Cloud Forests. Peaks rose over 3,500 feet with trees blanketed with moss, algae, and bromeliads with bright red flowers. San Juanites would picnic and swim at La Mina Falls. But there was trouble in paradise. Throughout the Sabana River valley, like a ring of rust surrounding a jewel, was chronic deforestation due to reckless coco farmers and rubber merchants.

For a conservationist like President Roosevelt the 5,116-acre Luquillo forest was a biotic plum dropped into his lap. There are approximately 100 million species on earth, and half of them exist in tree foliage and trunks. Who knew what undiscovered species lurked in that largely un-chartered and unmapped jungle? There were, for example, eleven coqui species (i.e. tiny tree frogs as loud as an opera singer after it rained). Roosevelt immediately assigned a USDA team of botanists, ornithologists, and foresters to write and publish a scientific report on the Luquillo forest. Roosevelt wanted to know everything about it. (A forest ecology report was published in 1905, to Roosevelt’s great satisfaction.) Roosevelt marveled at the proliferation of tabonuco trees (which grew at low elevations and could be 100 feet tall), unusual wild palm fruits, and picturesque waterfalls as exotic as something Gauguin might have painted in the South Seas. Sound forest management would be needed to protect this wonderland where more than 240 types of trees coexisted. If the deforestation that had taken place in Haiti was allowed to occur in Puerto Rico, Roosevelt believed, San Juan would lose its fresh water supply. A real disaster. (Likewise, Pinchot was dispatched to the Philippines to write a forest inventory report.)

Roosevelt’s preservationist instinct concerning Puerto Rico didn’t stop with Luquillo. On July 22, 1902, seemingly arbitrarily, he declared Miraflores Island in the harbor of San Juan off-limits to anything but a forest reserve and a future quarantine hospital for U.S. Marines.37 In 1906 Roosevelt wrote to Pinchot, asking him to go to Puerto Rico quickly and “oversee what is being done in forestry.” Pinchot went and recommended that Culebra Island be declared a wilderness preserve.38 Following Pinchot’s recommendation—and that of the Florida Audubon Society—on February 27, 1909, just before leaving the White House, Roosevelt did something dramatic on behalf of Puerto Rican wildlife. By an executive order he declared the entire island of Culebra a national wildlife refuge. This crab-shaped dollop, about seventeen miles east of the mainland, was (and remains) a pristine reef with a staggering array of Technicolor coral and fish. He was impressed by the large colonies of brown boobies, laughing gulls, and sooty and noddy terns that lived on Culebra; and once he learned that more than 50,000 sea birds used it as a sanctuary he forbade the U.S. Navy to conduct further military exercises there. Even as ex-president, Roosevelt didn’t forget Puerto Rico. He worked