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

environmental prescience would serve as “one of the greatest memorials to [his] farsightedness,” to which Roosevelt replied, “Bully. I had rather have it than a hundred stone monuments.”² In fact, Roosevelt would have both—a lasting reputation for environmental protection and timeless stone monuments at Mount Rushmore and elsewhere built to honor his dramatic public policy initiatives. He became the nation's original Green president and, as the first to publish a book while in the nation's highest office, its first true presidential author. These two braided strands, naturalist-executive and writer, serve as a twin focus for this singular book. Indeed, this anthology springs from two key assertions made by historian E. C. Blackorby: first, that “Americans do not fully appreciate their indebtedness to their first conservationist president”³ and, second, that as much of Roosevelt's interest in and writing about Green politics and environmental protection took place before and after his presidency as in it. The Green Roosevelt, then, recollects for the contemporary reader a longitudinal cross section of TR's ecological writings from his teen years to his later-life zoological expeditions. In sum, these letters, speeches, memoirs, magazine articles, personal essays, executive addresses, pamphlets, field notes, diaries, and childhood stories demonstrate the variety of methods by which Roosevelt offered a “wilderness cure” for the “national malaise”⁴ Richard Louv would later label “nature-deficit disorder.”⁵ “Had Roosevelt done nothing else as President,” R. L. Wilson writes “his greatness would still have been ensured by what he did in conservation.”⁶

And what President Theodore Roosevelt meant by “conservation” in the early 1900s was something as yet beyond the country's ability to grasp, something which even to Roosevelt must have felt gestural and uncertain and grand, driven as much by gut and instinct, urgency and pragmatics, as by book-learning. In effect, Roosevelt's writings on wilderness, wildlife, and wild places would be the divining rod by which the concept—conservation, a word Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris aptly describes as “general and…philosophical…religious even”—would be fathomed by Roosevelt himself.⁷ TR's body of work articulated a notion that became more nearly a writ, one “preaching the common sanctity of wood and water and earth and flora and fauna.”⁸ It is this very sanctity—gestured