The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

Conservation is the effort to protect species from extinction, maintain and restore habitats, enhance ecosystem services, and protect ecological diversity. This effort is motivated by the values of biocentrism, anthropocentrism, ecocentrism, and sentientism. Throughout their careers, Roosevelt and Pinchot worked to make conservation, a relatively new idea in the early 20th century, a matter of public interest. For them, America’s landscape was a public good that should be valued for its own sake and protected by the government, in the same way that monuments and cathedrals in Europe were considered national treasures worthy of protection. Roosevelt even expressed this view with foreign heads of state by showing them America’s landscape and touting it as a national treasure.

Though Roosevelt sought the public’s help in making America’s landscape a national treasure that the public could enjoy, his views on conservation represented a direct challenge to private businesses that had a vested interest in exploiting natural resources for financial gain. If Roosevelt were to set aside land for public interest, big business could not deplete the land of its resources for private monetary gains. Roosevelt and Pinchot frequently faced opposition from monied interests and the politicians that supported them. In the late