No president played a more seminal role in lending credibility and momentum to the conservation movement than Theodore Roosevelt. His administration made unprecedented efforts to establish a national policy to conserve the nation’s abundant natural resources during a time when the Industrial Revolution threatened to deplete the vast wilderness in the West. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the needs of the burgeoning industrial sector led to major improvements in transportation and infrastructure, and it fueled demands for cheap energy. Massive coal-mining operations sprung up in a number of eastern states such as Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky. Congress, eager to aid in the process of industrialization, granted private individuals and corporations the right to extract natural resources from federal lands in exchange for a fee. As the demand for coal, timber, and other natural resources increased, a fledgling conservation movement sounded an alarm that unregulated extraction of resources threatened the future of the country. The late nineteenth-century conservation movement sought to preserve the natural condition of federal land and place pressure on the Interior Department to protect the environment instead of focusing solely on the development of federal lands. The conservation movement faced intense opposition from political and corporate interests who adamantly opposed any effort to limit their access to natural resources.
One of the earliest political conflicts between these two forces occurred in the battle over Yellowstone National Park. Despite being designated a national park, there were no laws protecting the wildlife or other natural resources within its boundaries. By the end of the nineteenth century, mining and railroad interests threatened to permanently disrupt the habitat of the park. Extensive lobbying by the wilderness group Boone and Crockett persuaded President Grover Cleveland to sign legislation protecting Yellowstone’s natural resources in 1894.
The cause of conservation found a friend in Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had a lifelong fascination with nature and was an ardent admirer of famed environmentalist and author John Muir. In 1903, President Roosevelt went camping in the Yosemite Valley with Muir. The trip persuaded Roosevelt to expand the boundaries of Yosemite National Park to include Yosemite Valley and other adjacent areas. Similarly, a visit to Pelican Island in Florida in 1903 convinced Roosevelt that the majestic birds needed to be protected from the threats posed by the millinery industry, and he created the Pelican Island Bird Reservation, one of more than fifty such wildlife refuges that he would establish during his time in office.
In the Campaign of 1904, Roosevelt, who had become president upon the assassination of President William McKinley in September 1901, easily won election to a full four-year term. Roosevelt ran on a platform that included support for new conservation programs, rooted in the principles of scientific management of natural resources that he had developed decades earlier as a founding member of the Boone and Crockett Club. For the first time, the conservation movement had a strong ally in the White House. Roosevelt created the Bureau of Forestry in the Department of the Interior and appointed well-known conservationist Gifford Pinchot as the bureau’s “chief forester.” With the support of Roosevelt, Pinchot instituted a number of reforms to conserve the nation’s resources. Roosevelt created eighteen national monuments during his time in office, including the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona.
Roosevelt declined to run for another term, and in 1908, the Republican Party nominated William Howard Taft in his stead. Taft went on to easily win the Campaign of 1908 on a Republican platform that promised, in part, to continue Roosevelt’s conservation policies. Shortly after assuming the presidency, however, Taft angered the conservation movement by nominating Richard A. Ballinger, a friend of western business interests, as secretary of the interior. When Ballinger announced his support for opening large tracts of Alaskan land for the extraction of natural resources, the conservation movement criticized him for favoring the interests of his pro-development friends. In 1910, Ballinger dismissed Louis Glavis, an Interior Department employee responsible for overseeing federal lands in Alaska, for opposing his development decision. Chief forester Pinchot then released an open letter sharply criticizing Ballinger for the firing and for the decision to open Alaskan lands to development. President Taft responded by dismissing Pinchot for insubordination.
The Pinchot-Ballinger controversy had a major effect on the relationship between former president Theodore Roosevelt and President Taft. Many progressive Republicans attacked Taft for abandoning Roosevelt’s progressive agenda. In the Campaign of 1912, Roosevelt launched an unsuccessful effort to win the Republican nomination for president. When the Republican convention renominated Taft for a second term, Roosevelt launched a third-party campaign under the auspices of the Bull Moose Party, which was composed of progressive Republicans. Woodrow Wilson, the nominee of the Democratic Party, went on to win the 1912 presidential election, largely because Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote.
Elected to office in the Campaign of 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover shared some of the sensible-use ethic that underscored the progressives’ approach to conservation (although he openly feuded with Gifford Pinchot). As historian Kendrick Clements notes, by the 1920s, many federal agencies had bureaus devoted specifically to conservation or environmental concerns, and both chambers of Congress had formed powerful committees to deal with these issues. Hoover was an engineer by trade, and this influenced his approach to conservation. He was also suspicious of public-sector solutions to problems, believing that voluntary, private-sector initiatives were more effective. Hoover’s goal was the efficient, centralized organization of the federal government’s various environmental entities, reduction of industrial waste, efficient production of energy, and the conservation of natural resources so that they could be utilized by future generations. As secretary of commerce, Hoover played a major role in negotiating the Colorado River Compact, which allocated water use among the various states along its boundaries. He also negotiated the compact that created the Hoover Dam, which then began construction under his presidency. Hoover’s creation of a Timber Conservation Board in 1930 was primarily to limit overproduction of timber and to eliminate waste in timber harvesting. He was not interested in protecting forests from development; rather, he was interested in sustainable use. Similarly, the limits Hoover placed on oil permits on federal land were not to protect the land itself, but instead to limit overproduction (which he viewed as inefficient) in the oil industry. Ultimately, Hoover’s interests lay in promoting practices that made businesses more profitable and produced jobs for workers.
Elected to the presidency in the Campaign of 1932, Franklin Roosevelt threw his full support behind various conservation programs as part of his New Deal. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) helped to rebuild the national park system. Workers in the CCC worked on fire prevention in national forests, planted billions of trees, constructed hundreds of parks, cleaned up rural streams and stocked them with fish, controlled erosion, implemented flood-control projects, and created park trails and picnic areas. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) not only repaired and built transportation infrastructure, but also cleared slums and reforested blighted areas. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is best known for its electrification of rural America, but the program also replanted logged-out forests, restored soil that had been eroded due to overfarming, developed sustainable agriculture practices, and restored the natural habitats of fish and other wildlife. While Franklin Roosevelt’s primary goal was the useful employment of millions of out-of-work Americans, he chose to focus much of that effort on environmental conservation and on making America’s green spaces more accessible to its citizens.
During the 1950s, decades of air and water pollution began to threaten the health and safety of millions of Americans, as thick coats of smog blanketed the nation’s cities and waterways became contaminated by refuse and industrial waste. The publication of books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, which demonstrated the harm to human and animal life from the use of the pesticide DDT, helped to usher in a new era of environmentalism, and activists set goals far beyond conserving the nation’s natural resources. The new emphasis was on restoring the health of an environment severely damaged by the Industrial Revolution, along with large amounts of pollution caused by reliance on the automobile for transportation, the burning of coal to generate electric power, and the use of pesticides in agriculture.
Support for environmental regulations was more bipartisan during this time period than it had been in previous eras. President Lyndon Johnson’s wife, Lady Byrd, promoted a program to “Keep America Beautiful,” which involved limits on the use of public billboards along highways, limiting the size and location of waste facilities, and using public funds to beautify the nation’s highways and byways. By the 1970s, several states began deposit programs for beverage containers to encourage recycling. Most notably during this time period, two major pieces of legislation were enacted. The Clean Air Act of 1970 gave the federal government the power to develop standards for measuring and limiting industrial air pollutants. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established in 1971 to implement the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act was further amended in 1977 and 1990, giving the federal government new enforcement powers when air quality did not meet federal standards, and expanding goals to limiting acid rain and damage to the ozone layer. The Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 was amended substantially in 1972 and again in 1977, giving the federal government the authority to regulate the discharge of pollutants and wastewater, and to set federal guidelines for contaminants in all bodies of water. The legislation also created grants for building wastewater treatment facilities.
The bipartisan coalition to improve air and water quality began to unravel with the Campaign of 1980. Republican nominee Ronald Reagan argued that excessive federal environmental regulations were risking American jobs and constraining general economic prosperity. Throughout the 1980s, Reagan battled Democrats in Congress over drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A mere ten days after a Senate committee finally agreed in 1989 to allow limited drilling, the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, spilling eleven million gallons of oil. With this environmental devastation on the nightly news for months, the issue of drilling for oil in Alaska quietly slid off of the political agenda. From 1980 to the present time, Democratic presidential candidates have generally shown strong support for the federal government’s role in protecting the environment. The Republican position has generally reflected the sentiment expressed by Reagan—namely, that federal regulations are not the best means to solve the problem.
Democrat Bill Clinton used his time in office to create nineteen national monuments (via the existing 1906 Antiquities Act) and to establish the Joshua Tree National Park. In his last days in office, his administration issued rules to limit commercial and recreational use of national parks and monuments, including a controversial ban on snowmobiles in the Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks after an EPA study that blamed snowmobiles, powerboats, and off-road vehicles for their substantial contribution to the nation’s air pollution (because they have long been exempted from pollution regulations on other vehicles). The snowmobile ban was promptly overturned by Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush.
During the Campaign of 2000, Vice President Al Gore, author of Earth in the Balance, argued that the state of the environment was precarious and that Americans’ use of fossil fuels was contributing to a catastrophic change in the global climate. Gore supported the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, an international pact to limit greenhouse gases. His opponent, Republican nominee George W. Bush, argued that the effect of human action on the planet was not a point on which all scholars agreed and suggested that drastic action would be premature. Bush opposed the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that it put American businesses at a competitive disadvantage relative to other countries. Gore’s plan to limit fossil fuel consumption was not popular in West Virginia, a state that had historically voted for Democrats but was also heavily reliant on the coal industry. Gore lost West Virginia; had he managed to win the state, the Florida recount would not have been a factor in determining the outcome of the presidential race, and Gore would have easily earned the necessary electoral votes to win the election.
In the Campaign of 2008, the environmental debate shifted to offshore oil drilling. While Republican governors such as Jeb Bush (Florida) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (California) had opposed offshore drilling during their tenure in office, arguing that it risked the environment and their states’ tourism industries, the Republican Party in general took a different tack. Republican voters chanted “Drill, baby, drill” at their campaign events (reminiscent of the “Burn, baby, burn” slogan chanted by participants in the Los Angeles riots in the 1960s), while Democratic candidates assured their voters that they would never permit an expansion of offshore drilling (although Obama changed his mind after being elected).
The Campaign of 2012 continued the 2008 debate over offshore drilling. In the interim, the country had experienced a disastrous spill at the BP Deepwater Horizon offshore drill site in the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2010, and Obama’s plans to allow limited offshore drilling were put on hold. Democrats used the BP spill as evidence that offshore drilling was a dangerous and risky process, and they suggested that allowing the Keystone oil pipeline plan to proceed over land would potentially involve similar leaks and spills. The GOP defended Keystone, arguing that it would create jobs, although support for offshore drilling became less of a campaign centerpiece. Instead, the GOP began to promote “clean coal” and fracking for natural gas as viable domestic energy sources—while Obama and the Democrats focused on the environmental costs of pursuing these energy policies.
Another emerging environmental issue involves the use of dams and levees to control flooding and to generate hydroelectricity. During the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the Glen River Canyon (north of the Grand Canyon) was dammed to regulate the distribution of water from the Colorado River. While environmentalists had agreed to the project to spare the Dinosaur National Monument, they soon had regrets. A last-minute trip down the canyon by the director of the Sierra Club revealed breathtaking natural formations and numerous Native American artifacts, but soon this was all submerged under Lake Powell. Edward Abbey’s influential novel The Monkey Wrench Gang is a fantasy about sabotaging this dam. A number of the Colorado River diversion projects are being reevaluated, as are many of the numerous levees along the Mississippi River, as scientists try to determine whether these levees contributed to the damage from Hurricane Katrina by limiting the Mississippi Delta’s ability to absorb the overflow. The stormy spring of 2011 led the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to breach some of the levees on the Mississippi, flooding some areas, to protect major cities from rising waters. Letting some U.S. waterways and shorelines have more natural boundaries is a current topic of debate.
In the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns, the debate over the nature and causes of climate change has emerged as a major issue, with conservatives more inclined toward skepticism of the evidence supporting recent conclusions about the Earth’s climate and the patterns of change now observed, and liberals typically trusting the objectivity of the science behind it.
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