I will begin by confessing that I find Theodore Roosevelt confusing and contradictory. He seems to say one thing and then a few minutes later, say almost exactly the opposite – on almost any topic you can find. On his behalf, we can say that he mirrors the contradictions in American culture and society of his time. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether he resolved those contradictions or not. I have my own view. But let’s start with the contradiction to which Clay was alluding.

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 the consumer’s paradise in which we live, where economic abundance rolls steadily onward 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 has 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 want to control growth so 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 over, 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 scarcity 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 risk takers in the banking industry. Roosevelt believed emphatically in a regulated economy. He was always suspicious of Wall Street, the barons of finance and industry, the business class and its view of the world. Over the span of nearly two full terms in office, he made controlling the economy and 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. Usually, since Roosevelt was a maverick Republican, it is so-called maverick Republican candidates who try to fit themselves into his shoes. And then the pundits rush in to measure the fit – usually finding the candidate falling short and declaring, “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.

In our popular memories, Roosevelt is usually standing on an open air platform, giving a speech to a sea of upturned, adoring faces. He’s a stocky man with a broad chest. His ears lie flat against his blunt, round head. Unlike Abraham Lincoln, his face shows no ungainly angles, no melancholic shadows. He looks completely self-assured, complete transparent--all manly force and decision. He wears a pair of rimless eyeglasses clipped to his nose. His small eyes squint hard. And his teeth seem to snap together as he speaks. A fist is either up in the air or pounding into an open palm, beating out a harsh rhythm like a boxer delivering blows. “We have become great in a material sense," he thunders, "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 soil 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.”

Those words were delivered in his opening address to the conference of governors that Roosevelt convened at the White House in 1908, in his last few months in office, trying to move conservation from the fringes to the center of national attention. This year marks the 100th anniversary of that famous governors’ 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 how Mr. Roosevelt found his way to the idea that Americans needed a new 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 fifty years did it become so popular, and why did he become so committed to it?

The short answer is that Roosevelt became a conservationist through a love of hunting, combined with a strong family tradition which taught him that great wealth should bring great responsibility. Biographers tell us about his boyhood zeal for shooting animals, pursuing natural history as an avid collector of skins and feathers. When he was fourteen and his family was on vacation in Egypt – that immediately separates him from almost all of us– 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 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 lured him to the outdoors. But they didn’t alone make him a conservationist. Many men of his era liked to shoot birds or moose or African elephants, without ever thinking of conserving them. Roosevelt, in contrast, thought of the future and of a bleak time when there might be nothing left to shoot.

When he was twenty-nine years old, a graduate of Harvard, a crack marksman, and a veteran of big game hunting in North Dakota and Montana, he became president of the Boone and Crockett Club. It was one of the first conservation organizations in the United States. Its membership was limited to one hundred elite males, who had killed “in fair chase” several kinds of big game -- bear, elk, bighorn sheep, and so on. There were many objectives in this organization, but conservation was not number one. Number one was “to promote manly sport with the rifle.” But the Club did work for the preservation of large game. 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, self-restraint, and sportsmanship. 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. The psychological tension here needs exploring: the struggle within the conservation hunter 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 Roosevelt’s psychological complexity. He sensed in himself a capacity for violence and sought to restrain it within strict bounds.

A second stage in the making of this great conservationist came after he assumed the presidency in 1901. 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 lands legacy unlike any in the world for size and variety; to create a common land heritage open to all people, protective of all species, and protective, above all, of America’s remaining wild forests. The need for this environmental protection was not new. The Yosemite Valley had been 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 those ideas to heights undreamed of by earlier administrations.

Here is a list of what he achieved: 150 million new acres of national forests 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 directed at him, both here in the American West and in Congress, for these acts. In 1903 he established a system of wildlife refuges that eventually also stretched across this country, and today those refuges constitute about 100 million acres, about the size of the state of California. He established several national parks, before Congress put an end to his efforts, and they included the Grand Canyon, Devils Tower, and others.

No president, not even Jimmy Carter with his Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, did more than Roosevelt to nationalize, socialize, and democratize land in this country, or to preserve nature – wild nature – for its own sake. For all 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. 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 idea. For in addition to protecting nature, Roosevelt promoted conservation as a new kind of economic growth – planned, 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 expand beyond anything he could have imagined. Eventually, virtually every major river in the American West would be dammed many times over.

Roosevelt’s so-called water conservation program, building dams that no private capitalist would touch, set in motion a series of environmental changes that today have come to be seen as destructive of the West’s natural ecosystems. But it is also important to remember how that program forged a powerful alliance between government and private economic interests 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, and nuclear power--with a similar disregard for whether the benefits justified the costs.

This government-business 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 also mean the rationalized, long-term exploitation of natural resources to secure future profit.

According to this reasoning, nature as well as people can waste a valuable natural resource. An undammed river that dumps its water into the sea is wasting that resource. Nature needs 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.” He was speaking at a time when the U.S. population was one hundred million – not a negligible amount. But that was not enough for him. Through federal irrigation, he promised that the arid West alone would someday support at least one hundred million more. "Dee-lighted" by this promise of federal capital and leadership to “build the West,” chambers of congress in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Denver, and eventually Las Vegas, dropped their traditional opposition to government intervention in the economy.

So the notion of conservation changed from one of government protecting wildlife, forests, and open space, to one of government promoting and leading economic growth. In a speech given in 1910 in Osawatomie, Kansas, Roosevelt 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 contrary ideas that we try to balance or reconcile. They are 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 – particularly the West’s businessmen – how to win the West, how to transform the natural world into national wealth and power.

Here’s more from that Osawatomie speech, which makes economic development a national moral imperative: “Conservation 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 is that the ultimate issue is 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.

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 questioned the basic institutions and values of modern economic nationalism, imperialism, or industrial capitalism. Nor was raising such questions definitely on the agenda when he called the governors to the White House in 1908. Almost all the governors – attended, including Burke from North Dakota, Cutler from Utah, Hoch from Kansas, and Hughes from New York. Also attending were members of the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, and Congress. But the most numerous attendees were many guests from the business and scientific community, including Andrew Carnegie, the legendary steel-maker; James J. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railroad; two-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryant; labor figures Samuel Gompers and John G. Mitchell; the heads of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Bar Association, the American Livestock Association, and the Society of Civil Engineers; and 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, president of the Sierra Club and the most widely-recognized conservationist in the country. Although a good friend and admirer of Roosevelt’s, a man who voted for Roosevelt, Muir 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. Who, after all, can disagree with that idea of wise use? Muir believed in good farm management, he supported irrigation, and he favored the harvesting of trees, as a practical man of business. 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 decided to give the city of San Francisco permission to construct a dam in the wild, pristine Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park, a dam 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 those would have cost them some money. Having preserved the valley from developers and exploiters, Roosevelt now decided to turn it over to those who wanted to expand San Francisco into a seat of empire. Muir had fought that decision bitterly, and therefore he was not wanted in Washington.

The purpose of this impressive 1908 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 of that growth. He pounded home the idea that because the wealth of nations ultimately comes from the land, the heads of nation states 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, so appealing in a time of national tension and chaos. In the new 20th century they began to dream, conflicts between labor and management would disappear through government mediation, the old raw competitive capitalism would be tamed, prices would be stabilized, profits would increase at a steady rate, and the Mississippi River of consumer abundance would roll on and on.

To make that dream possible, nature would have to be more intensively managed than ever before. Start with rivers, the conferees were told. Turn all of our nation’s rivers into a network of improved transportation facilities, a system modeled after the railroad system but run by the government. And then turn every forest, public or private, into what Roosevelt's Chief Forester and key conservation advisor Gifford Pinchot called “a manufacturing plant for the production of wood.”

Not only was that vision accepted by the nation’s elite in 1908, it has continued to animate government right down to our own time. And it has worked remarkably well. 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 to secure them. In fact, we have not run out of resources, despite experiencing a massive growth in the American population and economy. Our numbers have increased by 300%. Our national economy has increased by 600% since Roosevelt’s day. And yet, the forests still grow, the waters still run. We have never experienced an actual timber famine, which they worried about in those early days, or indeed any other kind of resource collapse. At least, not yet.

The apparatus that can claim credit for this success was described in 1967 by the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith as “the new industrial state, an interlocking elite of government and corporations.” Since that point it has grown in scale until today a mere one hundred corporations control almost all of the products, services, and resources in this nation, while the government has become ever more indispensable as the architect of 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 under 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 in our national forests. We have turned public lands into massive tree plantations. We have opened them quite liberally – some say as though a fire sale were in progress – for gold, uranium, and coal mining. We have issued a horde of permits for oil and gas drilling. And all this because our privately owned lands can no longer meet consumer demands. The publicly owned and protected lands are being brought into more and more intense production, and even then they are not enough; increasingly, we must search for more resources overseas.

The clear message of the twentieth century is that conservation as protection has limped far behind conservation as development. This is so despite the fact that protection is a role the government does very well – in fact, 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 or 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 promotion, 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 and 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. As in laissez-faire capitalism, we are left with no system of checks and balances, or what Galbraith called a system of “countervailing power.”

Roosevelt could not see the outcome of his alliance, partly because he was living before it was well advanced but also 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 of more concentrated power left them with the means to do extraordinary damage in the name of conservation.

We can now see how, operating under the banner of wise use, the new industrial state – which I believe Roosevelt was largely responsible for initiating – has played a huge role in the planned destruction of the earth. Instead of bringing true conservation, the industrial state that Roosevelt did so much to create may have brought us more quickly 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, paper, and fossil fuels, a build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, an accelerating loss of terrestrial ecosystems? Is there something missing from the Roosevelt-Pinchot notion of conservation as development?

If Mr. Roosevelt were sitting in the White House today, surveying the damage that government as well as business has done over the past century, might he reconsider his words? Would he try to protect those wildlife refuges that he established from the developers, or would 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 Hetch Hetchy Valley? Either outcome is possible in Roosevelt's ethic of conservation. Would he have 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 this time would he stress environmental protection over development? Would he make that protection the highest work of government?

Let us imagine that in this age of global climate change, Roosevelt comes back to call another governors’ conference, or perhaps a conference of all the world’s heads of state? What might 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, might, and growth of the United States or any other nation, 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 leaders work for a government devoted to protecting not the sources of industrial wealth but the sources of life?

For what it’s worth, I believe that Roosevelt’s protective impulses were 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 interests. Conservation should mean that government acts as a countervailing force against the ups and downs of the market, a counterbalance to the human propensity for greed. Conservation should stand uncompromisingly for beauty, ecological integrity, and 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.

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 a tangled and contradictory pile of ideas and motives. It’s time to acknowledge those contradictions and choose which role we expect the government to play in our relations with the earth.