“As a people we have the right and the duty, second to none other but the right and duty of obeying the moral law, of requiring and doing justice, to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our natural resources, whether that waste is caused by the actual destruction of such resources or by making them impossible of development hereafter.”
So said President Theodore Roosevelt in his May 13, 1908 speech those attending the Governors’ Conference at the White House. However in making this speech, he was addressing not just those in attendance at the White House but perhaps even moreso the citizens throughout the United States.
What President Roosevelt said, to whom he said it, and the effect it and the conference as a whole had on the history of American environmental conservation is the very subject of Leroy G. Dorsey’s new book Theodore Roosevelt, Conservation, and the 1908 Governors’ Conference from Texas A&M University Press. Part of the Library of Presidential Rhetoric series, this particular volume should be seen as having considerable relevance not only to those interested in rhetoric and U.S. presidential history but to all those interested in the history of American environmental conservation and natural history.
