Public lands already belong to “the people.” And we have a he-man Republican rancher to thank for it [View all]

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News flash: Our public lands already belong to “the people.” And we have a he-man Republican rancher to thank for it.

BY JEFF TURRENTINE


Teddy Roosevelt in Rough Rider uniform in 1898, from Harper's Pictorial History of the War with Spain

Teddy Roosevelt in Rough Rider uniform in 1898, from Harper's Pictorial History of the War with Spain
Given that the armed occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge have holed themselves up in the facility’s visitor center for almost a week—and given that they’ve indicated their willingness to remain there indefinitely, according to the group’s spokesmen—perhaps they should take advantage of the many entertaining and educational diversions to be found in the visitor center’s gift shop.

Should any biographies of Theodore Roosevelt happen to be on hand amid all those 2016 wall calendars and wooden bird whistles, the protesters might well enjoy reading about their fellow cattleman, arguably the manliest of manly-man Republican icons in our nation’s history: a lawman, a navy man, a cavalryman, and a hunting man, in addition to our 26th president. A man who once captured and stood guard over a band of boat thieves for nearly 40 hours until law enforcement arrived, reading Tolstoy to himself in order to stay awake. A man who once gave a 90-minute speech with a newly lodged bullet in his chest before going to the hospital.

During his presidency, Roosevelt created the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 1908, turning unclaimed government property into one of more than 50 “bird reservations.” In previous centuries, the stewards of this land were the Paiute people, who had been ordered to leave in the 1870s as more and more settlers came to the area. These vast tracts of pristine land, which had never been owned privately, would eventually become the physical foundation for our current, 150-million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System. In May of that same year, he called a number of the nation’s governors to the White House for a pivotal conference in which he eloquently articulated the case for placing large parcels of undeveloped rural land under federal protection.

His pitch to the assembled governors included this statement:

We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources, and we have just reason to be proud of our growth. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone; when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted; when the soils shall have been still further impoverished, and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation.

This rhetorical line of “inquiry” was in reality the policy rationale for a sweeping set of acts and executive orders that would, in the aggregate, end up protecting nearly 230 million acres of land comprising hundreds of national forests, bird and game preserves, national parks, and national monuments. It also informed the mandate of the fledgling U.S. Forest Service, which had been established only three years earlier under Teddy Roosevelt’s direction. By the end of his administration, America’s 26th president had placed more land under federal protection than every one of his 25 predecessors combined.

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