Theodore Roosevelt Made Conservation a Conservative Cause, and It Still Is

If you wanted a man to represent the environmental movement, you would not start with a fellow who shot a rhinoceros. And yet the greatest conservationist in American history carried a rifle, wore a ranch hat, and spent more nights in the saddle than most of his critics have spent outdoors. Hold that thought, because it tells you something that the modern debate has forgotten: conservation was a conservative idea before anyone gave it a lobbying budget.

Let me make that case, and let me make it the way it deserves to be made, with dates. Theodore Roosevelt did not discover that nature was worth protecting. He discovered, in the Dakota Badlands, that a nation can spend its inheritance faster than it earns it. His answer was stewardship. That word is the root of what conservatives have always meant by conserving anything.

The Terms: Conservation, Preservation and Stewardship

Three words, because the argument depends on telling them apart.

Conservation means the wise use of natural resources so they last: timber cut so that the forest regrows, game taken so that the herd survives, water used so that the stream keeps flowing. Preservation means setting land aside from use, leaving it as it is. Stewardship is the moral idea underneath conservation: that we hold the land as trustees for the people who come after us.

Roosevelt's circle included both camps, and the tension between them runs through the whole story. Gifford Pinchot, the forester, was the great champion of conservation as wise use. John Muir, the naturalist, was the great champion of preservation. Roosevelt admired both, camped with Muir in Yosemite in 1903, and kept his own course between them. We will return to where the line should fall.

The Badlands: A Rancher Learns the Cost of Waste

Roosevelt first traveled to the Dakota Territory in 1883 to hunt bison, which were already vanishing from the plains. He bought an interest in a cattle operation, the Maltese Cross ranch, and in 1884 he established a second ranch, the Elkhorn, on the Little Missouri River. He ran cattle, rode in roundups, and served as a deputy sheriff. By 1887 he had begun selling off his cattle interests.

That was the education. He had seen the bison nearly wiped out by a market that valued a hide and nothing else. He had seen land damaged by overgrazing. He had seen, in the most practical way, what happens when a resource is treated as limitless. A man who has watched an overgrazed range fail does not need a lecture on the limits of nature.

Note the order: the rancher came first, the conservationist second. Roosevelt did not love the outdoors in spite of using it. He loved it because he used it, and he knew what was at stake if the use was reckless.

The Boone and Crockett Club, 1887

In 1887 Roosevelt co-founded the Boone and Crockett Club, with George Bird Grinnell among the leading figures. The club was an association of hunters and sportsmen, and its program was a conservation program: protect the big game, protect the habitat, enforce the laws, and promote the ethic of fair chase, the principle that the hunter gives the animal a fair opportunity to escape.

This is the point so often missed. The first organized American conservation movement was a hunters' movement. Hunters had the strongest interest in seeing that game survived, and they had the money and the political connections to act. Among the club's successes was the push to protect Yellowstone from poaching and commercial exploitation, and the legislative groundwork for the Lacey Act of 1900, a landmark federal law against interstate trafficking in illegally taken wildlife. The link between hunters and wildlife survival is the subject of Hunters and Anglers Pay for American Conservation and Few People Know It, and the habits of the sportsman-conservationist run through Duck stamps and the Dingell-Johnson Act, conservation the sportsman paid for.

Pelican Island and the Presidential Pen

Roosevelt became President in September 1901 after McKinley's assassination, and he used the office as no predecessor had on behalf of the land. On March 14, 1903, he signed an executive order setting aside Pelican Island, in Florida's Indian River, as a federal bird reservation. It was the first such reservation, the beginning of what became the National Wildlife Refuge System. The island's nesting birds needed protection. By the end of his presidency the number of bird reservations reached into the fifties.

Think about the scale of that choice for a moment. A President in 1903 looked at a sandbar full of pelicans, a bird that cannot vote, donate or file a lawsuit, and decided it was worth a signature. Today it takes an environmental impact statement to move a fence post. Pelican Island took one pen, and the pelicans, to my knowledge, filed no objections.

A fair point about method. Pelican Island was created by executive order, on the President's own authority, acting under no specific statute for a bird refuge. A conservative who cares about the separation of powers should note that, and I will return to it below. For now, the lesson is that Roosevelt could see a clear public good, a vanishing colony, and used the tools available.

The Forest Service and Pinchot, 1905

In 1905 Congress passed the Transfer Act, moving the forest reserves from the Interior Department's care to the Department of Agriculture, and the Forest Service was born, with Gifford Pinchot as its first chief. Pinchot's idea was wise use: the national forests were to be managed for timber, water and grazing, for the long-term benefit of the American people.

I want to dwell on the long view. That is the conservative instinct. Pinchot and Roosevelt were not asking the nation to stop using its resources. They were asking it to use them as a family uses an estate, with the heirs in mind. Edmund Burke wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 that society is a partnership "between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." Replace "society" with "the national forest" and you have Pinchot's philosophy in Burke's words. Conservation is intergenerational partnership applied to timber and trout.

By the time Roosevelt left office in March 1909, the forest reserves had grown to roughly 150 national forests, along with five national parks, 18 national monuments under the new Antiquities Act of 1906, and a number of game preserves. The commonly cited total is roughly 230 million acres placed under federal protection during his presidency. Roosevelt himself was proud of the record, and he left the White House for a long African expedition collecting specimens for the Smithsonian, which tells you he regarded the field and the museum as parts of one project. I give the acreage as the standard accounting, and you can check it with the Forest Service and the National Park Service, which publish their own histories.

The Governors' Conference and the Idea of an Inventory

In May 1908 Roosevelt convened a conference at the White House on the conservation of natural resources, bringing together governors, cabinet members, scientists and industrialists. It was an unusual event, a President calling the states to the table, not to command them but to take stock. The conference led to the National Conservation Commission, which produced the first inventory of the nation's natural resources: forests, minerals, waters and soils.

Here is a Founding-era instinct at work. Roosevelt was not ordering the states to comply. He was asking the governors, who held the sovereign authority within their borders, to join a common effort, and many states formed their own conservation commissions in response. That is cooperative federalism in its healthier form, a national conversation with states as partners, and it contrasts with the top-down approach we see too often today. The states do experiment better than Washington, as Federalism Lets Fifty States Experiment, and the Constitution Planned It argues.

The Conservative Critique of Roosevelt, Stated Fairly

Now I owe you the other half, because Roosevelt is not above criticism and a good conservative says so.

First, the method. In 1907 Congress, led by Western members who thought Roosevelt had set aside too much, passed a rider limiting the President's power to create new forest reserves in several Western states. Roosevelt signed the bill, but before doing so he had his forester prepare proclamations creating new forests, and he signed them first. Roughly sixteen million acres were added in a few days. They became known as the "midnight forests." As a political maneuver it was brilliant. As a matter of constitutional restraint, it was an executive using the last moment of a power Congress was about to take away. The Antiquities Act, which Roosevelt used generously, says to protect the "smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected." Whether that limit has been honored since is a live question, and it is examined in The Antiquities Act Says Smallest Area Compatible, So Read the Text Again.

Second, the scale. Today the federal government owns a very large share of the land in the Western states, and local people feel it. The Property Clause of Article IV, Section 3 gives Congress "Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States," and its use is discussed in Why Washington Owns Most of Nevada and What the Property Clause Allows. A conservative can honor Roosevelt's goal and still ask whether permanent federal ownership of vast tracts is the right model for stewardship, or whether state and private management would do better in some places.

Third, the line between wise use and lock-it-up. Roosevelt's friend Pinchot and his other friend Muir fell out over the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite, which San Francisco wanted to dam for its water. The fight ran past Roosevelt's presidency, and the Raker Act of 1913, under President Wilson, allowed the dam. Pinchot favored it; Muir thought it a desecration. The episode shows that conservation is never a single policy. It is a continuing argument about use and restraint, and conservatives should have a view in it.

Where the Line Falls: A Conservative Test

Here is the principle I would draw from the record, stated in numbered form.

1. Use is not the enemy. Roosevelt hunted, ranched and logged, and he saw those as consistent with conservation, provided the use did not destroy the resource. A policy that treats human use as a sin has left Roosevelt behind.
2. Waste is the enemy. A resource thrown away, a forest cut without replanting, a species hunted for its feathers: that is what the conservationists opposed. The conservative objection to waste is as old as thrift.
3. Those with a stake are the best stewards. The hunters of the Boone and Crockett Club, the ranchers, the farmers and the foresters have the strongest incentive to keep the resource alive. Policy should enlist them rather than evict them.
4. Congress should decide big questions, in the open. Roosevelt's energy was admirable. The structure of a republic is that large permanent decisions about public land belong to the legislature, which can be held accountable.
5. Mix of ownership is a feature. Federal, state, tribal, private and nonprofit land can each play a role. The private option, as in Keep the Farm a Farm With a Conservation Easement, Step by Step, deserves more room than it gets.

Why This Is a Conservative Cause

The deepest reason has little to do with any one program. Conservatism is the habit of receiving something good from the past and handing it on in better shape. We say that about the Constitution, about the family, about the church and the town. A national park, a forest, a river, a herd of elk are inheritances of the same kind. The people who passed them to us did not have to; they chose restraint. We should answer with the same.

Roosevelt put it in terms of duty. He treated the nation's natural wealth as a trust, and he held that the generation in charge owed it to those who follow to hand it on undiminished. That is not a left-wing idea or a right-wing idea. It is a decent one. If the modern environmental conversation has become polarized, it is partly because conservatives left the field. We have the better tradition. We have the rancher, the hunter and the farmer, whose livelihoods depend on a living land. We can take back the word.

The case in brief

1. Theodore Roosevelt's conservation grew out of ranching and hunting in the Dakota Badlands, where he saw waste ruin a resource and a market nearly destroy the bison.
2. The Boone and Crockett Club (1887), Pelican Island (1903) and the Forest Service under Gifford Pinchot (1905) made conservation a practical program of wise use, not a ban on use.
3. Roosevelt's roughly 230 million acres of protected land came partly through executive action, such as the midnight forests of 1907, which conservatives should examine for how they respect the separation of powers.
4. Burke's partnership of "those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born" is the conservative root of conservation: stewardship of an inheritance.
5. The sound conservative line favors use over waste, local stakeholders, legislative decisions and a mix of private and public ownership.

What you can do: find the national forest, wildlife refuge or state wildlife area nearest you, read its public management plan, and attend or comment on its next planning meeting.