 If you'd come back in and take your seats, please, I want to thank you for the respect you've shown to our first presenter. Now we have our second presenter of the morning, Donald Worcester of the University of Kansas. When we conceived of this symposium, one of our, well, two of our concerns were, first of all, where exactly does Theodore Roosevelt fit in the history of conservation in the United States? And it's sort of a difficult problem, because if I can just spend a minute trying to talk a little bit about it, and then I hope to help set up the remarks of Professor Worcester. But on the one hand, as you heard last night from Douglas Brinkley, if you were here, Roosevelt was an ardent conservationist with a deep, and in some regards, pure love of nature and its species. And on the other hand, he was a hunter who had what Douglas Brinkley called, at times, the bloodlust for killing animals. And so that, to the 21st century, conservationist's mind is something of a paradox. This hunter, who when he was in Africa in 1910 killed so many rhinoceroses that his British professional hunting guide said maybe enough President Roosevelt. So there's that paradox in Roosevelt. And the second one is that if you tick off, if you list Roosevelt's conservation accomplishments, one of them is the US Bureau of Reclamation. And in the 21st century conservation mind, the Bureau of Reclamation doesn't hold quite so central and prized a place in the history of conservation. And so that is a sort of a paradox that makes it a little bit difficult for us to make sense of Roosevelt as a conservationist. And the third area, I think, is that Roosevelt was a man of action. He was a politician. He was a statesman. He was a governor of New York State. And so he has this paradigmatic moment in 1903 at Yosemite with John Muir. And this is written about very interestingly in Donald Worster's just published book, A Passion for Nature, The Life of John Muir, which he'll be happy to sign for you. But it's so interesting because Roosevelt admired Muir. Muir later said, I fairly fell in love with Roosevelt during that three-day camping trip. But, and I would love to hear more from Professor Worster about this, but Muir looking at Roosevelt also realized Roosevelt is a man of power. And a man of power is a sort of an odd creature. Because I think he felt that Roosevelt's basic instincts were the right ones, but Roosevelt as a man of power had a certain detachment from those instincts. And so the fact that Roosevelt is in some sense a bureaucrat, a statesman, a government functionary, and he's not Emerson, and he's not Thoreau, and he's not John Muir, also creates a question of where exactly to put, to place Roosevelt as a conservationist. When we started planning this, I said, the person that I most want to reflect on this issue, particularly here in North Dakota, is Donald Worster. I've had the chance to hear him many times in Lewis and Clark settings, and others. You can see his biography in our brochure. He holds the Hall Distinguished Professorship Chair of American History at the University of Kansas. He has published an enormous amount, Rivers of Empire, which is one of the seminal books of our time, The Economy of Nature, Dust Bowl, the Southern Plains in the 1930s, The Standard Biography of John Wesley Powell, a river running west. My favorite of his books, The Wealth of Nature, Environmental History, and the ecological imagination, and now A Passion for Nature, The Life of John Muir. We are so fortunate to have you, Professor Donald Worster. Well, thank you, Clay, for those very generous remarks and introduction. I should also thank Douglas Brinkley for his generous comments and introduction last night of me. My ears are fairly tingling, and I'm very grateful for those remarks and for the invitation to come here today. What a good-looking audience out here. Those I can see, most of you are sitting in darkness, and I hope you will be illuminated. In a few minutes. Actually, though, the approved way of introducing speakers these days, Clay, is to lower the audience's expectations. Haven't you been watching the presidential debates? You're supposed to lower. So let me try. Well, this next speaker, he's a poor, shambling sort of a speaker. He never does what we tell him to do. He can't figure out what his topic really is. He can't remember his own name unless it's written down in front of him. We're not sure he's going to make it through this talk, but here he is. That would probably do a little better. Here I am, and I will try to, and then, of course, if you are still standing after 15 minutes and have not fallen down in the dead faint, they say, you're a winner, nominating for high presidential office. Well, I also have to lower expectations in this sense. Not only am I not a Roosevelt scholar, I find Roosevelt very confusing, very confusing and very contradictory. I think I find him saying almost exactly the opposite things in the same sentence. He says one thing, and then a few minutes later, he says it seems to me almost exactly the opposite on almost any topic you can find. Now, in his behalf, I think he says those things that are contradictory in our American culture. I think he is reflecting and mirroring the contradictions in our society. That conflict of loyalties that Clay was just mentioning, that Robert Morgan was also talking about. I'll leave it to you to figure out whether you think he resolved those contradictions. I have my own view. But let's start with the contradiction that Clay was just alluding to and Robert was talking about. One of the most sacred words in this nation's vocabulary is the word growth, or the synonym development. For some people, this word is more sacred than God or country. Growth moved the nation westward. It turned a sparsely populated continent into productive farms and cities. It gave us great institutions of culture and learning. And finally, it gave us this consumer's paradise we live in, where economic abundance rolls steadily like the great Mississippi River. We Americans love the idea of growth. We always want more of it. And we never hesitate to celebrate the benefits it's brought. At the same time, we say we want more than endless assured abundance. We say we want also to conserve this land, or some parts of it, from development. We say that we want to control growth so that it doesn't spoil the earth for our children and ourselves. Growth, we acknowledge, has its environmental costs. In other words, like human beings the world lower, we want to have it both ways. And in seeking to have it both ways, we tend to follow the lead of our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, the man who first put conservation on the national political map. No president before Roosevelt took so seriously the idea that America was facing a future of resource limits and could no longer leave economic growth to the free play of the market. Or the chaotic forces of greed. We know what he would say today about Lehman Brothers. Roosevelt believed emphatically in a regulated economy. He was always suspicious of Wall Street, the barons of finance and industry, or the business class and its view of the world. Over the span of nearly two-fold terms in office, he made controlling the economy as well as conserving the land his two most important domestic goals. Roosevelt left office in 1909, and since then political candidates of both major parties have repeatedly tried to lay claim to his legacy. As they are doing in this current presidential campaign, Professor Brinkley alluded to this briefly last night. Usually since Roosevelt was a Maverick Republican, it is so-called Maverick Republican candidates who try to fit themselves into his shoes. This year it is the candidate John McCain. And then the pundits rush in to measure the fit. Usually they find the candidate falling short, and they declare, well, we knew Teddy Roosevelt, Senator Blank, and you're not Teddy. But do the pundits know any better than the politicians or the public at large what Roosevelt really stood for? His ideas about balancing economic growth and conservation were more confused than we remember. And his legacy as the first environmental president is more difficult to figure out. What we need today may not be another Roosevelt, but rather someone to straighten out the muddle that Teddy left behind. I feel like I'm speaking sacrilege already. In our popular memories, Roosevelt is standing on an open-air platform, giving a speech to a sea of upturned, adoring faces. He's a stocky man. We saw him last night with a broad chest. His ears lie flat against his head, blunt, round head. Unlike Abraham Lincoln, his face shows no ungainly angles. I'm not talking about our ghosts last night. No melancholy shadows. He looks completely self-assured, completely transparent, all manly force and decision. He wears a pair of rimless eyeglasses clipped to his nose. His small eyes, I think they're rather small eyes, squint hard. And his teeth seem to snap together as he speaks. A fist is either up in the air or it's pounding into an open palm, beating out a harsh rhythm like a boxer, delivering blows. Quote, we have become great in a material sense. I can't do what was done last night. I'm not going to tie, but just get it in your mind. We have become great in a material sense 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 become still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation. The time has come for a change. He invented that word, I guess. Everybody uses it now. The passage I just quoted was delivered in his opening address to that conference of governors that he convened at the White House in 1908. In his very last few months in office, trying to move conservation from the fringes to the center of national attention. This year marks, I don't think it was said last night. I didn't hear it, the 100th anniversary of that famous governor's conference on conservation. And it's my purpose to examine it in more detail for what it aimed at and how it changed the country. But first, we should ask again how Mr. Roosevelt found his way to the idea that Americans needed a conservation ethic. When he was born in 1858 to a wealthy merchant family in New York City, conservation was not a household word. So how, over the next 50 years, did it become so popular? And why did he become so committed to it? Now, I'm going to be necessarily treading over some ground that others have treaded before me, perhaps more effectively. But it doesn't hurt to repeat a few things. The short answer is that Roosevelt became a conservationist through a love of hunting, combined with a strong family tradition that taught him that great wealth should bring responsibility. I was very intrigued last night to hear about Robert Roosevelt, whom I don't know very much about. And I'm really looking forward to reading Doug Brinkley's book, because I'm sure it's going to bring out this uncle who is so intriguing in himself. Biographers tell us about this boyhood zeal for shooting animals, pursuing natural history, an avid collector of skins and feathers. When he was 14, and his family was on vacation in Egypt, that immediately separates us from almost all of us, right, on the Nile, he got his first gun to collect more carcasses. In his diary, he recorded his youthful triumphs along the Nile, blew a chat to pieces in a walk of 100 yards, the first bird I had ever shot, and I was proportionately delighted. In the afternoon, I went out with a gun and shot a wagtail. So it's this little gun and this hunting zeal that drive him to the outdoors. But they didn't alone make him a conservationist. Many men of his era like to shoot birds or moose or African elephants without ever thinking of conserving them. Of course, in those days, no truly virtuous woman would be shooting birds, moose, or African elephants. Roosevelt, in contrast, thought of the future and of a bleak time when there might be nothing left to shoot. When he was 29 years old, a graduate of Harvard, a crack marksman, and a veteran of big game hunting here in North Dakota and Montana, he became president of the Boone and Crockett Club. You've heard this already, but let's go back over this, because I don't think we have gotten the full story here. It was one of the first conservation organizations in the United States. It's an interesting one, though. Its membership was limited to 100 elite males who had killed, quote, in their bylaws, in fair chase several kinds of big game. Not one, but several kinds. I think three, bear, elk, big horn sheep, and so on. There were many objectives in this organization. Conservation was not listed as number one. Number one was to promote manly sport with the rifle. But it also worked for the preservation of the large game of this country. To this end, Roosevelt led the club into a battle against poachers in Yellowstone National Park who were killing off the last bison herds. Without embarrassment, club members loved to watch a big game animal crumple to its knees, shot through the spine or heart. No goo goo sentimentalism for them. But they also preached responsibility to self-restraint sportsmanship. And the club played a critical role in saving wild animals from extinction by market hunters. That's what conservation first meant to this young man. We were talking last night about the psychological interpretation of him. I think the psychological tension right here really needs exploring. A struggle within himself and in American society to balance a desire to shoot and to possess while seeking to protect the hunted from a hunger for violence that knew no bounds. That, I think, is at the heart of Teddy's psychological complexity. He sensed in himself a hunger for violence that knew no bounds. A second stage in the making of this great conservation came after he assumed the presidency in 1901. And then he set out to do a lot more than save Yellowstone from the ruffian frontier class of unsportsmanlike hunters. He wanted to save the last wild undeveloped places in the American landscape. Surprising many of the party's old guard, he was determined to create a public land's legacy unlike any in the world for size and variety. To create a commons, the old world has its commons, and we did not, to create a commons open to all people, protective of all species, protective above all of America's remaining wild forest. The need for this environmental protection was not new. Yosemite Valley was set aside from private economic development in 1864, Yellowstone in 1872, and in 1891, Congress with the support of President Benjamin Harrison set aside the nation's first forest reserves. Roosevelt pushed these ideas to heights undreamed of by earlier administrations. And I think we at least ought to review quickly again what he claimed and what last night on the stage in front of all of you, 150 million new acres, a continent-wide system of national forest that stretched from Maine to Alaska. He did this legally through executive orders, but he did so in the face of bitter resentment in many states. We should remember the anger here in the American West directed at him for these acts. That has not been stressed so far, but and in Congress as well. We heard him talk last night how in 1903 he began a system of wildlife refuges that eventually stretched across this country. And today those refuges constitute about 100 million acres, about the size of the state of California. We heard about the national parks that he started before Congress put an end to that. And we heard about all those national landmarks that he set aside, the Grand Canyon Devils Tower and so on. No president, not even Jimmy Carter with his Alaska National Interest Lands Act of 1980, did more than Roosevelt to nationalize, to socialize, to democratize land in this country or to preserve nature, wild nature, for its own sake. For all of the use and the abuse those lands have endured over time, America's federal lands are still the most extensive conservation lands on the planet. This is a model that other nations have often admired, but few have matched. Roosevelt however did more than preserve the natural environment. And now we have to scrutinize what I think is the more troubling side of his conservation program. What he meant by conservation and what we mean by it today turns out to be a very confusing and ambiguous ethic. For in addition to protecting nature, Roosevelt promoted conservation as a new kind of economic growth, planned growth, efficient growth and above all government led growth. Shortly after taking office, he put the federal government into the business of developing the American West by building dams and irrigation projects. He did this by supporting the National Reclamation Act of 1902. The first large federal project under this act was built on the Salt River northeast of Phoenix, Arizona and appropriately named Roosevelt Dam and Reservoir. Here again the president started something that would grow beyond anything he could have imagined. Eventually virtually every major river in the American West would be dammed and dammed and dam many times over. Roosevelt's so-called water conservation program building dams that no private capitalist would touch set in motion environmental changes that today have come to seem destructive of the West's natural ecosystems. But here is something also important to realize. It forged a powerful alliance between government and private economic interest in the cause of national economic development. It established a model of state assisted capitalism that we have gone on to apply to the energy industry, oil, gas, nuclear power with a similar disregard for what are the benefits justified the investment of the cost. This alliance to exploit nature's resources was sold in the name of conservation. Roosevelt now decided that conservation should not mean merely protecting nature from feather hunters or loggers. It should mean the rationalized long-term exploitation of natural resources to secure future profit. According to this logic, nature as well as people can waste a valuable natural commodity, an undammed river that dumps its water into the sea is wasting a precious resource. Nature needed management. As the president promised in his first annual message to Congress, the western half of the United States would sustain a population greater than that of our whole country today if the waters that now run to waste were saved and used for irrigation. Now he was speaking at a time when the US population was 100 million. It's not a negligible amount, but that was not enough for him. Through federal irrigation, he promised the arid west alone would someday support at least 100 million more. Delighted by this promise of federal capital and leadership to build the west, chambers of commerce in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, eventually, dropped their traditional opposition to government interfering in the economy. So the notion of conservation changed from one of government protecting wildlife forest and open space to one of government promoting and leading economic growth. In a speech Roosevelt gave in 1910 in Osawatomi, Kansas, he put this complicated program into simple, memorable words. Conservation means development as much as it does protection. Now this is a significant shift of meaning. Conservation and economic growth, he's saying, should not be regarded as opposing ideas that we try to balance or reconcile. They're really the same thing. If Roosevelt had said greed and self-sacrifice are the same thing, he could not have been more confounding. He was turning the concept of conservation into another form of conquest, a moral imperative to rule and dominate the earth. And he was putting himself as president in charge of that conquest. The master builder who would show the West, show the West's businessmen how to build the West, how to win the West, how to turn the natural world into national wealth and power. Here's more from that passage on conservation delivered in Osawatomi, which makes economic development a moral imperative. Conservation, he says, is a great moral issue for it involves the patriotic duty of ensuring the safety and continuance of the nation. And in this great work, the national government must bear a most important part. What he's telling farmers and townsmen at that moment is that the ultimate question in our lives should be whether the United States, as a political entity, will survive and grow indefinitely into the future or will decline and fall apart. Over his later conservation program, unlike his early efforts to save endangered species or wilderness, waves the flag of red, white, and blue nationalism, America standing rich and supreme among the nations of the world. Now all this may sound harmless, even laudable to you, and perhaps it is, but notice how quickly Roosevelt passes over some deep and difficult issues. Can government both protect and develop resources? Where do respecting life and preserving beauty fit into this program of infinite national expansion? Should increasing the wealth and power of the United States be the supreme good, the supreme duty? Roosevelt never addressed such questions, nor did he question the basic institutions and values of modern economic nationalism, imperialism, or industrial capitalism. Raising such questions was definitely not on the agenda when he called the governors to the White House in 1908. You heard last night that almost all those governors showed up 40 some. There was Governor Burke, John Burke, he has a nickname, doesn't he, somewhere? Modest John, Modest John Burke was there, Cutler from Utah, Hoke from Kansas, Hughes from New York, and so on. And as the ghost said last night, there was the members of the cabinet to the Supreme Court, Congress, but by far the most numerous attendees was a long list of guests from the business and scientific community. Andrew Carnegie, the legendary steel maker, James J. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railroad, two-time presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, labor figures, Samuel Gompers, John G. Mitchell, the head of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Bar Association, the American Livestock Association, the Society of Civil Engineers, leading editors and journalists from the big cities. Only one woman was invited, Sarah Platt Decker, president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Besides leaving out a lot of women, the conference did not include John Muir, standing up here on the rock on Roosevelt's right, or on his left. John Muir, president of the Sierra Club, and the most widely recognized conservation in the country. Although a good friend of Roosevelt, an admirer of Roosevelt, a man who voted for Roosevelt, he was not invited because he disagreed with the redefinition of conservation that the president was now selling. He did not disagree that resources should be used wisely. I mean, who can disagree with the idea of wise use? Muir was a farmer. He supported irrigation. He supported harvesting of trees. But he did disagree that we should conserve resources primarily to secure the nation's future growth and power. Just days before the governors arrived, Roosevelt gave the city of San Francisco permission to construct a dam in the wild pristine Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park. A dam the city leaders wanted badly to create a cheap water supply for future growth. Cheap is hardly the word. The city would pay not a penny for the site. They had other options, but they would have cost them some money. Having preserved the valley from developers, exploiters, Roosevelt now decided to turn it over to those who wanted to expand San Francisco into a vast commercial empire. Roosevelt had fought that decision, but Muir had fought that decision bitterly, and therefore he was not wanted in Washington. The purpose of this huge gathering of the nation's elite was not to debate the meaning of conservation, but to promote the idea that conservation should mean planned economic development. The president wanted those powerful men not only to agree that America's future growth depended on using natural resources more efficiently, but also that the government should be put in charge. He pounded home the idea that because the wealth of nations ultimately comes from the land, the president and his administration must be involved in owning and managing that wealth. The state must become the brain center of the economy. Never before had so many powerful figures lined up to pledge their support for conservation. They did so because the president persuaded them that his vision of development made sense. It seemed so peaceful, so orderly in a time of national tension chaos. In the 20th century, they began to dream with him that conflicts between labor and management would disappear through government mediation, that the old raw competitive capitalism would be tamed, prices would be stabilized, profits would increase at a steady rate, and that Mississippi River of consumer abundance would roll on and on. To make all that possible, nature would have to be more intensively managed than ever before. Start with rivers, the conferees were told, and turn all of our nation's rivers into a network of improved transportation lines, facilities, a system model after the railroad system, but run by the government, and then turn every forest, public or private, into what Gifford Pinchot, the chief forester of the United States, Roosevelt's buddy at the Boone and Crockett Club, and his chief conservation advisor, what Gifford Pinchot memorably called, this is his definition of a forest, a manufacturing plant for the production of wood. Not only was that vision accepted by the nation's elite in 1908, but it has worked remarkably well since. Since that famous conference, the government has assumed the mission of mobilizing resources and making sure we don't run out of any essential commodities, trees, water, coal, even if we have to send troops to the Middle East, and we have not run out of resources, despite experiencing a massive growth in the American economy and population. Our numbers have increased by 300%. Our national economy has increased by 600% since Roosevelt's day, and yet the forests still grow, the water still run. We have never experienced an actual timber famine as they worried about in those days. I'm not going to say anything about the quality of wood you get down at Home Depot, but we have never experienced a timber famine or any other kind of resource collapse, have we? At least not yet. The apparatus that can claim credit for this success was described by the distinguished Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith as, quote, the new industrial state and interlocking elite of government and corporations. It also has grown in scale until today a mere 100 corporations control almost all of the products, services, and resources in the nation, and by next week we'll probably be down to five corporations, right? While the government has become ever more indispensable as the architect of this planned development, but what about the protection of nature's beauty and diversity? How well have we done there? We may have put a lot of land into protection, but most of that land is being pushed harder than ever before to feed the growth machine. We have now constructed thousands of dams on our public lands with federal dollars. We have constructed hundreds of thousands of miles of timber roads on our national forest. We have turned public lands into massive tree plantations. We have opened them quite liberally, some say even as if a fire sale was in progress. For gold and coal mining, we've issued a horde of permits still going on in these last few months of the president administration for oil and gas wells. Because our privately owned lands can no longer meet consumer demands. Our publicly owned and protected lands are being brought into more and more intense production. They are increasingly being exploited by the industrial state and they are not enough. This is so much the reason for our foreign policy today to garner those resources that the public lands can no longer provide. The clear message I think of the past few decades is that conservation as protection has lived far behind conservation as development. And this is so despite the fact that protection is a role that government does very well. Better than anybody else. Protecting nature like protecting the weak and the powerless in society or protecting the people's health is inconceivable without a strong and effective national government. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the role of economic developer is not a role that the government is well suited to perform, nor has done very well. Government tends to invest its capital without strict accountability. Investing, for example, in water projects that no economist can justify or in nuclear energy subsidies or in ethanol subsidies that make little economic sense. Government has trouble deciding where to invest its capital for the best return, which resources to save for future use, which to exploit today, or which technologies to promote, and which to abandon. Giving enormous power to government to plan and manage the nation's growth can be as bad for the environment as giving that power to corporations. The outcome may be even worse. For we are then left with no system, no set of checks and balances. Galbraith called this the countervailing power. We need a countervailing power, a system of checks and balances. But when government works as an alliance with corporations and there are no checks and balances. Roosevelt could not see this outcome, partly because he was living before it really was well-developed, but also, I think because he was confident that he and his advisors were smart, decent, honorable men. He was sure that he knew what was right and that he could persuade businessmen to do his bidding. And perhaps that was so. Later presidents, however, have proved less smart or less environmentally committed. While Roosevelt's legacy left them with the means to do extraordinary damage in the name of conservation. We can now see how the new industrial state, which I believe Roosevelt was largely, importantly responsible for, how that new industrial state operating under the banner of wise use has played a huge role in the planned destruction of the earth. Instead of leading conservation, the industrial state that Roosevelt did so much to create may have, I'll speculate here, may have brought us to a state of global environmental crisis. Is it possible that government aided and guided resource development may in the end have encouraged the overconsumption of water in places like Phoenix and Los Angeles? The overconsumption of fertilizer, of paper, of fossil fuels, a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and accelerating loss of terrestrial ecosystems. Is there something missing from the old notion of conservation as development? If Mr. Roosevelt were around today, or maybe we can summon his ghost up in a few minutes, sitting in the White House, surveying the damage that government as well as business has done over the past century, would he reconsider his words? Should he try to protect those wildlife refuges that he established, protect them from the developers? Or should he issue a permit to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, just as he issued a permit to construct that dam in Hetchatchee Valley? Should the government pour billions of dollars into new energy panaceas? Just as he did into reclamation projects for the West, leaving it to later generations to deal with the unforeseen problems? Or at this time, would he stress environmental protection over development? Would he make that protection the highest work of government? Let us suppose that in this age of global climate change, Roosevelt could come back to call another governor's conference, or perhaps a conference of the world's heads of state, or at least of the world's business and scientific elite. What should he say to those assembled leaders? Should he say, as he did in 1908, that the gravest problem we face is the problem of national efficiency, the patriotic duty of ensuring the safety and continuance of the nation? Or should he say that in this new age, there is a greater cause than the power, the might, and the growth of the United States and its industrial economy, namely the survival of the earth as a safe and healthy home for all of its peoples and all of its creatures? Should today's governor's work for a government devoted to protecting not the sources of American wealth, but the sources of life? For what it's worth, I believe that Roosevelt's first impulse as a conservationist was right. Conservation should mean protection. Through government of the endangered biological heritage of the nation and the planet, conservation should mean protecting the health of weak, vulnerable human communities from powerful economic interest. Conservation should mean that government acts as a countervailing force against the ups and downs of the market, the human propensity for greed. Conservation should stand uncompromisingly for beauty, ecological integrity, social justice. Conservation should not be confused with growing the industrial economy. Conservation should not mean entering into grandiose development projects to assure an endless supply of resources for the consumer society. Others outside of government, the business sector, individual entrepreneurs, corporations are better equipped for that work. Government should serve as a check on their ambitions and their methods and not become their partner. Here's my conclusion. As today's politicians compete for the Roosevelt look, we should ask, which Roosevelt do they mean? The TR of protection or the TR of development. Roosevelt's conservation policies were tangled in contradictory pile of ideas and motives. It's time to acknowledge those contradictions and choose which role we expect government to play in our relations with the earth. That's it, thank you very much. I think we have to say bully, you didn't faint. We have time for questions. Who has a question, please raise your hand. Spring-Clee. There comes a tough one. After he leaves office, you're saying. Yeah. Right. Hold that just for a second. So would you repeat the question and answer that? Okay, in his last few months, even after the governor's conference, he is signing all kinds of orders and so on to preserve wildlife, Alaska, et cetera. He's the preservationist, the protectionist again. Well, I think it's the contradiction here in the man. I mean, why didn't he at the governor's conference talk about those issues then? It's almost like there's a left and a right brain here working on these issues. Of course, to some extent, the governor's conference, he put in the hands of Gifford Pinchot and so now he's shoving Pinchot aside and going back to what he likes to do to a very great extent. So, but I think he believed what Pinchot was saying. I don't think he, you know, so I would just see this again as the man who again and again says one thing today and something quite different the next day and means both of them quite sincerely, but doesn't really engage us in asking how we're gonna think about both of these things together, how we're gonna reconcile both of these together. That would be the only answer I can come up with, but why is this the president of violence who gets the Nobel Peace Prize? You know, again, you're more of the Roosevelt expert than I am by far, but you know, again, I think this is part of the man's contradiction. He has this sense of violence in himself that he checks with his strong moral check and constraint. He fears that in himself at times as much as anything else. I wouldn't call him in practical terms a man of violence when it comes to foreign policy exactly, although Latin Americanists and people in Latin America find him an arch-imperialist, a man who, if not attacking him, at least they regard as a man who took some very aggressive actions toward them, particularly Panama Canal, et cetera, et cetera, but you know, I think this is, I don't wanna generalize across the board, but I think he certainly felt as you, I think you used the phrase bloodlust first, that he is a man who has a strong bloodlust, and somehow he's, I don't know how to get inside his head struggling with this. Maybe it's the difference between his uncle and his father. I mean, I don't know, maybe it would be interesting to see this in these two guys, but his father certainly was a man who believed in the moral check, the inner moral check, am I right? And he certainly carries that into office. So again, he could have it both ways, build up the US military to unprecedented levels, but then don't use it, interesting. Other questions back here, go ahead, Mike. Well, it's probably the way we'd have to work out this, but how do you do that? I mean, how do you develop every river in the country into irrigation projects, develop urban water supplies, and into a transportation network, and still preserve their ecologic, I mean, the word ecology was not in his vocabulary, I don't think he would have thought about it in those terms. In some ways, things have gotten a lot more complicated for us these days, but there is no easy answer for that. I think I would just like to have somebody who is such a thoughtful man and a well-read man, a great scholar, sort out some of this. It's not apparent how you do that. I mean, you can do it by sort of saying, well, we'll set these lands up in this way and put a fence around them, but over here we'll do these things. That's not altogether a very healthy solution, particularly when you then decide to build a dam in some place you've just saved. I mean, I think this is sort of the issue going on with ANMOR right now. How do you drill there and maintain the ecological integrity? I don't think there are many scientists who can give you an answer to this matter. To some extent, it's a moral issue. But my point is not that we shouldn't be trying to reconcile these things, but that we should not confuse them, economic development and protection. And that's a rather different thing than saying conservation is development or development is conservation or whatever. Other questions? Yes, here. In what message might Theodore Roosevelt send to the youth of today on the conservation question? Search me. I mean, I can't begin to speculate. I mean, you've got some experts here on this matter. I would say, give them Doug Brinkley's book. All of you in here who are college students here, buy Doug Brinkley's book and get the answer out of that. I mean, I find him quite confusing on these matters as I'm indicating here. But we haven't heard from too many students with questions and so maybe they have an answer to this. What do you think, Teddy Roosevelt, some of you, I see a lot of students in here. Let's have a comment from some of you rather than all the gray beards like me. Any takers? Anyone want to speculate about Roosevelt's message to young people today? What you'd like to have him say to you today? All right, well, think about that. Don't be shy. Well, there's still time. Let's go back here. All right. What happened unless he had been able to sell it to the public? I think that's what the political reality at the time would seem to suggest that he had no other choice but to do it the way he did it. So how would you... The question is, did he use the idea that conservation is economic development and the other way around as a stalking horse to get conservation ideas across the political spectrum? Well, perhaps that's a good way to look at it. But it's a very dangerous strategy. You get hoist by your own petard very quickly with that. I mean, when they go home, exactly what are they going to do about conservation? It seems to me at that conference, it would have been if you're trying to educate these people, start off with some ways in which this country's efficiency might be addressed, but then open up their minds to some other possibilities. Bring more women, more environment, more of the John Muir types into the conference and have talks. John Muir talked with wealthy people, industrialists, businessmen all the time. They understood what he was talking about. Why was this completely excluded from the conversation? So that's a very, it seems to me incomplete message and in the end a very dangerous message. But Professor Worcester, let me just follow that up. I've read that 50 minute speech that Roosevelt gave in May of 1908 and for a very large portion of it he outlines one conservation disaster after the next, ways in which we falsely exploited timber, ways in which we have depleted this or that national reserve. This is not a fully positive speech. He begins and spends I think at least half of the speech by making a list of ways in which government managed scientifically based, wise use conservation is the only alternative to the great barbecue of wholesale and unregulated resource exploitation. So I mean, that's a little less dark than your portraying. I'm not suggesting here he was celebrating everything we've done. I read the passage from him that talked about soil depletion, et cetera and so on. But the context in which he wants to put this finally is the way to economic growth and national power and security. He doesn't talk to them about the fact that he loves frogs. That these are things we all ought to love. He puts it always in the terms of self-interest. Now maybe he's underselling his audience. Maybe he has a critical message and he's underselling and underestimating his office. We're still doing that today. I think there is often a feeling in the conservation movement or the environmental movement that the only way we're gonna get through to people is to show them how this is gonna make them wealthier. How this is, how stopping doing the bad things we've done in the past will actually put money into our pockets and make us a more powerful nation than ever before. I think people are more morally complicated than that. And I think Roosevelt could have talked to them about all these passions. The fact that he loved deer not only as hides to wear or as commodities to be traded. He had a great opportunity there to talk to him about his passions for birds and so on. Many of those people probably would have shared a lot of that. Let's take a few more. This here, Roosevelt's pro-dam, pro-reclamation. Was anybody saying this might be dangerous? Well, there were people who talked about the dangers of building large dams. There'd been a major dam in Western Pennsylvania that had collapsed and there was a lot of anxiety about building more dams and what they might do just as a natural catastrophe or a man-made catastrophe. There were people who were worried about fish populations even then, what these dams would do to migrating fish species. There were people who said, well, build dams but don't build them in places of pristine beauty like Hatch-Hatch-E-Valley. I mean, there was a huge controversy even in the state of California over that. So yeah, there were critics out there who were not necessarily against old dams. I mean, who may have said we need water supplies for small farmers, but John Westley Powell's solution was not the one that we finally adopted. It was to build, let small farm communities amalgamate their own capital or borrow whatever credit they could get and to build their own small-scale dams to serve their own needs and to control it. Not turn this over to the federal government which would build much more grandiose projects. So there wasn't the kind of debate and discussion that we've had since, well, the 50s and 60s in this country but yeah, there were people talking about these issues. We have time for a few more, Gary. Can you summarize that and then speak to it? Well, he's asking me to say what the government should do about the use of mid-range sonar, the military is used today, what the government should do. Roosevelt just, as Brinkley said last night, I so declare. You know, I have some problems with anybody just so declaring as I'm sure Doug also does. This can lead to abuses of power and countervailing force in government should be one in which government also has checks and balances in which Congress is brought into these issues in which the courts are brought in. I mean, my idea of a countervailing system of power would probably check Teddy Roosevelt to some extent or his ability to do these things and have them discussed in the public. So I think this issue should be brought up in a broad political sense and a broad political discussion going on in this country of what the US military's impact upon the global environment is has been on our lands in the West, on our ocean resources, on other countries where we go to war, et cetera. That should be a political discussion and it should be one in which all the branches of government have some voice to play. And I'm very committed personally to bringing as many people into the conversation as possible to get. We may end up making bad decisions. We have many times, but I feel much more confident when we have a huge committee of people sitting down talking about these issues than a dictate by anybody, even as charming a guy as Teddy Roosevelt. We have time for just a few more, yes in the back. Can you help? Did anyone in the international community have Roosevelt's ear on global implications of our development during his time? I would refer that question to some of the experts in the room, but I'm not aware of any. He was planning to have a conference that would bring together Mexico, Canada, and so on. That didn't happen. Congress cut off his funding even for the governor's conference, but I don't know of any individuals who had internationally. I don't know actually what his relationship to someone like George Perkins Marsh was. I presume he read Marsh at some point. He read everything. He had to read George Perkins Marsh who had traveled extensively in the Middle East in the Mediterranean area, the Alpine area, served as ambassador to Italy in 1864, wrote this wonderful book on man and nature, how the earth had been transformed by human action. All kinds of conservationists read this. They were aware of international implications, but as far as any contemporary of his, Doug, do you know anybody? Don, let me just shift it back to the question of borders because you mentioned the Roosevelt's desire to have a North American conservation conference. You've written about the Colorado River and the border between the United States and Mexico. What would have his attitude have been about Mexican concerns about our exploitation of the Colorado? Search me. I mean, I don't think he, of course, Hoover Dam had not yet even been dreamed up. When he went into this reclamation program, I don't think he had any idea that all these things would follow in quite the scale. I mean, that was his successor Franklin Roosevelt era that started the era of huge massive dams that eventually drained so much water out of the Colorado that Mexico was left high and dry much of the time, necessitating a treaty. I would just add to all of this that I think it's probably unfair of us to try to fit Teddy Roosevelt into the global environmental situation we're facing today. He wasn't prepared for that. And maybe we're still not prepared for that. So trying to read what Teddy would have said and done to all these issues is an important question to ask. But I think ultimately my point would be Teddy was a great man for his day. He mirrored all the contradictions and complexities of his era. Let's say that about him. Let's realize he was a complicated dude and not try to set him up as a sort of continuing patron saint or guru who was adequate for all of our needs today. Let's do just two more questions. I think there was one here. It's about the damming of the Missouri. You've written about this in Rivers of Empire and elsewhere, but as you know, there are huge main stem dams on the Missouri. Can you talk a little bit about the implication of that industrial paradigm on the Missouri Valley? Well, I mean, it's nearly killed the Missouri River. I mean, what we've done over the years. And one of our big projects as a nation ought to be to try to figure out how we're gonna restore some of these projects and river declines that we've created. Not just on the Missouri, but the Colorado. I don't know what the possibilities are at this point, but surely the next great age is neither conservation nor development, but restoration. And the Missouri is one of those places that stands most in need of trying to figure out how to restore this place to its beauty and health that it once had. But that, we can't lay at the feet of Roosevelt either. That didn't get authorized till 1944. Let's do one more, yes. And the good sense of always wanting economic development to be the engine. Yeah, well, or also that economic growth and development must come first, and then we can do other things later when we're well-fed, but... And that's a legitimate point of view, and I'm glad that there are people who are speaking up for that point of view in here and we can have a debate about this. I'm afraid we're never gonna get well-fed enough to move beyond this. And I really don't think that's simply pragmatism. In 1908, as I said, the United States, well, in 1903, it was around the turn of the century, had 100 million people. We weren't starving as a people. That wasn't the real issue. It was how to make this nation, how to double the population in this country. Is that pragmatism? Is that solving problems? Or is that wanting to be bigger and greater than ever? And when do you sort of say enough? When do we say growth becomes a cancer? Those are the kinds of questions that I don't really expect him to answer. Nobody did in his era, even though he was such a smart guy and so well-read. But it is the question that we have to come back to an answer today. And simply saying that we've just got to get ourselves better fed and better housed and better clothed and better automobiled and better TVed and so on. And then these other things can come along, I think has always been a dangerous and inadequate strategy. That's my personal view, but I'm glad some of you may disagree. You know, Don, I think you really meant it when you said you'd like to hear from young people about... Definitely. Is anyone wished to speak here, yes? What are your views on the square deal of Theodore Roosevelt? Oh, you're really leading me way astray. I mean, I told you I'm not a Roosevelt scholar. You know, again, I think Roosevelt, when it comes to social policy, economic policy in the United States, is a man who is full of interesting contradictions. A man who could denounce the muckrakers for what they said about corporate America. And on the other hand, turn around and sound almost like a muckraker. So, and I think this is very much true of his general policies toward sharing the wealth in this country, giving everybody a square deal, et cetera. But, you know, I don't really want to go down that line because I think it really takes us away from the conservation and more than anything else, it takes me into areas of total ignorance. Is there any... I knew a student would ask me the most to go into my areas of ignorance. They always do. Any other thoughts here about conservation, what you are looking for from your leadership class? Okay, well, think about it and there's still time. I'm gonna ask you one last question and I'm gonna ask Marty Otterman Gardner to come up and give us some thoughts about the logistics of the rest of the day. But, and this is not meant to be some sort of a challenge to you, but weren't we going to get the industrial state one way or the other with or without Theodore Roosevelt? And maybe he was a cheerleader and maybe he was a man of his time, but weren't we gonna get that one way or the other? But it's not clear we were gonna get the conservation state without him. I mean, don't we have to place him on balance as insisting upon a conservation state while granting an industrial state? That's a good point to make. I don't think you could have stopped industrialization and here again, Roosevelt's a very conflicted man about the industrial society. There's a lot of it. I think this was a theme last night again that he wanted to get away from. As far away from it as he possibly could. But he understood you couldn't stop it. So my point isn't that he should have tried to stop it, but that he should have done what Galbraith called for in the 1950s and 1960s, a vision of a countervailing state, not a partnership, not an alliance, but a countervailing state. An industrial state needs a huge counterwheel to defend other sorts of values. And I don't know where one goes, but government. If government becomes the cheerleader of, the planner of, the brain center of the industrial state, then I think we have an industrial state that becomes tyrannical. I'm gonna ask Marty Odom and Gardner to come up please stay seated. But first of all, thank you, Donald Worcester. Thank you, thank you all. He'll be signing books in the lobby all day.