Northern Woodlands

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The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

On September 6, 1901, the day President William McKinley was mortally wounded in a Buffalo, New York, train station, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was in Vermont. He was there to study the state’s game laws, which were by far the most progressive in the nation. Roosevelt wanted the newly minted western states to “adopt Vermont’s admirable standards of resource management,” writes Douglas Brinkley in The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.

Who would have thought that there was anything new to say about the life of Theodore Roosevelt? Brinkley finds it. Drawing from a reservoir of neverbefore-published materials to consider the achievements of the “naturalist President,” he traces the role that nature played in Roosevelt’s brilliant and, at times, controversial career. The book is thoroughly researched, a pleasure to read, and big (over 900 pages), a requisite if you consider Roosevelt’s environmental legacy – a legacy likely never to be equaled. The Wilderness Warrior illuminates both Roosevelt’s life as a naturalist-writer, big-game hunter, and land preservationist and the parallel birth of the American conservation movement – the founding of the National Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the American Museum of Natural History, the Boone and Crockett Club, the Izaak Walton League, and the New York Zoological Society.

Roosevelt was so devoted to the study of nature, Brinkley writes, that for seven and a half years he kept a list of birds he saw on the White House grounds. The President regularly corresponded and traveled with preeminent naturalists with whom he shared wildlife observations and argued arcane points of taxonomy. Drawing on letters and journal entries, Brinkley exquisitely profiles John Burroughs, John Muir, C. Hart Merriam, George Bird Grinnell, Gifford Pinchot, and Frederick Remington (to mention a few) in the context of Roosevelt’s story, detailing their respective influences on the President’s public policies. And T.R.’s childhood heroes – Darwin, Audubon, George Perkins Marsh, and his Uncle Rob, founder of the Izaak Walton League – leave their spoor throughout the book.

A patriotic booster of everything American, Roosevelt believed like an Iroquois elder that landscape and wildlife were the birthright of the unborn. On June 6, 1906, he signed into law “The Antiquities Act,” which allowed the President to designate historical landmarks as national monuments. Without having to consult Congress, Roosevelt had at his disposal a law that enabled him to preserve “national treasures.” He went directly to the press for support, writes Brinkley, “... the sheer electricity that Roosevelt produces in his public appearances, the way he sucked the air out of any room ... (He) didn’t lull reporters’ sense of right and wrong; he challenged them to write the right thing by flattery and by making good copy.”

By the time Roosevelt left office, he had created 51 bird reservations and four national game preserves, which collectively began the National Wildlife Refuge System; he declared 150 national forests, six national parks, and 18 national monuments. After co-founding the Boone and Crockett Club and the New York Zoological Society, Roosevelt pushed to create the Bronx Zoo, which became a breeding site for endangered species. Zoobred bison were reintroduced to South Dakota and Oklahoma on his watch. All told, T.R. set aside 234 million acres of wild America.

My only rub with Brinkley’s book, and it’s small potatoes when compared to the author’s brilliant analysis of Roosevelt’s outdoor life, is the mislabeled pictures of birds and a few misstated natural history tidbits – a water shrew is an Insectivore not a rodent. But in the course of original and thoughtful writing on a well worn subject, that’s not bad.

Ted Levin

© 2010 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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A Natural History of North American Trees

To assimilate the full value of many books, a reader must start at page one and continue to the end. Other books, however, may be consumed, like a rich dessert, a portion at a time. Such is the case with The Natural History of North American Trees by Donald Culross Peattie. When first published nearly 60 years ago, the work was in two volumes: the first concentrated on trees in eastern and central North America; the second on trees in western North America.

To combine the two volumes, editor Frances Tenenbaum pruned the minor trees and “unwieldy” descriptions. The resulting distillation includes 112 of Peattie’s elegant essays and 135 of Paul Landacre’s exquisite scratchboard illustrations in one, 490-page volume.

At first glance, this work appears to be a book about trees. Don’t be fooled. It’s much more than that. Peattie infuses each essay with scientific information, cultural history, and details about the products made from various trees and their importance to commerce. Each essay – a biography of a tree, really – easily stands on its own.

First among Peattie’s descriptions of pines is the eastern white pine. The book devotes 10 pages, plus a magnificent, full-page illustration, to this familiar species. This essay includes not only a natural history of the tree but also an important window into the history of settlement in New England and why colonists pushed to liberate themselves from England.

He also lavishes praise on another well-known Northeastern tree, saying: “If oak is the king of trees, as tradition has it, then the eastern white oak, throughout its range, is the king of kings.” The British Royal Navy lusted for oak but considered the American eastern white oak to be an inferior species. American shipbuilders learned to master the wood, though, by carefully drying the lumber. Peattie states: “The immortal frigate Constitution had a gun deck of solid White Oak of Massachusetts. … All-Oak ships became the pride of our shipbuilders; not good enough for the British Navy, they were just good enough to carry the New England sea captains around the world.”

Of particular interest are the précis biographies of the explorers and naturalists who discovered and were the first to describe trees and woody plants in the New World. These include Archibald Menzies, who in 1792 described the vast “impenetrable stretches of Pinery” in the Pacific Northwest. And David Douglas, who went inland in 1825 along the Columbia River and measured trees he knew as Pinus taxifolia. Peattie stated, “The largest he could find was 227 feet long and 48 feet in circumference.” We now know that tree as Douglas fir.

Because this volume is an amalgamation of Peattie’s writings on trees found throughout North America, some species will be unfamiliar to those acquainted with forests in the Northeast. That shouldn’t matter. With Peattie’s guidance, learning about new species is an easy armchair adventure. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of these essays is their breadth – clearly Peattie knew most, if not all, of his subjects firsthand.

In the second half of the 20th century, Peattie was one of the most widely read nature writers. Reading this volume, it is easy to understand why. On nearly every page, I learned something new about a tree, its wood, or its place in the cultural history of this nation. The writing is elegant and learned without being pedantic. The illustrations are exquisite. As I read this book, I felt as though I were walking through the woods with Peattie, talking, observing, and learning about the land he loved and the trees that occupy it. A Natural History of North American Trees is a wonderful book to read, savor, and treasure.

Ann Davis

© 2010 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.

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Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners

After reading this book, you might find yourself having a panic attack the next time you press a spade into topsoil.

There are myriad creatures– many are bizarre and many are beautiful – who call that spadeful of dirt “home.” Soil is an amazingly busy place, and although many of its inhabitants are on a microscopic scale, their importance to life on earth is enormous. It turns out that they are really interesting as well.

The book begins with the creation of substrate, wherein parent materials, as rocks are called, are transformed into silt, clay, or sand by being heated, cooled, frozen, and deluged with carbonic acid, a natural ingredient of rainfall. That’s all essential, but the author is most inspired by the accomplishments of living organisms, beginning with the patient lichens that can live for more than a thousand years, secreting acids that can eat into any rock, even granite.

Life in the Soil does indeed bring soil to life. The presentation is in a modified field guide format, with each group of soil dwellers considered separately, but the storyline explains how the actions of each group contribute to the formation of humus, the key to healthy soil. Only humus can latch on to nutrients and keep them within easy reach of plant roots as the nutrients move back and forth from the living to the non-living world.

Decomposers, shredders, and diggers all have their roles, but bacteria are the true heroes of the story as only they can liberate the essential elements from soil in forms that living plants can use. Other microbes, including actinomycetes, slime molds, algae, fungi, protozoa, and a hodgepodge of other microscopic beings are also present. Many of them occur in quantities that make our national debt seem manageable: imagine 10 billion protozoa in the top 15 centimeters of just a square meter of soil, not to mention the billions of bacteria and other life forms coexisting in the same space.

The shapes and behaviors needed to survive in soil are unlike those required for a happy existence in air or water, and these are nicely pointed out for each group of animals. Different springtails (snow fleas are one of the roughly 7,500 springtail species) inhabit different layers of the soil – becoming paler and shortertailed in the lower layers. The deepest dwelling springtails have no tail and no eyes. Myriapods have more than seven pairs of legs and are common underground. They are not built for speed but instead are able to twist and turn through tight spaces. Many underground insects have small wings or no wings. Although mole crickets have been redesigned, they haven’t given up chirping; instead they mold underground chambers that look and sound like a megaphone. In addition, they have velvety fur that sheds water and mud, and front legs shaped for digging.

Most of the creatures Nardi describes are within reach of our shovels in the Northeast, but he slips in tales of the underground activities of such animals as the motmot, wombat, and spiny anteater to liven things up. And even though we won’t find them – nor will we find onchophorans, ricinuleids, or caecilians – all of these animals demonstrate the enormous diversity of underground life. Plus, the author’s drawings of these – and all the other organisms – are lovely. Not everyone can make a long-legged orabatid mite with a pile of shed skins on its back look adorable, but Nardi’s illustration does just that.

Virginia Barlow

© 2010 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author’s consent.