Missing in action: Where is the national leadership on conservation?

Four past U.S. Presidents show us what can be done

President Theodore Roosevelt was furious. For months, he’d been hearing about the brazen slaughter of herons, egrets, pelicans and spoonbills whose feathers were worth as much as gold to adorn women’s hats in the fashion of the times.

Finally, in the spring of 1903, he was determined to take action. There was no precedence for such a move, but Roosevelt ordered that a strip of land loaded with wading species on the Northeast Florida coast would become the nation’s first official bird sanctuary called Pelican Island. “Let it be so,’’ he famously announced to the circle of aides, lawyers and conservationists gathered at the White House.

Roosevelt’s decree was the first step in the gradual creation of a sprawling network of national parks, wildlife refuges, preservation laws and wildlife agencies designed to protecting the continent’s birds and mammals, forests and grasslands.

Today, however, this impressive accomplishment is failing to live up to its purpose.  A combination of forces is undermining this system, including diminishing funding, disagreements over policies, political stalemate, and most of all, a lack of the inspired leadership Roosevelt exemplified. The impacts are hard to ignore: North America has lost nearly a third of its breeding bird population over the last 50 years.

We delve into the past to follow up on our recent essay that ran in CNN Opinion on why this is the right moment for a fundamental review of the country’s conservation commitment. It’s worth looking over the history of this conservation framework to understand what could happen – and in fact needs to happen — today.

Building on Pelican Island

Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t alone in his willingness to act. For most of the past century, Americans have been united around the idea that wildlife is a treasure worth protecting. Starting with Roosevelt’s creation of Pelican Island, four presidents over the last century — two of them Republicans, two Democrats — forged this system that grew into the world’s gold standard for conservation.

As we’ve interviewed hundreds of people for our book, “A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds,’’ we’ve run into a measure of defeatism over the difficulty of living up to these policies. There’s no shortage of challenges demanding attention and money, which makes it harder to argue that investments in conservation should be a priority.

This is where it helps to look back over the decades that Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon took the steps that pieced together our conservation engineering. Each of these presidents faced enormous pressures – ranging from World War II to Vietnam, recessions to impeachments – but nonetheless acted to protect wildlife.

FDR, for instance, pushed through several important wildlife preserves just after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Lyndon Johnson delivered one of the most impressive speeches on the importance of conservation as his presidency was struggling. With the exception of Teddy Roosevelt, whose love of birds began as a child, these president weren’t especially environmentally oriented. But they each came to realize that the kind of wildlife losses we’re seeing accelerate in our time must be confronted.

What’s needed now

Recent administrations have tended to talk big about the value of the outdoors, natural resources and the need to protect the land. President Joe Biden just released a statement on his administration’s commitment to conservation with the 50^th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act at the end of December. “As we observe this anniversary, my administration recommits to conserving America’s flora and fauna for generations to come,’’ the president said.

But the actions of Biden as well as the Obama, Clinton and both Bush presidencies – all of whom supported conservation — have failed to take the kind of aggressive action their predecessors did.

The best recent example of this is Congress’ failure to act on the most significant conservation legislation in decades, the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act. The bill passed the House in 2022 but remains mired in the U.S. Senate, despite bipartisan support for the funding. It would provide $1.4 billion annually for the vast array of wildlife not getting support.

But more than funding is needed. The Endangered Species Act requires the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department to review imperiled creatures on a timely basis but it is too overwhelmed to do so. The act itself needs to be updated for the modern pressures on wildlife. The research prowess within the Department of Interior that once led the world in sorting out the needs of wildlife has atrophied. State and federal agencies responsible for conservation have fallen far behind with so many species in need of revival.

There are some tough issues that need attention, along the lines of what these past presidents have been willing to take on. It’s no coincidence that we’ve lost nearly a third of our bird population in the 50 years since Richard Nixon, the last president to do justice to conservation, left office.

We traveled more than 25,000 miles researching our book, meeting people in every part of the hemisphere, from every station along the political spectrum. A solid majority favor thoughtful conservation that relies on a mix of government agencies, private property owners and nonprofit organizations.

But with issues of this dimension, history has shown time and time again that leadership must come from the top. We’ve reached a juncture not unlike Teddy Roosevelt’s Pelican Island decree, Johnson’s legislative achievements and Nixon’s creation of the Endangered Species Act and the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s a time to ask: Where is the national leadership that built this country’s proud conservation tradition?

Notes: The best history of the creation of the country’s environmental system is found in a series of books by presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. His most recent, “Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and the great environmental awakening,’’ is the most compelling. But his earlier books on Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt breathe life into the journey of how the U.S. build its global model for conservation so in need of rejuvenation.