The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [485]
The Lewis and Clark National Monument, which overlooked the Lewis and Clark Trail along the Jefferson River, was Roosevelt’s salute to an earlier age of American exploration. Aside from setting aside a unique cavern, Roosevelt took distinct pleasure in reintroducing the two great American explorers to popular consciousness.
On May 13, Roosevelt brought the Conference of Governors at the White House to order. As he had promised in Memphis during his inspection tour of the Mississippi River, nearly every governor summoned (from both states and territories) attended the conference.55 Roosevelt had asked each governor to bring along with him three competent advisers on natural resource management.56 The nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court were also in attendance—something unprecedented for a blue-ribbon commission. In addition to the politicians and judges, Roosevelt had invited scores of biologists, geologists, ornithologists, and advocates of forestry science to offer their informed input. “Any right thinking father earnestly desires and strives to leave his son both an untarnished name and a reasonable equipment for the struggle of life,” Roosevelt had said, as a rationale for the conference. “So this Nation as a whole should earnestly desire and strive to leave to the next generation the National honor unstained and the National resources unexhausted.”57
When Roosevelt took to the podium in the East Wing on the morning of May 13 for the opening session of the conference of governors, there was a palpable sense of unity among the attendees. The White House had given a multiple-course dinner party the previous evening, so the governors and the other dignitaries were in a fine mood. According to Plutarch’s Lives, Alexander was once asked if he craved any service and snapped in reply, “Stand a little out of my sun.” That’s how it was for Roosevelt that afternoon. Starting with Genesis, Roosevelt went on to relate how civilization began on the banks of the Nile and Euphrates. Organic evolution was always on the march. Leaping over millennia, be swung his oration quickly to the founders of America at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1776. Then, the natural resources of the young country, ranging from anthracite coal to vast timberlands to streams full of fish, had seemed limitless. But owing to unwise land management, America was losing its gifts. Utilization of mineral fuels and metals had transformed America into a steel empire, but overmining was turning the nation’s wilderness into an eyesore. “The mere increase in our consumption of coal during 1907 over 1906,” Roosevelt warned, “exceeded the total consumption in 1876, the Centennial Year.”
Roosevelt’s speech was a kaleidoscope of times and places: here were Kentuckians felling forests and Mississippians watching as their riverine modifications washed the delta away. It was a quasi-public lecture on causes and effects of land misuse. He included many doomsday predictions about the depletion of natural resources (Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise” speech of 1978 seems cheery by comparison). Here were new and frightening concepts: timber famine, choked rivers, denuded fields, obstructed navigation, exhausted oil fields. But Roosevelt also wanted to introduce phrases like “sustainable growth,” “renewable resources,” and “a future undiminished for our children” into the vocabulary of the twentieth century. “We have become great in a material sense because of the lavish use of our resources, and we have just reason to be proud of our growth,” Roosevelt said. “But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen