Dan Flores

They also brought him into contact with people who were about to push him much farther along the road to environmental thinking.

Roosevelt met Grinnell, editor of a famous conservation-themed magazine called Forest and Stream, following Grinnell's quite critical review of hunting trips of a ranchman.

Bursting into Grinnell's office demanding to know why the journalists had been underwhelmed, Roosevelt ended up impressed with his fellow Ivy Leaguers' knowledge of the state of the West and its fast-declining wildlife.

With Grinnell's coaching and friendship, over the next 15 years of his career, Roosevelt launched the intellectual journey that would ultimately transform America and bring it into the 20th century.

Their organization of elite hunters, the Boone and Crockett Club, along with Grinnell's Audubon Society, provided platforms that translated their Western experiences into a rethinking about freedom and nature.

The particular epiphany that became the foundation for this rethinking wasn't an easy one.

But for those who loved American nature, the evidence for it was everywhere.

Pure self-interest of the Adam Smith sort, which had driven capitalism for most of American history, was growing close to leaving nothing for the future.

Largely through witnessing the loss of the wild animals he loved, Roosevelt was coming to an undergirding principle for the political revolution known as progressivism.

Capitalism's excesses, it turned out, were going to have to be curbed and regulated.

And the lesson then being offered by railroad and oil company domination of state governments meant to Roosevelt and progressives that the only entity truly powerful enough to regulate capitalism was the federal government.

In search of a word that might symbolize what he had in mind, Roosevelt borrowed the term conservation from British Governance of India.

to conserve something meant to save it, to ensure its perpetuation.

As an American, Roosevelt saw conservation in democratic terms.

He would develop programs wherein the federal government would conserve American nature for what he called the greatest good for the greatest number and for the longest period of time.

A great country and a great civilization, Roosevelt believed, needed to understand itself.

The first step involved taking some sort of action to curb the market hunt for wildlife that for three centuries had systematically destroyed everything from deer, turkey, great auks, passenger pigeons, and plume birds like snowy egrets in the east, to a near obliteration of western wildlife, most shamefully America's iconic animal, the bison.

Until 1900, the U.S.

federal government had stood by and allowed unregulated capitalism to have its way with wildlife.

But in that year, an Iowa congressman named John Lacey stepped forward with a plan to engage Washington in halting these abominations.