A photo of Theodore Roosevelt in the East but the environmental president loved the West. Today, how should his words, actions and deeds be assessed? Photo courtesy Library of Congress
By Charlie Quimby
In 2012, David Gessner headed west on a 9,000-mile road trip, accompanied by the words and spirits of two saints of the American environmental movement. In pairing the “intellectual godfather” Wallace Stegner with the rabble-rousing laureate Edward Abbey, Gessner’s All the Wild that Remains hoped to reawaken readers to the indispensable relationship between humans and the land—and perhaps inspire them to do something more than read about it.
Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness reprises the road trip theme as well as its quest, this time roughly shadowing TR’s legendary 14,000-mile whistle-stop tour that combined camping with presidential campaigning. Gessner’s new spirit guide contains in one figure the contradictory multitudes embodied in Stegner and Abbey.
Among presidents, our 26th has no peer in influencing how America sees its public lands. Roosevelt was zealous, knowledgeable and deeply in love with the outdoors. He wrote as lover—impulsive, attentive, and full of himself. But he also had in great measure the capacity to evolve and to step out of his immense self-regard, to perceive “there are worlds beyond the human world.”
The book’s title derives from Roosevelt’s 1903 speech at the edge of a Grand Canyon already facing encroachment from railroad-ticket tourism.
“Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”
Therein lies the conundrum of conservation. Man shapes and mars the world as no other creature. The essential and ongoing act of saving the work of ages is protecting it from our expansionist human nature. In the speech, TR was arguing for preserving the Grand Canyon as a sight for future generations, and in that moment, he helped arrest its devolution. He invoked the past, but did not include the indigenous people who had kept the place holy for centuries. And while he glimpsed the perils of growth, he did not see all the way to today’s imperiled world.
In the speech, TR was arguing for preserving the Grand Canyon as a sight for future generations, and in that moment, he helped arrest its devolution. He invoked the past, but did not include the indigenous people who had kept the place holy for centuries. And while he glimpsed the perils of growth, he did not see all the way to today’s imperiled world.
John Szarkowski’s observation of Ansel Adams applies to Roosevelt as well. Adams “did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service, but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul that he was trying to save.”
Upon arriving at Yellowstone's northern entrance in 1903, Roosevelt insisted upon riding into the national park on horseback. Not long after he dedicated the Roosevelt Arch and in the same year he visited the Grand Canyon and Yosemite where he famously had his photograph taken with John Muir. Based on ignominous things they wrote and said, Roosevelt and Muir have been called out and condemned as racist. Photo courtesy Library of Congress
Though a reflective worshipper, TR was also an energetic man of action, the sort of soul Gessner celebrates and wants to better emulate. One key difference: Roosevelt was a prodigious wielder of executive power, dating back to 1903. The government owned Florida’s Pelican Island, where the great birds were endangered by poachers. He inquired whether there was any legal reason why he could not declare it a federal bird reservation, and being told there was not, he said, “I so declare it.”
Westerners and wildlife owe much to Roosevelt’s exercise of that power on behalf of public lands. A hundred years later, however, we see the dark side of presidential fiat.
“Bully” is no longer a joyful adjective but an antidemocratic verb. The Department of Interior has backslid from protector of lands to granter of leases, serving a chief executive whose private appreciation of nature is limited to fairway grasses and water-hazard alligators.
Westerners and wildlife owe much to Roosevelt’s exercise of that power on behalf of public lands. A hundred years later, however, we see the dark side of presidential fiat. “Bully” is no longer a joyful adjective but an antidemocratic verb. The Department of Interior has backslid from protector of lands to granter of leases, serving a chief executive whose private appreciation of nature is limited to fairway grasses and water-hazard alligators.
Gessner admires Roosevelt, warts, contradictions, and all, but has no need to retread familiar ground. Great biographers have already captured the man; TR did it himself, with a prolific, wide-ranging output of books, articles, and speeches. Gessner helps us find the sweet spot beyond TR’s exploits, in the wild places that inspired his words. Early on he writes:
“I do know what the experience of seeing wild places does to me. It brings me to a wordless place. But then that wordlessness succumbs to words. In fact it has been my experience that places prompt sentences as if the place were asking you to celebrate and protect it.”
Gessner’s original plan was to visit TR territory and savor those places as they are now. Then, inspired, he would arrive at the Four Corners Area, the place of origin for Antiquities Act, where the recently created Bears Ears National Monument suggested a new model for preserving land. Bears Ears was the first such designation initiated and driven by indigenous people to protect land, wildlife, cultural assets, and spirit as a whole rather than as a semi-wild federal resource for tourists and jobs. He asks,
“Was it really possible to unite Roosevelt’s pugnacious spirit with that of the Native peoples who were driving this effort to preserve [the threatened lands of the Four Corners]?”
The road trip gains an upsetting complication at the start when President Donald Trump and his Interior Secretary Ryan “If you like Teddy Roosevelt, you’ll love me” Zinke eviscerate Bears Ears by 85 percent and halve neighboring Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
The Bears Ears reduction is not about energy, Zinke often declared, but the downsizing process and the new maps don’t lie. Of course it’s about energy, which means it’s about money. (As I write this, the Trump administration just authorized its planned sale of drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.)
The battle remains against the same mercenary forces TR momentarily turned back. Only now technology and global finance magnify consumerism and corporate power. Canadian and Chilean mining enterprises threaten Bears Ears and the Boundary Waters. Japanese, Dutch, and Mexican investors are actively buying U.S. timber. All are aided and abetted by a president who swings his big executive order stick in the opposite direction.
As a nature writer and teacher, Gessner is a wonderful guide through all this. And he recognizes that some nature lovers must encounter these wild places through the accounts of others. He puts great faith in books and stories, even while lamenting the decline of deep reading as part of national discourse. Books are our elders, he says, and reading provides an immersive experience similar to what is experienced in nature. We leave our noisy selves and slip into a world we share with the rest of creation.
The challenge for most of us who lack TR’s power and drive is to believe our actions make a difference. In the age of unchecked powerplays, broadening extinction, and accelerating climate change, we must first defend our spirits from despair and surrender.
Gessner tells stories for a living and naturally sees stories as a vital act, just as Adams valued printmaking, and Abbey advocated monkey wrenching. Without executive power, we must go with our own strengths and pursue our own passions. As. Gessner points out with his examples of local heroes, most of our stages are small and particular. Our role is to play up our own characters in places that matter to us.
Gessner's hope, he often reminds us, is to discover "something close to the combination that TR embodied. We need thoughtful, well-read, articulate human beings, of all classes, ages, genders, and races, who care enough about other human beings to throw themselves out into the world and do battle with the waves of ignorance created by those who live without empathy.”
His hope, he often reminds us, is to discover “something close to the combination that TR embodied. We need thoughtful, well-read, articulate human beings, of all classes, ages, genders, and races, who care enough about other human beings to throw themselves out into the world and do battle with the waves of ignorance created by those who live without empathy.”
At the end, Gessner acknowledges his early efforts to become more political and pugnacious are rather tentative. But his larger point is that we must do our best with what we have to change what can, even if it’s saving one little island.
What is stopping me? I so declare it!
About Charlie Quimby
Charlie Quimby is the author of two novels set in Western Colorado, Monument Road,and Inhabited, published by Torrey House Press, which also published Red Rock Storiesin support of the creation of Bears Ears National Monument. He contributed essays to “Breathing Stories” and “That Thing with Feathers” as well as to Writers on the Range. He was a co-author ofPlanning to Stay,a guide that helps communities assess themselves and take control of future development. Now retired after a writing career, he channels his positive pugnacity toward making change in the places where he lives— Minneapolis and Grand Junction, Colorado.
