The Keeper Of The Garden

 Theodore Roosevelt, one small word that guarded the land for fifty years, and what we quietly handed back to the axe. We are keepers, not owners, and the difference is everything. 

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There is a photograph, if you go looking for it, of two men standing on a granite ledge in the Yosemite high country in the spring of nineteen oh three, with a whole cathedral of stone and falling water at their backs. One is John Muir, the wanderer, the man who walked a thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico and once climbed a hundred feet up a Douglas fir in a windstorm just to ride it and feel what the tree felt. The other is the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt He had come west and run off from his own presidency. He slipped his guard and his handlers and the reporters and the whole apparatus of his office, and he went up into the mountains with one guide and a stack of wool blankets, and he slept three nights on the bare ground among the giant sequoias, trees that were already a thousand years old when Rome was still deciding whether to be a republic. And by the fire on those nights, Muir worked on him. He talked the way a prophet talks about the sheep he called hoofed locusts locusts that had chewed the mountain meadows down to the bone, about the giant trees going one by one under the saw, about a whole valley being let go to ruin by the state that was supposed to guard it. He was not making conversation. He was lobbying the most powerful man in the country three feet across the coals with no aide and no reporter to soften a word of it. He woke one morning under five inches of fresh snow, and he laughed like a boy, and he called it the grandest day of his life. He came down off that mountain, and he began to set the land aside. Not a little of it. He put a hundred and fifty national forests under the nation's protection and five national parks and eighteen national monuments and fifty-one refuges where a hunted bird could rest. And he pulled some two hundred and thirty million acres of this country out from under the hand of whoever might come next with an axe and a hurry. Lay it all in one piece, and it is larger than all of France. He did it because he believed a truth that has grown strange to us. He believed the land was not ours to use up. He believed we were only holding it in trust for people not yet born, people who could not vote for him and could not thank him and could not stop him, and that this, exactly this, was what made the trust holy. This week, with the stroke of a pen and no vote at all, we begin to hand a piece of that trust back to the axe. I write to you under a borrowed name. You may call me Discus, and this is Dear Uncle Sam. Dear Uncle Sam, A country is not only a government, and we forget it. We speak of America as though she were a stack of laws and a pile of arguments, a thing made of paper and shouting. But she is also a body. She is dirt and rock and moving water. She is the short grass prairie and the longleaf pine, the cold trout stream and the red canyon wall, and the gray Atlantic breaking on a gray morning shore. Before there was a Congress, there was a land. And when the last of our arguments has blown off like a chaff in dry wind, the land will still be lying there under the same sky, holding its breath, waiting to see what kind of people we turn out to be. This letter is about the land. It is about one small word that stood guard over it for fifty years, and it is about what happened this week when a pen reached out and crossed that word off the page. The word is harm We have forgotten that we do not own this country. We are only keeping it. A man who knows himself a steward will tend what he was given and hand it on. A man who has talked himself into believing he is the owner will sooner or later sell it. And somewhere in the last long stretch of years, we quietly became a nation of owners standing on ground the founders left to a nation of keepers The man who taught this country how to keep its land was not, at the start, strong enough to cross a room. Theodore Roosevelt was a sickly boy, asthmatic, half-smothered in his own chest through the long nights, propped up on pillows so he could breathe, carried to the window at night in the arms of a frightened father. He was not given a strong body. He built one. He made himself, by sheer grinding will, into the man we remember, the barrel chest and the boxing and the endless punishing motion. the alternative was to lie still and be beaten, and he had decided very young that he would not be beaten. He never did stop. He boxed, this president, in the White House, until a blow he took there tore something loose behind his left eye and blinded it for good. He kept that quiet for years, because a Roosevelt did not complain and did not quit Then came the day that would have broken most men clean in half. It was the fourteenth of February, eighteen eighty-four. In the same house, on the same day, within hours of each other, Roosevelt lost his young wife and his mother both. His wife to a hidden illness two days after she had given him a daughter. His mother to typhoid down the same stairs. He drew a great black X across the page of his diary that day, and beneath it he wrote a single line: "The light has gone out of my life." He did not sit in that darkened house. He handed the newborn to his sister, and he went west, out to the Dakota Badlands, to a cattle ranch in a hard, raw country that did not know his grief and did not care for it. And he let the land do to him what no comfort could. He rode eighteen hours in the saddle and thought of nothing. He froze and hauled and branded, and once chased a pack of boat thieves for days down a half-frozen river and guarded them at gunpoint while reading Tolstoy by the fire to stay awake. The badlands did not console him. The badlands remade him. The wild country put the man back together, bone by bone, before the man had ever once thought to save the wild country. He came home east with a will like a driven spike and a debt he never forgot, because he was an honest man, and an honest man pays what he owes, and he owed his very self to the land So when the presidency fell to him, and it fell to him young by an assassin's bullet meant for another man, he spent it on the debt He found in the government a young forester named Gifford Pinchot, who believed as he believed, and together they built the Forest Service out of almost nothing, and set aside forest by forest by forest, until the men who traded in timber and mineral cried out that this cowboy in the White House was locking up the continent. And he did not forget what Muir had pressed on him by that fire. He reached back for Yosemite Valley itself, still being grazed and logged toward ruin under the careless hand of the state, and folded it in, and folded it into the nation's keeping for good. He signed a law, the Antiquities Act, that let a president guard a place of wonder by his own hand when a slow and bought Congress would not. And with it he reached out, and he saved the Grand Canyon. They wanted to mine it and dam it and hang their signs on it. And Roosevelt stood at the rail and looked at that immensity of colored stone and said the truest words a ruler ever spoke about a piece of ground: "Leave it as is. You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it." Leave it as it is. It is a strange sentence to the modern ear, almost holy. Here was the most restless, most building, most driving man of his age, a man who could not sit still to save his life, and what he understood about the greatest wonders handed to him was that his one right task before them was to keep his hands off and guard them and pass them on untouched. He did not invent that idea. He inherited it the same way he hoped we would. It is written on the second page of the first book of the Bible, and we have half forgotten it was ever there. When God set the man in the garden, the scripture says, he set him there to dress it and to keep it, to tend it and to guard it, not to strip it, not to sell it, not to pave it and call the paving progress. The very first commission ever handed to a human being was the commission of a gardener and a keeper, and every deed to every acre any of us has ever held has come, in the end, on a lease from a landlord who wrote at the top of the first page that the earth is his and the fullness thereof, and we are tenants in it and not lords of it. There was a poor little man in Assisi eight hundred years ago who understood this so completely that he called the sun his brother and the water his sister and the very death that came for him a sister too. And the church, which is not sentimental about such things, looked at his life and named him at last the patron of all who would care for creation. That is the old faith about the land, older than this republic, older than Rome. We are keepers, and we were only ever keepers. None of this is poetry. It is also the plainest kind of politics, the kind you can hold in your hand There was an Englishman named Chesterton who gave us the sharpest rule ever written for a man who wants to tear something down. "Imagine," he said, "you are walking a road and you come upon a fence standing in a field. Do not,' he said, 'do not touch it. Go away and learn why it was put there. Because someone built that fence with labor and for a reason, and until you can walk back and tell me plainly what that reason was, you have not earned the right to remove it. That is the deepest instinct of the right, the very marrow of it. Conservation and conservative are the same word with the same root, and the root means to keep, to hold, to hand down whole. The oldest impulse in the conservative soul is the suspicion of the man in a hurry with a theory and a bulldozer, the reverence for what was handed to us by better men than us, the refusal to spend in one lazy afternoon an inheritance it took ten thousand years to grow. A conservative who will not conserve the land he was given has forgotten how to spell his own name. Roosevelt knew that, and his inheritance had a second half, a bitter one, forgotten even more completely than the first. He believed all of this so fiercely that in the end it cost him his own party. By nineteen twelve, he had come to feel that the men who ran things, including the men of his own side, had sold the future to the powerful and the present. That the machine had closed its ranks around comfort and money and its own survival, and had stopped serving the country and started serving itself. So he did the thing you are not permitted to do. He walked out. He gathered the men and women who still believed, and he built a party of his own from the ground in a season, and he called himself as fit as a bull moose, and the name stuck to the whole crusade And they tried to kill him for it. In Milwaukee, on his way to give a speech, a man stepped out of the crowd and shot him in the chest. The bullet should have killed him. What stopped it was the folded fifty pages of the speech in his own breast pocket and the steel case of his glasses, which caught it and slowed it just enough. Roosevelt reached inside his coat, and he looked at the blood on his fingers, and he reasoned coldly that since he was not coughing blood, the bullet had not reached his lung. And so he refused the hospital. He went to the hall. He stood up in front of the crowd with a bullet lodged against his ribs, and he told them, "It takes more than that to kill a bull moose." And then he spoke for the better part of an hour and a half with the lead still in him, because he had decided what he had to say was worth more than his wound He won a larger share of the vote than any man running outside two great parties has ever won, before or since, and he lost. the door he had pried open swung shut behind him, and it has not been opened since. In more than a hundred years, no third man, no outsider, no one who came from beyond the two machines has walked through it. The two of them learned that day to close ranks against any citizen who dares to rise up from outside their walls. In the arena that is supposed to stand open to every American, quietly hung a small sign on its gate that reads, "Members only." So look at everything Roosevelt fought for, and look at what has become of it. He fought for a wild country kept whole for our grandchildren, and we are paving it. He fought for an open arena where a free man outside the machine could still win, and we have bolted it. The land and the outsider, both of them were once open, both of them have been fenced. One paved over, one locked out. And the same instinct did both. The instinct of the powerful and the impatient to close off what once stood open and to keep for themselves what was once meant to be held in common It comes down now to one word and one week and one stroke of a pen Half a century ago, this country did something that now sounds like a fable told about better people. It decided, almost with a single voice, that it would not stand idly by and let its own creatures blink out of the world on its watch. It passed the Endangered Species Act. And hear, please, who signed it into law, because you have been taught to forget. Richard Nixon signed it, a Republican. It came out of the Senate by a vote of ninety-two to nothing. Not ninety-two to eight, ninety-two to nothing. Not a single senator willing to stand up and be the man who voted to let the eagle and the grizzly and the whooping crane vanish. The same president gave us the agency that guards our air and our water, and nobody at the time thought any of it strange or foreign or partisan, because in that not-so-distant country, conservation still remembered that it was conservative, and keeping the creatures of God in the world was simply understood to be what a great and grateful nation does. The law itself is simple in its heart. It forbids the taking of a creature standing at the edge of the abyss. And taking, everyone understood, meant more than the rifle and the snare. Taking included harm. And harm, for fifty unbroken years, meant more than the direct blow. It meant you could not go and destroy the one place a creature must have in order to live at all. Because a law that says you may not shoot the last panther, but you may drain and pave the last swamp it hunts in, is not a law. It is a joke delivered with a straight face. The highest court in the land saw that plainly and upheld it thirty years ago. To wreck a creature's home is to harm the creature. A child of six understands it without being told. Take away the nest and you have killed the bird as surely as with a stone, only slower and from greater distance and with far cleaner hands. And this week, with a pen, we unlearned it. A new rule, made final on the tenth day of July, reaches into the law and strikes the home out of the meaning of harm. You may still not lift your hand against the last of a kind, but you may now take it from the last ground it has to stand on, the last water it has to drink, the last cover it has to hide its young. And the law of the United States will look at what you have done and call it no harm at all. The sea turtle may keep her life. We have only taken her beach. The songbird may keep his wings. We have only felled the wood that he was hatched in and every wood beside it. It is a strange and modern mercy that leaves a creature its life and takes from it every single place that it could live. See what was actually done here, because it is the oldest wisdom on the right, and it is being trampled by men who call themselves the right. The definition of harm was a fence. It was built for a plain reason, and it stood for fifty years. And the reason a child could grasp in a sentence. And the men who pulled it down this week did not pull it down because they had gone and studied why it was raised and come back able to tell us it was foolish. They pulled it down because it stood in the way of something someone wanted to build or drill or pave, because a stretch of ground is worth more on a balance sheet once nothing lived is allowed to need it. It was easier to remove the fence than to answer for it. That is not courage, and it is not reform. There is only one honest name for it, vandalism with a permit. And mark how it was done, because you have heard this music before. In the last letter I sent you, not by a vote, not in the crowd, arguing sunlit room where the whole people is meant to speak through the men it chose. By a rule drafted in an office, signed by hand. The pen again. The very same pen from my last letter, only now it is not turned outward against a nation across the sea. Now it is turned against a marsh and a stand of old timber and a stretch of quiet coastline and against the small and speechless lives that keep no lobby and cast no vote and have no way on God's green earth to plead their own case, except through the one fence we agreed fifty years ago and almost unanimously to leave standing on their behalf. And now even that is gone. And now on the other side of it said fairly, because it has real claim, I am no worshiper of the wild set over the works of man. Man must eat. He must raise his house and heat it through the winter. He must break the ground and take the timber and dig the ore. And the same scripture that told him to keep the garden told him first to work it and to have dominion. And a nation that locks up all its land and feeds no one with it has robbed its children just as surely from the other side. The line was never drawn between using the earth and leaving it untouched. For no creature that has ever drawn breath leaves the earth untouched. The line is drawn between the man who uses and the man who squanders. Between the farmer who takes the harvest home and leaves the soil richer than he found it, and the man who takes the harvest and the soil and the seed corn too, and hands his own children a field of blowing dust and a note that reads, I got mine. To use the land is stewardship, and it is good. It is commanded. To strip it bare is theft. And the ones we are stealing from in this particular theft are not yet even born, which makes them the coward's favorite mark. The one victim in all the world who cannot see it coming and cannot cry out and cannot ever, ever make you answer for it. Go back with me one last time to those trees. The sequoias Roosevelt slept beneath were a thousand years old when Rome was still young. Some of them were standing and already ancient when the gospel that would one day be read in their shade was still being written down Sit with that until it frightens you a little. It frightens me. I did not grow up among these Western giants. I grew up in the East under the old oaks, the ones that had already stood a hundred years and more before I was born, and will stand a hundred years after I am gone. The great oaks of the East and their brothers, the sequoias of the West, are one argument written in two hands. Their roots hold the ground of this country in place. Their branches hold up a corner of the sky over the head of small and hurrying man who comes and sits in a shade he did not plant and is given a rest he never earned. I have sat under them with the wind pouring through the leaves above me, more leaves than any man could number, and the whole crown of the tree swaying and singing at once, and felt what a man is meant to feel there and And almost never grows still enough to feel small, and glad to be small. A living thing In this country older than the faith of half the men who walk beneath it. It did not belong to Roosevelt. It does not belong to us. It will not belong to the ones who come after us either. We are every one of us just passing under it, one short flicker of human life at a time. And the only question that old tree has ever asked of any of us is the exact question Roosevelt answered on that snowy ledge with Muir by his side. Will you keep me or will you take me? Will you be a keeper or will you be an owner? And here is the question beneath that question, the one I cannot answer for you or for myself. I do not know whether a people who count their own lives in four-year terms can learn to love a life that is counted in thousands. We may not be built to keep what we will never live to see the good of. I hope we are. I will not stand here and promise you we are. The land is lent, Uncle Sam, like the office in my last letter to you, nearly everything a free people is ever handed, it is lent, and it is not owned. We hold it in trust for a boy who is not yet born, who will one day stand exactly where Roosevelt stood, at the rail of the great canyon, or at the foot of the giant trees, or on the low bank of some plain brown river in some overlooked corner of the country, and who will look out at whatever it is we choose to leave him. He cannot vote today. He cannot thank us today. He cannot reach back through the years and stay our hand. He can only inherit what we hand down, whole or ruined, tended or spent, and live in the world we did or did not bother to keep for him. And a nation is judged in the end not by the grandeur of what is built for itself, but by the mercy of what it refused to steal from him. "Leave it as it is," Roosevelt said at the edge of that canyon. "You cannot improve upon it. Man can only mar it." We were set down in a garden, all of us, latecomers to a country far older and far more beautiful than anything we will add to it. And we were given one plain and gentle charge on the way in, to dress it and to keep it, not to strip it to the rock and call that progress. To keep it. All the law and the prophets on this one small matter are folded up inside that old soft word, "Keep it." I will keep writing. You keep reading. And between us, God willing, we keep the house and the land it stands on, and the whole wild and voiceless country that was here long before us, and is owed entire and unbroken to every soul who comes after. Yours, Discus