The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [457]
If Roosevelt had traveled (as modern visitors do) in a glass-bottom boat a mile off of Key West—over a vast tract of ominous shoals—a coral kingdom would suddenly have appeared before his eyes. As Herbert K. Job understood, this was an important zone for obtaining data on schools of luminous tetra. On closer inspection, Roosevelt would have seen a brown film, or membrane, which blanketed the entire ecosystem together as if a connecting tunic. Polyps with flower-bud mouths, towering barrel sponges, giant octopuses, jellyfish waving their tentacles, porcupine fish ballooning themselves up, angelfish with broad bands of shiny black sailing into and out of coral thickets, all lived in this Key West reef. Their lives were fragile. Roosevelt’s nature writings are nearly encyclopedic, but he never wrote about this ecosystem. He surely knew the difference between a lumpfish and a surgeonfish but when it came to differentiating coral species, he was probably clueless. What he did know, however, was that these Florida reefs needed protection, that scientists had still not discovered all the species and plants living on the vegetation-rich bottom of the ocean. The Florida Keys, as Wild Wings indicated, was an heirloom as valuable as Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon.
Roosevelt, moreover, considered these reefs national treasures not just because shimmering fish, rays, jellyfish, anemones, big sponges, lobsters, and bull sharks were scientifically fascinating. Roosevelt probably also understood the reefs protected American coasts by reducing “wave energy” from hurricanes and tropical storms. And Key West was the habitat of more than 250 bird species. The national imperative was, therefore, clear. To disregard scientific opinion, aesthetic value, and natural security in favor of fast dollars was, to his mind, reprehensible. When the Key West reservation celebrated its centennial in 2008, only about half of Florida’s coral reefs had even been mapped.48 This didn’t, however, mean that the reefs were secure from environmental degradation. A coalition of marine scientists feared that rising carbon emissions might kill off the reefs by 2050 or 2060. “Burning coal, oil and gas adds carbon dioxide—a heat-absorbing greenhouse gas—to the atmosphere,” Elizabeth Weise wrote in USA Today. “That interferes with the ability of coral, living organisms, to calcify their skeletons, and the coral begins to die.”49
IV
Each Florida wildlife refuge Roosevelt saved in 1908 had a fascinating story of its own. The last remaining rookeries along the lower Gulf Coast of Florida were documented by the National Association of Audubon Societies Secretary T. Gilbert Pearson in April of 1906, during a trip he made to visit two Tampa Bay bird reservations already established by Roosevelt—Indian Key and Passage Key—and to help the widow of murdered warden Guy Bradley buy a home in Key West. Pearson found a colony of brown pelicans and cormorants at Palma Sola, eight miles south of Tampa Bay and two large colonies of brown pelicans a few miles north of the Caloosahatchee River, presumably in Matlacha Pass, and Pine Island Sound. He also discovered two large colonies of Louisiana (tricolored) herons in Gasparilla Sound (Island Bay). He learned that the bird laws of Florida were hardly enforced. Only Guy Bradley kept the professional hunters at bay before his murder. Pelican colonies were constantly raided by locals for the eggs. Plume hunting caused the egrets to be so scarce that Pearson only saw a dozen in six weeks of observations. A local