Teddy the Wilderness Warrior
Posted on 03 November 2009 | by Wendy Norris | 
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It’s rare when a 900-plus-page book keeps you interested, even riveted.
Jessica Knoblauch at Mother Nature News (and no less than The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart) positively gush about The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper Collins, $34.99), the new epic biography by Douglas Brinkley.
Here’s an excerpt of Knoblauch’s review:
To prevent further habitat destruction and species degradation, Roosevelt employed the help of his friends, a sort of Naturalist Rat Pack that included powerful conservation players such as Sierra Club founder John Muir, buffalo breeder William Hornaday and the Catskills poet John Burroughs. Together with Roosevelt, these revolutionaries helped conserve the rapidly dwindling wilderness and saved countless species from certain extinction.
…
One of Roosevelt’s greatest legislative victories, the passage of the Antiquities Act in 1906, allowed him to bypass the characteristically lethargic Congress by giving presidents “unencumbered power to unilaterally declare the protection of landscapes of archaeological, scientific and environmental value federal land.”
As Brinkley notes, Roosevelt’s genius as a conservationist was that “he never listened to other politicians about how to get things done.” Instead, his “instinct was to turn to the professional biologists, foresters and field naturalists first.”
Sounds like a better strategy than that “team of rivals” thing we have going on in the White House now.
