Dan Flores

regulating drugs that were sold in pharmacies and having the government begin to intervene in making sure that the food that was sold in grocery stores was healthy.

And it extended to child labor laws and a variety of different things.

What I try to do in this particular script

as I mentioned a minute ago, is to couch what Roosevelt's particular passion about progressivism is in the conservation movement that establishes very much the beginnings of the whole environmental movement in the United States.

And this, of course, is 125 years ago that this happens.

But much of what becomes the kind of framework of

conservation and environmental thinking in America comes out of this particular period.

And it does involve, as Roosevelt said, a different role for the government than had been the case in American life up to this point.

So if you're a fan of kind of the anarchy of the wild, wild west, this is the point at which Americans, and particularly someone like Teddy Roosevelt, who thinks, as he says, a great civilization and a great

country needs to understand itself that you have to step in and say okay you know that level of freedom is great but we're going to have to regulate things and make sure that just kind of pure selfishness doesn't prevail to the detriment of the future especially and the other the other sort of intellectual thread that shapes roosevelt's worldview is as you point out that a darwinism

Yeah, and I tried to do this in a way to provide a kind of a fresh look at that sort of famous nature faker controversy where Roosevelt and William Burroughs in particular

charge these writers like Jack London and John Muir and Ernest Thompson Seton with, uh, with faking the animals that they were writing about.

And, uh, the truth is with the perspective of another 125 years of research, uh,

It looks as if actually the people who were getting it right were probably the writers themselves.

And I think Roosevelt stepping into the fray, which he, of course, he couldn't resist doing.

For one thing, this was a subject dear to his heart.

And for another thing, he inhabits the bully pulpit as the president, and he tends to sort of step into every debate that's out there.

And I think that what you get out of that story, as I told it in this particular episode, is probably a fresh look at how this played out and who, in fact, probably had the better notions about the relationship that people had.

and other animals have.

I mean, you know, I've always loved that line that Ernest Thompson Seton uses in Wild Animals I've Known, where he says, we and the beasts are kin.