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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 rangersand 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
T HE E DUCATION OF A D ARWINIAN N ATURALIST
    I
    A t 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