Now, with this imperious decree of March 1903, the irrepressible naturalist was saying that a part of wild Florida should be saved for the sake of imperiled birds and endangered animals. President Roosevelt’s guiding eco-philosophy was that habitat preservation for animals mattered, completely. Any reasonable person, he believed, should understand this. In the new century, market hunters had an obligation to stop their rampage and bow to the forces of biological conservationism and utilitarian progressivism as far as land and wildlife management were concerned. Forests needed to be treasured as if life-giving shrines. Citizens had to rally to save remnant populations of wildlife everywhere before species extinction became epidemic. Biodiversity was apparent and essential in nature, Roosevelt believed, wherever open minds looked. A huge cornucopia of wild creatures and plants, diverse in purpose and structure, with beauty and utilitarianism beyond the most fertile imagination, was an omnipotent God’s blessed gift to America.
A relieved Chapman rejoiced when he heard Roosevelt’s verdict—“I So Declare It”—realizing this was a new precedent for wildlife protection. He vowed to convey to future generations that March 1903, was the turning point in the birds’ rights movement. True to his word, Chapman would laud Roosevelt in Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist (1908) and Autobiography of a Bird-Lover (1933). Filed away in Chapman’s personal papers on the fifth floor of the American Museum of Natural History, in fact, is the letter he wrote to Roosevelt in 1908, claiming that “The Naturalist President” had, “more than any other person,” inspired him to write Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist.42 In that long memoir, Chapman credited the “characteristic directness” of President Roosevelt with guaranteeing the “future safety of pelicans” for perpetuity.43 “Not only shall I enjoy the book, but what is more important, I feel the keenest pride in your having written it,” Roosevelt wrote to Chapman in gratitude. “I like to have an American do a piece of work really worth doing.”44
With that one sweeping “I So Declare It,” President Roosevelt, the big game hunter, had entered John Muir’s aesthetic preservation domain. And Pelican Island wasn’t a passing whim of a president showing off to ornithologist colleagues. It was an opening salvo on behalf of the natural environment. No longer would slackness prevail with regard to conservationism, for Roosevelt—the wilderness warrior—would coordinate the disparate elements in the U.S. government around a common “great wildlife crusade.” Perhaps the historian Kathleen Dalton in The Strenuous Life summed up Roosevelt’s evolved attitude toward biota circa 1903 best: “Despite his official commitment to the policy of conservation of natural resources for use by humans he held preservationist and romantic attachments to nature and animals far stronger than the average conservationist.” 45
On March 14, 1903 President Roosevelt officially signed the Executive Order saving Pelican Island. By slipping the federal bird reservation into the domain of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as Charles DuBois of the Interior Department had suggested, T.R. was hoping to avert the notice or controversy that keeping it in the Interior Department would have generated. Whenever he was faced with an obstacle, Roosevelt liked figuring out a way to circumvent it. Remarkably, T.R.’s Executive Order sailed through the bureaucracy in just two weeks. Legally it had to be approved by both Agriculture and Interior before the president could sign it.46 Without any note of toughness—and only fifty words long—the order was a seminal moment in U.S. Wildlife History: “It is hereby ordered that Pelican Island in Indian River in section nine, township thirty-one south, range thirty-nine east, State of Florida, be, and it is hereby, reserved and set apart for the use of the Department of Agriculture as a preserve and breeding ground for native birds.”47
The first unit of the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System was now a reality. And Sebastian, Florida—the hamlet closest to Pelican Island—was its birthplace. Eighteen months later, Roosevelt created the second federal bird reservation, at Breton Island, Louisiana. By 2003, when Pelican Island celebrated its centennial, the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System comprised more than 540 wildlife refuges on more than 95 million acres. Taken together, this woodlands, bayous, desert scapes, bird rocks, tundra, prairie, and marshland make up 4 percent of all United States territory.48 At the time, however, the Pelican Island declaration garnered very little national attention—the New York Times never mentioned it, nor did the Jacksonville Florida Times-Union.49 But future generations took serious notice; the impetus for a National Wildlife System had sprung to life. Saving Pelican Island initiated Theodore Roosevelt’s evolving idea of creating greenbelts of federal wildlife refuges everywhere the American flag flew. Very quickly these refugees grew exponentially in numbers under Roosevelt’s influence until the map of the lower forty-eight states was vastly altered. From this single small island in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon grew the world’s greatest system of land for wildlife. In the remaining six years he was in office, Roosevelt created fifty more wildlife refuges. Writing in his well-received An Autobiography (1913), Roosevelt explained how his ambition hardened to create these refuges without his ever making an on-site inspection trip:
The establishment by Executive Order between March 14, 1903, and March 4, 1909, of fifty-one National Bird Reservations distributed in seventeen States and Territories from Puerto Rico to Hawaii and Alaska. The creation of these reservations at once placed the United States in the front rank in the world work of bird protection. Among these reservations are the celebrated Pelican Island rookery in Indian River, Florida; The Mosquito Inlet Reservation, Florida, the northernmost home of the manatee; the extensive marshes bordering Klamath and Malheur Lakes in Oregon, formerly the scene of slaughter of ducks for market and ruthless destruction of plume birds for the millinery trade; the Tortugas Key, Florida, where, in connection with the Carnegie Institute, experiments have been made on the homing instinct of birds; and the great bird colonies on Laysan and sister islets in Hawaii, some of the greatest colonies of sea birds in the world.50
Michael McCurdy, well-known illustrator of John Muir reprint books, pays homage to President Roosevelt’s saving of Florida’s brown and white pelican rookeries.
Illustration of T.R. petting a brown pelican. (Courtesy of Michael McCurdy)
What Roosevelt doesn’t mention in An Autobiography was the backlash against his creation of bird refuges. The plumers and the millinery industry fought back, appealing to public opinion, lobbying Congress, and, in the most extreme cases, shooting at bird wardens. A battle royal ensued between powerful exploiters of nature versus beleaguered preservationists. Determined to win the so-called Feather Wars against plumers and market hunters—not to give an inch and to use the full force of the U.S. federal government as his arsenal—Roosevelt declared Passage Key, another brown pelican nesting area in Florida, the third federal refuge in October 1905.* This sixty-three-acre island was located offshore from Saint Petersburg, Florida, at the entrance to Tampa Bay. Roosevelt had studied it in 1898, when his legendary Rough Riders were waiting to transfer to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War, so he knew firsthand the high quantity of both migratory and year-round birds using it.51
Now as president, with another “I So Declare It” decree on Florida’s behalf along the Gulf Coast, Roosevelt had helped every bird at Passage Key to continue to survive and thrive in its marine habitat. Slowly but steadily, the federal bird reservations grew. Many of his first reserves were in Florida—Indian Key, Mosquito Inlet, Tortugas Keys, Key West, Pine Island, Matlacha Pass, Palma Sole, and Island Bay. Roosevelt’s “Great Wildlife Crusade” also protected colonies of white-rumped sandpipers, black-bellied plovers, and piping plovers on the East Timbalier Island preserve in Louisiana; provided safe nesting grounds for herring gulls on the Huron Islands Reservation in Lake Superior three miles off the shore of Michigan; and offered sanctuary to the sooty and noddy terms on the Dry Tortugas Reservation in the Gulf of Mexico. At the Pathfinder Federal Bird Reservation in Wyoming—created on February 25, 1909, just befo
re T.R. left office—the president not only saved an essential waterfowl migration stopover place on the western edge of the Central Flyway but also preserved herds of pronghorns, the fastest mammal in North America.
IV
When writing or lecturing about American birds Roosevelt often became lyrical, sometimes even songlike. His sparkling writings are often good enough to put him in the company of such first-rate naturalist writers as John Muir, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Louise Erdrich, Peter Matthiessen, and John Burroughs. In 2008 the nature writer Bill McKibben included Roosevelt’s 1904 speech at the Grand Canyon in Library of America’s American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau.52 “To lose the chance to see frigate-birds soaring in circles above the storm,” Roosevelt wrote in A Book Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916), “or a file of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset, or myriad terns flashing in the bright light of midday as they hover in the shifting maze above the beach—why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.”53
During his presidency, Roosevelt also instituted the first federal irrigation projects, national monuments, and conservation commissions. He quadrupled America’s forest reserves and, recognizing the need to save the buffalo from extinction, he made Oklahoma’s Wichita Forest and Montana’s National Bison Range big game preserves. Others were created to protect moose and elk. To cap it off he established five national parks, protecting such “heirlooms” as Oregon’s iridescent blue Crater Lake, South Dakota’s subterranean wonder Wind Cave, and the Anasazi cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado. Courtesy of an executive decree, Roosevelt saved the Grand Canyon—a 1,900-square-mile hallowed site in Arizona—from destructive zinc and copper mining interests. The doughty scrawl of his signature, a conservationist weapon, set aside for posterity (or for “the people unborn”* as he put it) over 234 million acres, almost the size of the Atlantic coast states from Maine to Florida (or equal to one out of every ten acres in the United States, including Alaska.) 54 All told, Roosevelt’s acreage was almost half the landmass Thomas Jefferson had acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.55
Full of environmental rectitude, Roosevelt turned saving certain species into a crusade. Unafraid of opposition, always watchful of political timing, and constantly ready with a riposte, Roosevelt acted with the prowling boldness of a mountain lion on the hunt. Suddenly, before people knew what hit them, strange-sounding place-names like Snoqualmie, Nebo, and Kootenai were national forest reserves. Because Florida was known as a bird haven, perhaps turning Pelican Island and Passage Key into Federal Bird Reserves wasn’t too shocking. But imagine how perplexed people were when Roosevelt ventured into the supposedly arid desert territories of Arizona and New Mexico, establishing federal bird reservations at Salt River and Carlsbad. Roosevelt believed there was no type of American topography that posterity wouldn’t enjoy for recreational purposes and spiritual uplift: extinct volcanoes, limestone caverns, oyster bars, tropical rain forests, artic tundra, pine woods—the list goes on and on. As Roosevelt noted when dedicating a Yellowstone Park gateway in 1903, the “essential feature” of federal parks was their “essential democracy,” to be shared for “people as a whole.” 56
With the power of the bully pulpit, Roosevelt—repeatedly befuddling both market hunters and insatiable developers—issued “I So Declare It” orders over and over again. Refusing to poke at the edges of the conservation movement like his Republican presidential successors, Roosevelt entered the fray double-barreled, determined to save the American wilderness from deforestation and unnecessary duress. The limited (though significant) forest reserve acts of the Harrison, Cleveland, and McKinley administrations were magnified 100 times over once Roosevelt entered the White House. From the beginning to the end of his presidency, Roosevelt, in fact, did far more for the long-term protection of wilderness than all of his White House predecessors combined. In a fundamental way, Roosevelt was a conservation visionary, aware of the pitfalls of hyper-industrialization, fearful that speed-logging, blast-rock mining, overgrazing, reckless hunting, oil drilling, population growth, and all types of pollution would leave the planet in biological peril. “The natural resources of our country,” President Roosevelt warned Congress, the Supreme Court, and the state governors at a conservation conference he had called to session, “are in danger of exhaustion if we permit the old wasteful methods of exploiting them longer to continue.”57
Wildlife protection and forest conservation, Roosevelt insisted, were a moral imperative and represented the high-water mark of his entire tenure at the White House. In an age when industrialism and corporatism were running largely unregulated, and dollar determinism was holding favor, Roosevelt, the famous Wall Street trustbuster, went after the “unintelligent butchers” of his day with a ferocity unheard of in a U.S. president. As if recruiting soldiers for battle, Roosevelt embraced rangers and wardens far and wide—even in Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico—insisting that the time was ripe to protect American wildlife from destructive insouciance. By reorienting and redirecting Washington, D.C. bureaucracy toward conservation, Roosevelt’s crusade to save the American wilderness can now be viewed as one of the greatest presidential initiatives between Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I. It was Roosevelt—not Muir or Pinchot—who set the nation’s environmental mechanisms in place and turned conservationism into a universalist endeavor.
“Surely our people do not understand even yet the rich heritage that is theirs,” Roosevelt said in his book Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, in 1905. “There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon in the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children’s children forever with their majestic beauty unmarred.”58
Theodore Roosevelt spent his adult life crusading on behalf of the national parks and monuments. Here he is at Yosemite in April 1903.
T.R. at Yosemite National Park. (Courtesy of the National Park Service)
CHAPTER ONE
THE EDUCATION OF A DARWINIAN NATURALIST
I
At a very early age, Theodore Roosevelt started studying the anatomy of more than 600 species of birds in North America. You might say that his natural affinity for ornithology was part of his metabolism. As a child Roosevelt became a skilled field birder, acquiring a fine taxidermy collection while recording firsthand observations in note-books now housed at Harvard University.1 And it wasn’t just birds. When Roosevelt was four or five years old he saw a fox in a book and declared it “the face of God.”2 This wasn’t merely a flight of fancy. The mere sight of a jackrabbit, flying squirrel, or box turtle caused Roosevelt to light up with glee. The multilayered puzzle that was Roosevelt, in fact, was titillated by the very sound of species names in both English and Latin—wolverines (Gulo gulo), red-bellied salamanders (Taricha rivularis), snapping mackerel (Pomatomus saltatrix), and so on. At times revealing a Saint Francis complex regarding animals, Roosevelt wanted to understand all living matter. “Roosevelt began his life as a naturalist, and he ended his life as a naturalist,” wrote the historian Paul Russell Cutright. “Throughout a half century of strenuous activity his interest in wildlife, though subject to ebb and flow, was never abandoned at any time.”3
Roosevelt was born on October 27, 1858, in the noisy hubbub of gaslit New York City. He struggled with ill health well into adulthood. “I was,” Roosevelt later wrote, “a wretched mite suffering acutely with asthma.”4 Often wheezing, the young Roosevelt found physical relief by simply observing creatures’ habits and breathing fresh air. Nature served as a curative agent for Roosevelt, as it’s been known to do for millions afflicted with respiratory illness. “There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness,” he wrote, “that can reveal its
mystery, its melancholy and its charm.”5 Literally from childhood until his death in January 1919—following his arduous journey down the River of Doubt through Brazil’s uncharted Amazon jungle—he epitomized Ralph Waldo Emerson’s criterion for being an incurable naturalist. “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other,” Emerson explained, “who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”6
As a precocious child Theodore Roosevelt became an amateur ornithologist. Trained by one of John James Audubon’s student taxidermists, Roosevelt started his own natural history museum in New York City to show off his specimens. Later in life Roosevelt argued that parents had a moral obligation to make sure their children didn’t suffer from nature deficiency.
A precocious young T.R. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)
Just over a year after Roosevelt’s birth, the British naturalist Charles Darwin published his great scientific treatise On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Deeply personal in tone, without esoteric graphs or undecipherable tables, On the Origin of Species set off heated global debate over religious beliefs that underlay the then current theories of biology. Darwin’s great idea was evolution by natural selection, a death knell to the ancien régime of rudimentary biology. Although the Darwinian catchphrase “survival of the fittest”—which was first coined by the economist Herbert Spencer and which Roosevelt adopted practically as a creed—didn’t appear until a revised 1869 edition, by the time Theodore was ten or eleven the biologist was his touchstone, a Noah-like hero. He was enthralled by the idea of collecting species in faraway places, and in his youthful imagination the Garden of Eden was replaced by Darwin’s Galápagos Islands. (Almost twenty years before On the Origin of Species raised tantalizing questions about the Creation, Darwin had written about circumnavigating the world collecting specimens of animals and plants—both alive and dead—in The Voyage of the Beagle). Once Roosevelt grasped the concept of natural selection his bird-watching instincts went into overdrive. Suddenly he understood that the biological world wasn’t static. Observed similarities between living creatures were often a product of shared evolutionary history. With Darwinian eyes he now studied every bird beak and eye stripe, hoping to reconcile anomalies in the natural world.7 As an adult he would often carry On the Origin of Species with him in his saddlebag or cartridge case while on hunts.8
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