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By Root 3821 0

President Roosevelt’s love of pelicans and other birds was a staunch belief in the healing powers of nature. That he had a mighty strong Thoreaurian “back to nature” aesthetic strain coursing through his veins becomes evident when we read his voluminous correspondence with Chapman, Hornaday, and other leading naturalists of his day, including John Burroughs, William Dutcher, George Bird Grinnell, John Muir, and Fairfield Osborn. Through a combination of book learning and field observations, Roosevelt had a keen sense of the importance of what would come to be known as biological diversity and deep ecology. His appreciation of the beauty of nongame birds like pelicans imbued him with a stout resoluteness to protect these endangered avians. To him the destruction of pelicans—and other nongame birds—was emblematic of industrialization run amok. In fact, with the exception of his family, birds probably touched him more deeply than anything else in his life.

Starting after the Civil War, Americans were faced with the revolutionary impact of Darwinism: everybody, it seemed, weighed in for or against evolutionary theory. To Roosevelt, who read the revolutionary On the Origin of Species as a young teenager, Charles Darwin was practically a god, the Isaac Newton of biology. Besides being an excellent scientist, Darwin was a fantastic imaginative writer who had wandered the world far and wide. Because of his intense interest in Darwin, naturalist studies became Roosevelt’s guiding principle. Only the Hebrew scriptures had a more profound impact on human societies than On the Origin of Species.20 Although there was a Creator, Roosevelt believed, the natural world was a series of accidents. Yet he also held a romantic view of the planet, a belief that Homo sapiens had a sacred obligation to protect its natural wonders and diverse species. He believed every American needed to get acquainted with mountains, deserts, rivers, and seas. One ethereal experience with nature, he believed, made the world whole and God’s omnipotence indisputable. “Roosevelt,” the historian John Morton Blum concluded, accepted the Darwinian belief in “evolution through struggle as an axiom in all his thinking. Life, for him, was strife.”21

II

After the Civil War, a new “gold rush” throughout America fomented the massacring of wildlife for profit and sport. Game laws were practically nonexistent in much of the interior west and south of the Mason-Dixon line up until the 1890s. Roosevelt was repulsed by firsthand dispatches he received about the abominable eradication of species throughout America. The glorious bison (once somewhere around thirty million to forty million strong) were nearly exterminated from the Great Plains, and jaguars along the Rio Grande simply disappeared into the Sierra Madre of Mexico. Pronghorn antelope could no longer outrun the market hunters and ranchers. The colorful Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) and the ubiquitous passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) were about to vanish forever. So was the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis). It was already too late for the great auk (Pinguinus impennis) and the Labrador duck (Camptorhynchus labradorius)—both species had been permanently eliminated from the planet.22 Using satire to open resistant minds to the conservation crusade, William T. Hornaday’s prophetic Our Vanishing Wild Life featured an illustration of a tombstone with “Sacred” carved on top and “Exterminated by Civilized Man 1840–1910” on the bottom. Scrolling downward on the tombstone, Hornaday listed birds made extinct by the epic brutality of humans—the Eskimo curlew, Gosse’s macaw, and purple Guadalupe parakeet among them.23

By the turn of the twentieth century the situation in Florida was particularly acute. Once deemed a vast swamp of little value, the state was experiencing a boom due to the fashion trendiness of its birds—especially their feathers. Ironically, the Florida birds’ splendid display of colorful plumes—nature’s design to draw female birds into a mating ritual—had done its job too