Theodore Roosevelt: Firebrand Conservationist

Although he was born into a posh and wealthy New York City family, Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) is often remembered of as one of America’s wildest and most rugged presidents. A leader in the Republican party and an iconoclastic figure of the progressive movement, Roosevelt was the youngest person to serve as United States president and certainly one of the nation’s most fascinating. He was a politician, explorer, soldier, author, naturalist, and gifted orator. His most lasting legacy is as a conservationist and as the father of the U.S. Park Service.

“To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.”

From his Seventh Annual Message, December 3, 1907.

(h/t Wikiquote)