The Green Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt in Appreciation of Wilder ...

places, it submits for consideration an alternate model of the public servant as outdoorsman, historian, author, intellectual, and engaged citizen rather than armchair quarterback—the antithesis of George W. Bush's self-professed descriptor as a “windshield rancher.” Considered in its proper historical context, and fleshed out in Roosevelt's own words, TR's precedent-setting model of enacted public service in general and impassioned environmental protection in particular takes new root.

Theodore Roosevelt, Writer-Naturalist

A handful of collections of Roosevelt's outdoor writings published to date have mostly followed two well-worn paths: Roosevelt the Sportsman and Roosevelt the Adventurer. And while it is true that TR, to his later dismay, sometimes allowed narratives of the hunt to trump his nature-minded observation,¹³ the two modes of engagement—one reflective and documentary—the other pursuant and participatory—must be considered across Roosevelt's dynamic life, not simply drawn from a young man's early, bombastic rhetoric. The seasoned Roosevelt proved much more circumspect, regretting his youthful habit of over-collecting specimens, “thereby committing an entirely needless butchery.”¹⁴ “I am happy to say,” TR added, “that there has been a great change for the better since then in our ways of looking at these things.”

While acknowledging the premise advanced by John Eliot and others, namely that the “vast gulf between hunter and nonhunter”¹⁵ is unlikely to be bridged, this anthology aims to show, to borrow another presidential phrase of more recent vintage, a kindler, gentler TR, a man who, importantly, rendered false the supposed divide between sportsman and naturalist. In fact, Roosevelt's great gift is that he transcended such pigeonholes, he of the “extraordinary ability to express almost simultaneously his admiration of an animal's beauty, the details of its natural history, his efforts to turn that animal into a trophy, and his outrage at the depredations of greedy and unsporting ‘game hogs’ who were destroying wildlife.”¹⁶ Moreover, this book aims, in its thematic and chronological organization, to trace the evolution in Roosevelt's thinking about