What did Roosevelt do to protect the environment?

Theodore Roosevelt

President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was an ardent abet of outdoor life, and of all his policies that of conservation of the nation's natural resource was of the near permanent significance. In his commencement message to Congress, he had declared that the forest and h2o problems were the almost vital domestic bug facing the American people. During his administration he succeeded in setting aside almost lx million hectares of timber land in the United States proper and some 34 million hectares of mineral lands in Alaska. More than than this, he dramatized the conservation problem earlier the Nation by his speeches, his actions, and by the convening of the Conservation Conference, making the protection of natural resources a national result. Following is an excerpt from his 7th Almanac Message to Congress on December three, 1907.

To the Senate and House of Representatives:

. . .The conservation of our natural resources and their proper employ constitute the fundamental trouble which underlies almost every other problem of our national life. . ..Equally a nation nosotros not but enjoy a wonderful measure of present prosperity only if this prosperity is used aright information technology is an earnest of future success such as no other nation volition take. The reward of foresight for this nation is great and hands foretold. But in that location must be the expect ahead, in that location must be a realization of the fact that to waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will event in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by correct to paw downward to them amplified and developed. For the last few years, through several agencies, the government has been endeavoring to go our people to look alee and to substitute a planned and orderly evolution of our resources in place of a haphazard striving for firsthand profit. Our great river systems should exist developed as national h2o highways, the Mississippi, with its tributaries, standing first in importance, and the Columbia second, although in that location are many others of importance on the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Gulf slopes. The National Authorities should undertake this work, and I promise a outset will be made in the nowadays Congress; and the greatest of all our rivers, the Mississippi, should receive special attention. From the Great Lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi there should be a deep waterway, with deep waterways leading from it to the East and the West. Such a waterway would practically mean the extension of our coastline into the very heart of our land. It would be of incalculable benefit to our people. If begun at once information technology tin can exist carried through in time appreciably to relieve the congestion of our great freight-carrying lines of railroads. The work should be systematically and continuously carried forward in accordance with some well-conceived plan. The chief streams should be improved to the highest signal of efficiency earlier the improvement of the branches is attempted; and the work should exist kept free from every taint of recklessness or jobbery. The inland waterways which lie just back of the whole Eastern and Southern coasts should also be adult. Moreover, the development of our waterways involves many other important h2o problems, all of which should exist considered as part of the same general scheme. The government dams should be used to produce hundreds of thousands of horse-power as an incident to improving navigation; for the almanac value of the unused water-powered of the Untied States perhaps exceeds the annual value of the products of all our mines. As an incident to creating the deep waterways downward the Mississippi, the regime should build along its whole lower length levees which, taken together with the control of the headwaters, volition at once and forever put a complete stop to all threat of floods in the immensely fertile delta region. The territory lying adjacent to the Mississippi along its lower course will thereby get one of the most prosperous and populous, every bit it already is 1 of the most fertile, farming regions in all the world. I have appointed an inland waterways commission to report and outline a comprehensive scheme of development along all the lines indicated. Afterward I shall lay its report earlier the Congress.

Irrigation should be far more than extensively adult than now, not only in the States of the great plains and the Rocky Mountains, simply in many others, as, for instance, in large portions of the South Atlantic and Gulf States, where it should get hand in hand with the reclamation of swampland. The Federal Authorities should seriously devote itself to this chore, realizing that utilization of waterways and water-ability, forestry, irrigation, and the reclamation of lands threatened with overflow, are all interdependent parts of the same problem. The work of the Reclamation Service in developing the larger opportunities of the Western one-half of our state for irrigation is more important than almost whatsoever other movement. The constant purpose of the government in connection with the Reclamation Service has been to utilize the water resources of the public lands for the ultimate greatest good of the greatest number; in other words, to put upon the land permanent abode-makers, to employ and develop information technology for themselves and for their children and children's children. . . .

The endeavour of the regime to deal with the public land has been based upon the same principle as that of the Reclamation Service. The land law organisation which was designed to meet the needs of the fertile and well-watered regions of the Middle West has largely broken down when applied to the drier regions of the cracking plains, the mountains, and much of the Pacific gradient, where a farm of 160 acres is inadequate for cocky-support. . . .Three years ago a public-lands committee was appointed to scrutinize the constabulary, and defects, and recommend a remedy. Their examination specifically showed the existence of great fraud upon the public domain, and their recommendations for changes in the constabulary were fabricated with the pattern of conserving the natural resource of every office of the public lands by putting information technology to its all-time use. Especial attention was called to the prevention of settlement past the passage of great areas of public country into the hands of a few men, and to the enormous waste caused by unrestricted grazing upon the open range. The recommendations of the Public-Lands Commission are sound, for they are especially in the interest of the actual home-maker; and where the small home-maker cannot at present utilize the land they provide that the regime shall go on control of it so that it may not be monopolized past a few men. The Congress has not yet acted upon these recommendations, just they are so just and proper, and so essential to our national welfare, that I feel confident, if the Congress will take time to consider them, that they will ultimately be adopted.

Some such legislation as that proposed is essential in order to preserve the great stretches of public grazing-land which are unfit for cultivation under present methods and are valuable only for the provender which they supply. These stretches amount in all to some 300,000,000 acres, and are open to the free grazing of cattle, sheep, horses, and goats, without restriction. Such a system, or lack of system, means that the range is non so much used equally wasted by corruption. As the Westward settles, the range becomes more and more overgrazed. Much of it cannot be used to advantage unless it is fenced, for fencing is the only way past which to continue in check the owners of nomad flocks which roam here and thither, utterly destroying the pastures and leaving a waste behind so that their presence is incompatible with the presence of abode-makers. The existing fences are all illegal. . . . All these fences, those that are hurtful and those that are beneficial, are alike illegal and must come down. But it is an outrage that the law should necessitate such action on the office of the Assistants. The unlawful fencing of public lands for private grazing must exist stopped, only the necessity which occasioned it must be provided for. The Federal Government should accept command of the range, whether by allow or charter, as local necessities may make up one's mind. Such control could secure the neat benefit of legitimate fencing, while at the same time securing and promoting the settlement of the country. . . . The government should part with its title simply to the bodily home-maker, not to the profit-maker who does not care to make a home. Our prime object is to secure the rights and guard the interests of the small ranchman, the man who ploughs and pitches hay for himself. It is this small ranchman, this bodily settler and abode-maker, who in the long run is well-nigh injure by permitting thefts of the public land in whatever class.

Optimism is a proficient feature, just if carried to an excess it becomes foolishness. We are decumbent to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not then. The mineral wealth of the country, the coal, iron, oil, gas, and the like, does not reproduce itself, and therefore is sure to exist wearied ultimately; and wastefulness in dealing with it today means that our descendants will feel the burnout a generation or two before they otherwise would. But there are sure other forms of waste which could exist entirely stopped-the waste of soil past washing, for instance, which is among the most dangerous of all wastes now in progress in the United States, is easily preventible, and then that this present enormous loss of fertility is entirely unnecessary. The preservation or replacement of the forests is ane of the virtually of import ways of preventing this loss. Nosotros have fabricated a beginning in wood preservation, but and so rapid has been the charge per unit of exhaustion of timber in the U.s. in the past, and so rapidly is the residual being exhausted, that the country is unquestionably on the verge of a timber famine which volition be felt in every household in the land. The present annual consumption of lumber is certainly three times equally great as the annual growth; and if the consumption and growth proceed unchanged, practically all our lumber volition be wearied in another generation, while long before the limit to complete burnout is reached the growing scarcity will make itself felt in many blighting means upon our national welfare. About twenty per cent of our forested territory is now reserved in national forests, simply these exercise not include the about valuable timberlands, and in any event the proportion is too pocket-size to look that the reserves can accomplish more than than a mitigation of the trouble which is ahead for the nation. .
Nosotros should acquire in the Appalachian and White Mountain regions all the woods-lands that information technology is possible to larn for the employ of the nation. These lands, because they form a national asset, are equally emphatically national equally the rivers which they feed, and which flow through and so many States before they reach the ocean.

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Source: https://kr.usembassy.gov/education-culture/infopedia-usa/living-documents-american-history-democracy/theodore-roosevelt-conservation-natural-resources-1907/