Review: The Wilderness Warrior
Sunday in The Baltimore Sun, Cornell University professor Glenn C. Altschuler reviews The Wilderness Warrior, a new biography that focuses on Theodore Roosevelt's push to preserve America's wilderness. Here's an excerpt:
In his magnificent and magisterial biography, Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, celebrates Roosevelt, a Harvard trained zoologist, as a "pro-forest, pro-buffalo, cougar-infatuated, socialistic land conservationist." Between 1901 and 1909, "that damn cowboy" set aside 234 million acres of Wild America for posterity, creating hundreds of federal bird reservations, national game preserves, forests, parks, and monuments. More than his trust-busting or his Nobel Peace Prize, Brinkley demonstrates, these actions should secure Roosevelt’s reputation as one of the greatest presidents in American history.
By mixing Darwinian analysis with cowboy campfire yarns, and establishing himself as a gun-toting Easterner embodying a western ethos, Brinkley writes, Roosevelt was able to persuade congressmen, bureaucrats in the departments of Agriculture and Interior, and millions of Americans that saving "natural wonders, wildlife species, timberlands, and diverse habitats was a patriotic endeavor." When he couldn’t, he went beyond his legal authority (to preserve The Grand Canyon as a public park) or issued "I So Declare It" executive orders.
Brinkley is too good an historian to ignore inconsistencies and contradictions in Roosevelt’s conservationist philosophies and policies. But he tends to downplay them. Acknowledging, for example, that the president’s penchant for big-game hunting "was troublesome" to Americans concerned about cruelty to animals, he indicates that the justification — hunters participated directly in ecological cycles of birth and death — was "more intellectually honest than all the bleatings" of critics. Despite his "blood lust," he adds, Roosevelt fought for wildlife refuges, seasonal hunting, hunting licenses, bag limits, and strict regulations against killing young animals or females during the mating season. ...
Roosevelt was, no doubt, a larger-than-life figure, large enough to contain contradictions, and arrogant enough to ignore them. Although he didn’t always take into account the consequences of hyper-industrialization, he deserves the appellation Brinkley bestows on him in this splendid biography: "a conservation visionary," who entered "the fray double-barreled," at a time in which hunting, drilling, population growth, and pollution were unregulated, and used the powers of the presidency, as none before him had, to preserve America’s precious resources "with their majestic beauty unmarred."
While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, 
Comments
On C-span Mr. Brinkley mentioned the Badlands of "North Dakota," where T.R. went to recover and grieve from some death in the family? I think he may have meant "South Dakota."
Other states may claim Badlands, Wyoming does, but the real deal is a little bit west of the Black Hills. An incredible sandstone formation, unequal in the world....and I am assuming the endless grasslands of North Dakota have nothing like it....jojo h.
Posted by: john harper | August 11, 2009 8:42 AM
Wait a minute....wilderness warrior???????
You're talkin about SARAH PALIN!!!!!!!
Posted by: david eberhardt | November 18, 2009 6:44 AM