"The Wilderness Warrior": Teddy Roosevelt's mighty quest to save American wilderness

During his presidency Theodore Roosevelt created enough federal bird reservations, national game preserves, national forests, national parks and national monuments to have saved 234 million acres of American wilderness from being despoiled. According to Douglas Brinkley, author of a new biography that focuses exclusively on Roosevelt's exploits as a naturalist, "History still hasn't caught up with the long-term magnitude of his achievement."

It's not hard to see how this aspect of Roosevelt's life has been overlooked. For one thing, it has been hidden in plain sight; his lifelong love of the outdoors, fascination with nature and obsession with hunting figure in every biographical portrait. For another, he spent his hugely eventful life and presidency being extremely busy with other matters too.

And then there's the ambivalence Roosevelt prompts in historians trying to understand his attitudes toward nature. Brinkley cites "a left-leaning bias against aristocratic hunters" and confusion about Roosevelt's hearty bloodlust as further barriers to a full and fair understanding.

To compensate, "The Wilderness Warrior"(Harper, 960 pp., $34.99) adopts a deliberate type of tunnel vision. It cherry-picks the nature and conservation stories out of the vast panorama of Roosevelt's life. That's not to say that Brinkley has come up with an abbreviated biography; far from it. "The Wilderness Warrior" can seem thick as a sequoia as it catalogs all the specimens Roosevelt studied, bird calls he analyzed, jaunts he took, beasts he bagged and remote, exotic places with which he fell in love.

The prologue to "The Wilderness Warrior" promises little drama, given that Roosevelt sustained a consistent attitude toward natural wonders throughout his life, and that his crusade against feather poachers in Florida is treated as a whiff of the excitement to come.

This chronicle seems poised for many digressions, since it must establish Roosevelt's relationships with the most important naturalists of his day: the Sierra Club founder John Muir, the poet John Burroughs, the forestry expert Gifford Pinchot and others.

But for the patient reader, Brinkley's fervent enthusiasm for his material eventually prevails over the book's sprawling data and slow pace. He clearly shares Roosevelt's rapture for mesmerizing settings like the North Dakota Badlands (where Roosevelt had a ranch and where Brinkley's family spends its summers).

He conveys the great vigor with which Roosevelt approached his conservation mission. And he delves into the philosophical contradictions inherent in a man whose Darwinian thinking led him both to revere and kill the same creatures.

"The Wilderness Warrior" is able to reconcile that Roosevelt with the one who used the Bronx Zoo, which he had helped to found, to breed buffalo that could be shipped west and repatriated to the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma.

And Brinkley tries to dissect the Darwinism at the heart of Roosevelt's contradictory-seeming credo. He labels as "bunk" Roosevelt's claims that he needed dead specimens for scientific study or was killing game to eat it. "Quite simply, he enjoyed shooting the birds and animals he loved the most," Brinkley writes.

"The brutality of such acts never seemed to bother Roosevelt, for he considered himself privileged as a Darwinian biologist, a big game hunter and a naturalist."

Even as he celebrates Roosevelt's many bold moves to preserve tracts of land, Brinkley acknowledges his subject's complex motives. "It's hard to escape the feeling that Roosevelt enjoyed creating national forests and national monuments in part because it was rubbing his opponents' faces in his wilderness philosophy of living," he says.

As for the politics implicit in that statement, "The Wilderness Warrior" skips over politics and other aspects of Roosevelt's life to a degree that can be downright peculiar. Although Roosevelt's presidency ended 100 years ago, Brinkley finds ways to make his presidential portrait a timely one.

Beyond underscoring the environmental urgency of the causes that Roosevelt championed, "The Wilderness Warrior" also describes a vigorously hands-on president, eager to fight more than one battle at a time, accused of socialism by the businessmen with whom his policies (like trust busting) interfered and dismissively labeled a celebrity.

But this book's best lesson about the presidency involves the blunt means by which Roosevelt enacted his conservation policies. He could — and did — create wildlife refuges just by saying, "I Do So Declare." And with the help of the Rep. John F. Lacey, R-Iowa, whom Brinkley cites as one of the great unsung heroes of American conservation, he helped incorporate a provision for saving objects of scenic or scientific interest into the Antiquities Act of 1906.

Thanks to wording that proved superbly elastic in practice, we have Devil's Tower in Wyoming, the Petrified Forest in Arizona, Mesa Verde in Colorado and the Grand Canyon as evidence of how much Roosevelt treasured American beauty.