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

at, argued over, reached for, and, finally, reconciled, by one man across a lifetime––which this collection endeavors to illustrate.

Naturalist in Chief

“Theodore Roosevelt,” botanist David Fairchild writes, is “the first and last President…to have a biological sense of proportions.”⁹ More to the point, Roosevelt makes flesh two, long-dormant but nevertheless time-honored presidential tropes, namely “Naturalist in Chief” and “Farmer in Chief.” “No President since Jefferson,” notes Blackorby, “had brought to the Presidency the skill as a naturalist possessed by Roosevelt.”¹⁰ Lost and largely inapplicable since TR the rancher-naturalist took office after William McKinley's assassination, these two executive tropes now assert themselves anew, a fact implicit in environmental journalist Michael Pollan's 2008 New York Times open letter entitled “Farmer in Chief,”¹¹ in which he bids the new President-Elect consider the very same utilitarian demands on the nation's finite natural resources that Roosevelt and his Department of Agriculture engaged exactly one hundred years prior.

Not surprisingly, since peanut farmer Jimmy Carter, whose contact with the land the press caricatured more than earnestly appreciated, the image of the President as man-of-the-earth has been unceremoniously mothballed in favor of more politically expedient masks worn by Carter successors: actor, ex-athlete, war hero, businessman, and community organizer, to name an emblematic handful. Roosevelt's inimitable combination of these and other traits—wonk, warrior, wanderer, world traveler—compels anew, though the changing fashions in presidential scholarship have too often styled TR reductively as imperialist and bloviator. The Green Roosevelt, by contrast, makes explicit a fact widely acknowledged by leading historians, principally, as Paul Schullery puts it, “[Roosevelt's] work as a naturalist, as an outdoor writer…was overshadowed by the grander show of his political successes.”¹² This book aims to redress exactly this imbalance in presenting the environmental writings of a figure of many exuberant avocations. In presenting the reader with Roosevelt's own words on wilderness, wildlife and wild