Although similar in content and approach to Brinkley's [b:The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America|4668676|The Wilderness Warrior Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America|Douglas Brinkley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348324787s/4668676.jpg|4719080], I just didn't find Rightful Heritage as engaging. I can't quite put my finger on why not.
Nonetheless, FDR's conservation accomplishments are most impressive (and the then-unpredicted negative consequences of some actions are disappointing). ( )

A few quotes:

"When Ohio was first opened for settlement, in 1783, about 95 percent of its more than 26 million acres were blanketed with forests. As Roosevelt took to the platform to speak at the Cleveland Public Auditorium in early November 1940, only three million forested acres remained. The CCC reforested hilly sections of the Cuyahoga Valley, built bridges, and dammed Salt Run to create Kendall Lake (all or partof what became Cuyahoga National Park in 1974). But even with the CCC's intense efforts, Ohio's existing forests were being cut over at a rate three times higher than the rate at which they were growing. "I see an America," Roosevelt told a cheering crowd in Cleveland just before Election Day, "whose rivers and valleys and lakes-hills and streams and plains- the mountains over our land and nature's wealth deep under the earth- are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people."


"In 1940, one particularly onerous problem the CCC faced in Ohio was trying to save the Cuyahoga River, which had caught fire multiple times. The hundred-mile-long river, which flows through Akron and Cleveland before emptying into Lake Erie, had long since been ruined by industry. Ohioans had dumped so much effluent and debris into the Cuyahoga that the river emanated a rank odor even when it was frozen in the winter."

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"A phenomenal era in conservation had ended. From 1933 to 1942, the CCC had enrolled more than 3.4 million men to work in thousands of camps across America. Roosevelt had used the CCC as an instrument for both environmentalism and economic revitalization. Its erosion-control programs alone benefited forty million acres of farmland. The success the agency had in building up American infrastructure is impossible to deny: forty-six thousand bridges; twenty-seven thousand miles of fencing; ten thousand miles of roads and trails; five thousand miles of water-supply lines; and three thousand fire-lookout towers. Credited with establishing 711 state parks, the CCC also restored closes to four thousand historic structures and rehabilitated 3,400 beaches."

"Nobody could deny the CCC's enduring legacy from 1933 to 1942: combating deforestation, dust storms, overhunting, water pollution, and flooding. In this way, the New Deal conservation revolution had already made a difference. Even while American troops were fighting in Europe and the Pacific, back home American lands brimmed with native grasses and cottonwoods, desert oases and high-country evergreens. The American land was healing and, in some regions, thriving. Around three billion trees had been planted by "the boys."

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"It is disturbing," Eleanor Roosevelt would later write about the Jackson Hole fight of the 1940s, "to find how little real enthusiasm there seems to be among our people for the preservation of our national parks."

"Throughout the 1944 campaign, Roosevelt proudly invoked the conservation accomplishments of the New Deal. One-third of America was covered in forestlands. Over 180 million acres of woodlands in forty states were part of the national forest system: enough commercial forests left to maintain maximum sustained yield to win World War II. Furthermore, in 1935, there had been fewer than 30 million waterfowl in America; now there were over 140 million from the Cascades to the Cumberland Plateau, to the Pennsylvania Wilds."

"Around the same time that the president was delivering his West Virginia tree sermon, Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Audobon Nature Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she expressed the conviction that young people needed education about the natural world to better understand the "interdependence of human kind-the animals, the oceans, the earth, and human beings."

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"Many top echelon New Dealers weren't quite convinced that Truman would be up to the job as president. Ickes feared that Truman would be too easily intimidated by the stockmen associations, the oil lobby, and timber corporations and would fail to establish new national monuments (or enlarge existing ones) in the Colorado Plateau or wildlife refuges in the Gulf South. As Ickes would sneer in 1948, Truman was the kind of pro-business leader who allowed "the oil companies to get away with murder." Ickes, who left office in 1946, was right. The only national monument that Truman established was Effigy Mounds in Iowa. But in 1947 Truman did bring Roosevelt's beloved Everglades fully into the National Park Service."

"Well into the twenty-first century, Springwood remained the only place in the United States where a president had been born, grown up, and laid to rest. In a very specific provision in his will, Roosevelt had requested that the over half million trees he planted between 1912 and 1945 be protected in perpetuity. If one of his trees died, then another was to be planted in its place. The National Park Service was tasked with overseeing this program. The pond where Roosevelt swam in his efforts to recover from polio and the hemlock hedge were also carefully preserved. Even the river bluffs across the Hudson would be preserved as a memorial.

"My husband's spirit will live in this house, in the library, and in the quiet garden where he wished his body to lie," Eleanor Roosevelt said. "It is his life and his character and his personality which will live with us and which will endure and be imparted to those who come to see the surroundings in which he grew... He would want them to enjoy themselves in these surroundings and to draw from them rest and peace and strength as he did all the days of his life."



( )

What really struck me is how interconnected FDR's travel was to his conservation agenda. he traveled frequently and it seems that every time he returned from a trip, he had a new proposal to protect that area. ( )

5394. Rightful Heritage Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America, by Douglas Brinkley (read 2 Aug 2016) This is a carefully researched work detailing with FDR's great interest in trees and conservation, and all the effort he exerted in regard to such when he was Governor of New York and President . It is very complimentary of his work in establishing the CCC and seeking to preserve natural and historic sites. I admit it told me a little more than I was interested in but it is probably the definitive work on its subject. ( )

This is the third in Brinkley's National Park's series, and concentrates on conservation and environmental history during FDR's administration. I like this series, because you read about historical events (such as Yalta) from a different prospective; that of the role of politics in protecting, or destroying, our natural resources. In the case of FDR, there was some of both. He loved the outdoors, was very informed, especially about forestry, and really wanted to protect the environment for future generations. Thank you, FDR, for the Olympics. And he established the CCC, which did a lot of good. Some of what he did expanded access to wild areas for Americans, and that is a double edge sword -- good for people, and probably increases people's commitment to saving wild places,m but not always so good for plants and animals. And then, FDR's administration was big on dams. And the CCC planted Kudzu in Georgia.

I enjoy Brinkley's writing. He does tend to give a lot of facts, which sometimes is at odds with a directed narrative. I am OK with that, especially as the facts tend to be interesting, and his prose easy to read. ( )