The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [298]
337,300
Niobrara, Nebraska
123,779
Dismal River, Nebraska
85,123
Santa Catalina, Arizona
155,520
Mount Graham, Arizona
118,600
Lincoln, New Mexico
500,000
Chiricahua, Arizona
169,600
Madison, Montana
736,000
Little Belt Mountains, Montana
501,000
Alexander Archipelago, Alaska
4,506,240
Absaroka, Montana
1,311,600*51
On December 2, 1902, amid this flurry of national forest legislation, Roosevelt, in his Second Annual Message to Congress, defended the legality of his thirteen new reserves with the passion of John Muir. This generation of Americans, he said, had a duty of handing down natural wonders, not squandering them. Whether it was the temperate rain forests of Alaska; the dazzlingly colorful fall broadleafs of the Great Lakes; the pine barrens of New Jersey; the Joshua tree terrains of the Southwest; or the supreme cottonwoods, tupelos, and bald cypress of America’s river bottoms, citizens needed to protect their trees for aesthetic and other reasons. To Roosevelt a single limb of a many-branched oak had more true wisdom than all the congressmen in session combined—except, of course, for Lacey, who was as big as a forest in the president’s mind. Furthermore, wildlife survival was, quite simply, completely dependent on trees. In line with the mission of the Boone and Crockett Club and the Audubon societies, Roosevelt also wanted written assurances from Congress that the fish along the White River, the wild turkeys of Wisconsin, and the walruses of Alaska on federal lands would be unmolested in perpetuity. “Legislation should be provided for the protection of the game, and the wild creatures generally, on the forest reserves,” he said. “The senseless slaughter of game, which can by judicious protection be permanently preserved on our National reserves for the people as a whole, should be stopped at once.”52
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PAUL KROEGEL AND THE FEATHER WARS OF FLORIDA
I
Starting in March 1903 President Roosevelt engaged in a Herculean effort to save the bird rookeries of Florida. Playing the role of a modern-day Noah, the committed Audubonist insisted that every bird species in Florida was a world unto itself, a masterpiece of Darwinian evolution. And these birds needed habitats to survive. Even though the term “biodiversity” would not be coined until about 1985, Roosevelt had an intuitive grasp of the concept. He worried that for some species in Florida—a hot spot for biodiversity—the death rate was far exceeding the birthrate, threatening them with extinction. The initial showdown over the future of Florida’s wildlife took place at Pelican Island, a teardrop-shaped Atlantic Coast islet situated three nautical miles from the hamlet of Sebastian. The island was home to the last breeding colony of brown pelicans on the east coast of Florida. The Indian River Lagoon basin, of which Pelican Island was a part, contained some 4,300 species of plants and animals—more species than any other estuary in the United States—including 685 types of fish and 370 bird species.1
Of all the Florida avians, it seemed that the brown pelican was Roosevelt’s personal favorite. These pelicans were to him like Keats’s nightingale or Wordsworth’s cuckoo. The brown pelicans were the finest fishermen Roosevelt knew—a far cry better than any human. That pelicans were such superb natural fishermen, however, may have enthralled the president, but it irritated the dickens out of rural Floridians. Since brown pelicans had an almost insatiable appetite for scooping up finned prey, Florida fishermen saw these birds as unwelcome competition, a hindrance to their livelihood, like woodpeckers devouring corn or mockingbirds incessantly pecking at grapevines. The mere sight of brown pelicans—flying over the low gray river with pouches chock-full of fish to feed their nestlings—made fishermen reach for a gun. The pelicans’ fishing grounds were supposed to be humans’ fishing grounds. Therefore, the pelicans had to be eradicated. What locusts were to a Nebraskan