For anyone who had the chance to visit it, only a few natural landscapes are able to leave the observer as breathless as the boundless Grand Canyon is able to. Its immensity, its basic but extremely vivid colours, the just seeming calm of the Colorado river, which winds serpentine in the depths of the gorge: everything contributes to transmit an absolute feeling of magnificent pristine nature.
It is probably due to the desire to preserve this feeling that, over a century ago, a thoughtful man left those lands on his back, riding his horse.
Theodore Roosevelt, born in 1858:
He was undoubtedly a controversial figure, although universally recognized as one of the most beloved presidents by American people.
Plagued from a very young age by serious health issues that will stick with him throughout his entire life, he always found the reason for a healthy lifestyle in the difficulties and in the harshness of his existence.
He loved calling it “rough life”. Gritted teeth, he used to constantly follow an intense regime of physical training, exercising energetic tenacity in any area of his life.
He was a writer, a boxer, a Harvard graduate, a brilliant politician, an explorer and a hunter, a cowboy, a police commissioner, a war hero as well as the governor of the New York State, the Vice President of the United States for six months and eventually, after the murder of his predecessor, he became the President of the United States for the following eight years (the youngest person having held that Office) and the first American president to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
This man's political life alone could undoubtedly be enough to make him an endearing character and fill in rivers of pages.
However, what makes him even more fascinating nowadays is an aspect of his personality less known, especially by the inhabitants of the Old Continent: his passion for the environment.
That is right: since nature-loving Theodore has always made his way in the shadow of the politician Teddy. A passion that will accompany him throughout his whole life and whose goals have had such enormous repercussions that are still relevant today.
It all begins one morning in 1870, when a young Theodore, who at the time was just seven years old, is stunned by the lifeless body of a seal, in the port of New York City. Something in that animal is attracting his innate and disruptive curiosity. He does not know yet, but that meeting is just the beginning of a path which will lead him to take action for the preservation of both nature and all the wild places of the States in the future.
Teddy returns home with the seal skull to study it, but soon he realizes that he wants to know more: much more than that.
From that moment on he begins a spasmodic research about all animals, mainly all insects and birds, he is able to find or that other children can carry to him and then he founds the small Roosevelt Museum of Natural History in his bedroom. What initially seems like a childhood passion is going to become an interest that will accompany him for his whole lifespan, and, in his adulthood, it will turn into love toward the natural world.
During his youth, he will do nothing but accumulate specimens by filling all his private spaces, reaching such a number of specimens as to contribute, by donating a part of them, to the birth of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
At the age of twenty-six, with a political career underway, and shocked by some serious family tragedies, he spent his next two years on his ranch in the Badlands in Dakota, where he learned how to master pain by living on the saddle, hunting and driving cattle.
Although the political Theodore had been temporarily shelved, the nature-loving one was always present and in fact he founded the Boone and Crockett Club in Dakota in 1887, a non-profit organization aimed at supporting and promoting an ideal of sustainable hunting, where the passion for coursing was contextual to the study and active conservation of animals and their habitat.
Such an organization was the first of its kind in the United States.
This two-year experience as a cowboy taught him riding and roping, but it also showed him another side of his passion for the natural world: the love for the outdoors.
Once he becomes President, this love will take him, accompanied by the famous naturalist John Muir, on an official visit to the Yosemite valley in California. Later on he will define it as one of the most significant encounters of his life.
Intrigued by the charm of the place, at a certain moment he asked the naturalist to take him to see the real Yosemite and for Muir this was just grist to the mill. The two of them hit the road with their backpacks, venturing alone into the secrets of that magical place. They spent most of the night talking by the fire, they slept in the open air and were woken up by a light morning snowfall. This was a night Roosevelt would never forget.
As a result of that experience he said: "Lying down at night under those gigantic sequoias was like lying in a temple built without the hand of man, a temple larger than any human architect could build anyway". Muir informed the president about the rampant exploitation of the valley and the alarming public mismanagement: it took Theodore very little to realize that the only way to protect that valley at best, as well as many other wild places like this, was through the control and the management carried out by federal authorities.
We must in fact remember that since the mid-19th century the most sensitive people environment-wise had already realized the enormous threat that hunters, miners, railways and lumberjacks represented not only toward the single species, but also for entire ecosystems.
And they started to report this situation.
Roosevelt, initially with the Boone and Crockett Club and then with his presidential powers, became the champion of the environmental cause.
While his conservation efforts were moved by his innate sensitivity to beauty and by his love for nature, on the other hand they were motivated by an insightful sense of foresight.
Indeed Roosevelt was firmly convinced that nature and its resources existed solely for the benefit of humanity. But only in a properly preserved wild nature hunting could continue to be practiced as well as timber could be cut and lands irrigated and cultivated.
"The conservation of natural resources is a fundamental issue" Roosevelt once said. "If we do not solve this problem, it will be hardly useful solving the others."
Year after year, act after act, from the Tongass and Chugah forest reserves in Alaska to Lake Malheur in Oregon, from Mount Olympus in Washington to Culebra Island in Puerto Rico, from small islands transformed into bird sanctuaries in Hawaii to the rescue of Yellowstone National Park, Roosevelt's passion created what was later called a "natural empire".
His greatest achievement, however, was perhaps the signing, in 1906, of what would later become the fundamental tool for the environmental protection for almost every president after him: the Antiquites Act.
From that moment on, the President of the United States was given the authority to restrict the usage of particular public lands by making them a protected national heritage.
The “prince” of these protected areas was the Grand Canyon National Monument, founded in 1908: “I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon".
Altogether Roosevelt oversaw the creation of twenty-one federal irrigation projects, thirteen national forests, fifty-one bird shelters and eighteen national natural monuments.
He created what it would later become the United States Forest Service.
He appointed a National Conservation Commission to prepare the country's "first inventory of natural resources" and initiated a conservation program for the remaining American buffalo herds.
All this has obviously taken place while having to constantly clash with the lobbies of lumberjacks, mining extractors, sellers of animal-origin clothing and anyone who was more interested in having poor environmental protection. It was a relentless struggle that culminated, years later, in a Congressional bill aiming to limit the President's power to declare protected areas.
Although Roosevelt was eventually forced to sign this document, he could only smile while thinking of little Theodore setting up a natural history museum in his bedroom and then the 230 million acres he had now managed to place under federal protection: larger than the size of two California.
After the end of his mandate, in 1909, he went back to his childhood passion and, thanks to the patronage of the Smithsonian Institute and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, he could spend the following years planning expeditions to Africa and to the Amazon, following his insatiable curiosity in territories that were still unexplored at that time.
He returned from these expeditions having collected thousands of specimens for both museums, most of which are still on display to the public nowadays.
Even if this hunting method may seem deplorable to the contemporary eye, it should not be forgotten that Roosevelt only followed the practices that the scientific community of the time considered acceptable. The killing of an animal was the only way available to be able to make extremely accurate observations on the physical characteristics of unknown wildlife, as well as exhibiting animals in museums was the most effective way to show common people the wonders of the natural world and sensitize them to its conservation.
He will write about nature throughout his life, starting with "Natural History of Insects", an essay he composed when he was just nine years old, to the report of his Amazonian expedition in "Through the Brazilian Wilderness". He spent his life always fighting: at first as a young man with serious health problems, after that against corruption and mismanagement, and finally on an actual battlefield.
After having forever changed the face of his nation, as well as the perception that it would have had of its own natural heritage, after having fought against everything and everyone for the realization of his dream, Theodore Roosevelt passed away peacefully in his sleep on January 6th, 1919 at the age of 60. A politician of the time wrote: "Death had to take Roosevelt to sleep, because if he had been awake, there would have been a fight."
GLAUKO BARBAGALLO
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