In 1891 Benjamin Harrison, the first president engaged in
conservation, had to have this new area of public policy explained
to him by members of the Boone and Crockett Club. This didn't take
long, as he was only asked to sign a few papers setting aside
federal timberland. But from such small moments great social
movements grow, and the course of natural resource protection
policy through 22 presidents has altered Americans' relationship to
the natural world in then almost unimaginable ways. Presidents and
the American Environment charts this course. Exploring the ways in
which every president from Harrison to Obama has engaged the
expanding agenda of the Nature protection impulse, the book offers
a clear, close-up view of the shifting and nation shaping mosaic of
both "green" and "brown" policy directions over more than a
century. While the history of conservation generally focuses on the
work of intellectuals such as Muir, Leopold, and Carson, such
efforts could only succeed or fail on a large scale with the
involvement of the government, and it is this side of the story
that Presidents and the American Environment tells. On the one
hand, we find a ready environmental engagement, as in Theodore
Roosevelt's establishment of Pelican Island bird refuge upon being
informed that the Constitution did not explicitly forbid it. On the
other hand, we have leaders like Calvin Coolidge, playing
hide-and-seek games in the Oval Office while ignoring reports of
coastal industrial pollution. The book moves from early cautious
sponsors of the idea of preserving public lands to crusaders like
Theodore Roosevelt, from the environmental implications of the New
Deal to the politics of pollution in the boom times of the forties
and fifties, from the emergence of "environmentalism" to recent
presidential detractors of the cause. From Harrison's act, which
established the American system of National Forests, to Barack
Obama's efforts on curbing climate change, presidents have mattered
as they resisted or used the ever-changing tools and objectives of
environmentalism. In fact, with a near even split between "browns"
and "greens" over those 22 administrations, the role of president
has often been decisive. How, and how much, distinguished historian
Otis L. Graham, Jr., describes in in full for the first time, in
this important contribution to American environmental history.
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