Simon & Schuster | 2020 | 352 pages
Six-hundred miles into our family’s westward road trip, at last we reach the moonscape of Badlands National Park. Naively, I’d brought us here in search of solitude. I find hundreds of tourists seeking the same.
I wonder what 24-year-old Theodore Roosevelt might’ve thought of such an explosion of foot traffic when he first visited the Badlands of present-day North Dakota in 1883. Would he have been perturbed by our shoulder-to-shoulder parade along the boardwalk? Or would he have viewed our communal pilgrimage as proof of the conservation-minded citizenry he helped to create by way of passage of his 1906 American Antiquities Act?
Twenty years after his visit to the Badlands, then-President Roosevelt visited a different geological wonder of the west—the Grand Canyon. Standing at its rim, he urged onlookers to “Leave it as it is…” adding also, “You cannot improve on it; not a bit.”
Over a century later, we ask ourselves: Did we listen?
In David Gessner’s Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness, the author not only takes inventory of America’s environmental past, but directs readers’ attention to its present and future, too. Simultaneously deconstructing and resurrecting America’s most conservation-minded president, Gessner offers insights far beyond Roosevelt’s highlight reel. He portrays Roosevelt as neither saint nor sinner, but rather, the kind of complex figure he surely was. Avoiding the well-trod terrain of Roosevelt biographies, Gessner instead turns his attention to “the story of Roosevelt and the land, his love of it, his words about it, [and] his ferocious fight to preserve it.”
Gessner—by way of his interview-filled Western road trip to Bears Ears National Monument—does just that, offering a timely, 21st century take on what Roosevelt’s lessons mean for today’s environmentally precarious moment. I’m not only referring to the daily drip of dreadful news on our climate crisis; I’m speaking also of the former presidential administration whose efforts to remove land protections for nearly 2 million acres of national monuments (Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears, respectively) amounts to, according to the New York Times, “the largest rollback of public lands protection in United States history.”
Throughout Gessner’s book, Bears Ears serves as the latest battleground in the continued fight for preserving public lands. After speaking with stakeholders on all sides of the issue, Gessner offers his own take on the motivations behind removing the land’s protected status. “In reducing Bears Ears so dramatically, Trump can please his own rural constituency, not to mention Utah Senator Orrin Hatch,” Gessner writes, “but best of all he can undo something Obama did. What could be sweeter?”
Gessner’s analysis of the political calculus involved in the rollbacks of land protections seems, on an emotional level, nearly as blood-boiling as the rollbacks themselves. As Gessner reports, from the moment President Trump signed the 2017 executive order directing Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to “review certain national monuments… many felt the fix was in…” Indeed, Zinke’s five-day “listening tour” left many constituencies—most notably Utah’s native community—feeling voiceless in the process. As Utah Diné Bikéyah chairman Wille Grayeyes remarked, “[Secretary Zinke] chose to meet only with non-tribal leaders and he did not set foot in a single Native community in Utah to learn where our cultural sites are and why they matter to the traditions of our people.”
The environmental toll of these lost protections hits readers like a body blow. But the knock-out punch comes as a result of the Trump Administration’s blatant—yet unsurprising—disregard for indigenous culture.
Rather than lament these losses, Gessner counterpunches on the page. A scholar-with-swagger, Gessner’s as comfortable cracking a beer along a hiking trail as he is quoting from the Antiquities Act of 1906. The result is an earnest, knowledgeable, and straight-shooting guide, one whom readers can’t help but feel close to as he links Roosevelt’s America with our own.
With prosecutorial precision, Gessner shines a light on the shortfalls of today’s environmental policies. Yet rather than rest his case on the evidence, he goes further to remind readers that public lands were always intended for the common good.
“As we think about public lands as yet another arena of conflict and parse human beings into categories—a crunchy liberal enviro over here and a crusty cowboy local lover there—we forget how our public lands benefit all citizens,” he writes. “Until relatively recently, public lands were supported by both political parties and were a place and an issue for Americans to come together over, not be torn about by.”
To the cynics, the notion of returning to such an innocent time might seem Pollyannaish given the era in which we now live. Yet to the rest of us, it’s a refreshing notion: a much-needed reminder that our love of country extends to the land itself, and that love is hardly limited to party lines.
Part biography, travelogue, memoir, and investigative report, Gessner’s book—much like Theodore Roosevelt himself—defies pigeonholing. Such a broad approach offers Gessner more tools than a Swiss army knife, allowing him to fulfill his goal of transitioning from a “writer” to a “fighter” on the conservation front, and to use his own growing advocacy to inspire others.
If the measure of this book is determined by its ability to inspire, then it’s nothing short of a marvel. Yet devastating, too, in the story it shares.
One-hundred seventeen years ago, it might’ve been enough to follow Roosevelt’s advice to leave the land as it is. Yet given the damage we’ve since wrought upon it, doing nothing is no longer sufficient. Thankfully, we are no longer doing nothing. A month into the Biden Administration has resulted in executive action to combat the climate crisis, the country’s reentry into the Paris Agreement, the nomination of Representative Deb Haaland, an unwavering environmental advocate, for Interior Secretary, and—most relevant to Gessner’s book—a 60-day review of the Trump Administration’s decision to shrink both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments; a move that paves the way for their expansion and safe keeping. As Gessner reminds, protecting public lands requires public protectors. All the better when hose protectors are politicians, too, though their role is but half the answer.
This fight belongs to us all, much like the land itself.
Header photo of Badlands National Park by Mike Goad, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of B.J. Hollars by Andrea Paulseth / Volume One.