Douglas brinkley. Booktv live from tucson. Good morning. Welcome to the tucson festival of books, the worlds greatest book festival. [applause] my name is jim cook, executive director of the National Parks association and sponsor of this session. Western National Parks association is the Nonprofit Organization partner of the National Park service. Our purpose is to educate visitors about the history, nature, cultural and recreational opportunities in 67 National Parks in 12 western states. So as you are here with the Tucson National festival of books and the main library western National Parks association is very proud to present our special guest today , what a treat to have him back in tucson. With that, i introduce our moderator bill. Thank you. Yes, i am bill bill buckmaster i host a daily radio talkshow on kb oi a. M. 1030 the voice. Also you can listen to the program live anywhere in the world. By going to buckmaster show. Com. I hope you will check it out. Im excited to be here at the tucson festival of books and to be talking with Douglas Brinkley. Just to mention about the fest of your tax donation, taxdeductible donation really makes this all possible. It is a free event so we do encourage you to visit the Student Union south ballroom or go to the website. Your gift will sternly make a tremendous a difference. Before we get into Douglas Brinkley i want to mention the way this will work, i will be talking oneonone with professor brinkley and then i will allow time for your question. We will at least to 20 minutes of questions after our one on one with douglas bradley. Mr. Binkley is a a professor of history at rice university, he is a cbs news contributor, cnn president ial historian, and a contributing editor of vanity fair. The Chicago Tribune has called him america is a new past master. His mentor, Stephen Ambrose called him the best of the new generation of american historians. Seven of these books have been selected as a New York Times notable books of the years, cronkite one the sperber prize for best book in journalism and was a Washington Post notable book in the year 2012. The great day lucia, hurricane hurricane katrina, new orleans and the mississippi gulf coast won the Robert F Kennedy book award. His newest book is rightful heritage, Franklin D Roosevelt and the land of america. That. That book is actually being released in conjunction this week with the tucson festival of books. It is a followup to his a bestselling project, the wilderness lawyer which celebrate Teddy Roosevelts spirit of outdoor exploration and bold vision to protect. Get this, 234 million acres of wild america. Lets hear it for professor Douglas Brinkley [applause]. Lets begin with this being the centennial of the National Park service, envision what the National Park system would be like without the advocacy of the two president roosevelts. Thank you for being here, i am very thrilled to be in tucson. I come here every chance i got. I am launching my book here at your festival because a because a lot of this is a bout arizona. And the beautiful places here, all of the grand canyon state magazine places fdr is really responsible for preserving, the civilian conservation corps for building roads and places to get to. A lot of the wildlife here in wild arizona from sheep and antelope, were all protected by fdr. When we talk about the National Park service the first National Park is 1872 with ulysses as grants. It is not the centennial and that cents. The revolution and the the revolution in the idea of National Parks and public land the preservation kicks off with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt from 1901 until 1909. He believed that democracy was about wild spaces and to our heirlooms, taj mahal and places called the tetons or the olympic or big ben, or mammoth cave this is what defined america in the view. Its preserving the american landscape he views the number of mechanisms to get things going while he was in president. One one was to get a National Park created. When fdr who loved executive power more than any other president would start signing executive orders and he did so by using the Antiquities Act of 1906, along with the congressman john lacey of iowa they put through the landed desk at capitol hill in congress, will lacey lance commissioned if you are a westerner and needed to deal with the federal government on grazing rights, mining, gas, etc. , et cetera, you would go through this land commission, everyone was kind of nice to lacey. He came up with the lacey act and the Antiquities Act which really says for scientific reasons the president of the United States can set aside places for the heritage of americans, largely thought to be for dinosaur bones. There were apparently intelligence were digging up dinosaurs all over the west and europeans were stealing these artifacts also people were vandalizing and native american sites stealing pottery and rare objects and the like. Antiquities act of 219 oh six was meant for something smaller, maybe 60 acres or 6 acres. Roosevelt came to your state, arizona and he came into a territory when he was president. He stood at the lip of the grand canyon and was surrounded by roughriders, the man who served with him in the spanishamerican war and many of them hailed from new mexico and arizona, oklahoma, along with plane swells and ivy leaguers. It was a legendary group. The roughriders. He goes to they grand canyon and says looking out over there great divine abyss and says do not touch it, god has made it, you can only bar it, borrow it, leave the grand canyon alone. [applause]. He did a similar thing with the redwood trees in california. People would name individual redwood trees and commercialize it, he physically started ripping the sides off the trees and said this is a cathedral you are defecating this redwood groves. It is driving the conservation message home. Congress or senate was going to mine the grand canyon for zinc, or copper whether the roosevelt gave a good speech or not. They did not want as a National Park. So roosevelt put that Antiquities Act which was supposed to be for 60 acres and saved 600,000 acres. You can clap for that [applause]. He say that 600,000 acres and when asked, thats illegal it went to court. He declared it declared it a National Mountain you met with with executive power. It was legal that he did it. When asked why he said they settled science a show me a better example of erosion at work. It is worldclass worldclass erosion so we have to study it. That begins this revolution in conservation. I wrote my first book about the inner roosevelt and john mere, and the gang back in that period of time, the early progressive era. I recognized that the big player becomes Franklin Roosevelt who is president from 1932 until 1945 who is enamored with his distant relative but he called him uncle ted. Theater roosevelt oversaw the marriage of eleanor and fdr and conservation was in their family blood. When the national this is the centennial of the National Park service in 2016, and august 2016 Woodrow Wilson, after being prodded by stephen mather, great Conservation Activist and franklin lane, secretary of interior and horace albright, they got together, there, there was a summit at berkeley about the anniversary streamlined again, not just having a National Park like yellowstone and yosemite, the u. S. Army running them, it them, it was not a coherent system so Woodrow Wilson in those three gentlemen i mentioned in august 2016 made it the National Park system. But the big Game Changers fdr because when roosevelt becomes the presidency in the midst of the Great Depression, just days after he said we have nothing to be about fear itself, he took took a ride and a card with horace albright, one of the guys who did the 1916 act and they drove to shenandoah National Park which roosevelt wanted to see made into a huge park and at that point he talked to albright and said i want all of our consolidation of all national monuments, alt military military battlefields, all big historic sites, the mall in washington d. C. , all brought and stripped away from other agencies and put into a National Park service. It is about american heritage. Suddenly, they became the pet agency of the new deal and fdr built the modern National Park system. He started saying, and hiring unemployed men, gave them a dollar a day to come work in places like arizona, to build visitor centers, civilian cap conservation corps planted 3 billion trees dealing with d4 station in the great plains in the southwest. That is where my book picks up on this tree army of roosevelt and how he uses these people to build incredible structures and start doing heavy duty preservation of our national heritage. There was tremendous opposition early on to both wrote so well to what they wanted to do. We almost did not get the grand canyon National Park. There was tremendous opposition, in florida the plumage for the birds, they would use all of these plumes and fashion. It pretty much had driven some of these birds to extinction, correct . Yes. The reason you need a federal government and not state laws, birds do not have state boundaries. You can say we are protecting our birds in massachusetts and if they land in florida they can be shot and killed willynilly. There is no protection of birds. So species were being eradicated. The other roosevelt for example wrote the last recorded document we have of the Passenger Pigeon he saw near charlottesville virginia. Now that bird is extinct, the last bird, martha died in 1913 and a cincinnati zoo. The extinction and the species is what really concerned Theodore Roosevelt a great deal. It did the same for Franklin Roosevelt. Fdrs mechanism was again he had people coming in and say the reason they slaughtered all the birds was because any woman in the audience to hear me would have come years ago for a Public Lecture wearing bonnet with ornamental feathers. Just like you see the pictures of the buffalo that some people say 3060 million use to go across the great plains, in florida they would come with some i automatic weapons and these and gotten them all down, plucking the feathers and stilling the eggs. We were decimating species. The flamingo used to be all over florida and now luckily there is a remnant survival birth in the bahamas but we drove them out of florida. Roosevelt, theater roosevelt was told this and he said lets go to the indian river and Pelican Island and declare it a federal bird reserve. And he said i so declare it. That became the birth of u. S. Fish and wildlife, although fdr creates fish and wildlife. What Theodore Roosevelt does is establish 51 federal bird reservations with executive power. From the allusions to the gulf islands off of louisiana, the parts of key west, all over. Big ones, the yukon yukon delta, and alaska put aside parts of west virginia. Fdr comes in and says lets streamline it. We have some of these reserves but the ducks of america have been slaughtered, geese almost out of existence because when the midwest for example dried up in the dustbowl, there is no water stop places for birds. It is fdr says we are going to make the bird reservations at Night National priority. When you are hungry here is a president same birds are priority. He says if you can build bird fly waste those migratory spots, those hotels for birds, that will also help Water Supplies for areas so in drought years they have a reservoir. It became a huge saving of the birth under fdr. He created a duck stamp making all hunters pay a fee. All of that money went into buying land for new National Wildlife refugees. In the back of my book, rightful heritage i have a a whole list, it will blow your mind how many National Wildlife refugees fdr saves to protect vanishing bird species but to help repopulate the country with duck, geese, swans, he did for example in a state like texas that never like the federal government much. He went to the port near the golf and now it is the place you go to see the whooping cranes. Fdr did that, he went fishing down there for tarpon, recognize the bird rich environment, signed an executive order saving it. He wanted the cranes saved, and on and on in every state to save bird life but also mammals, particularly the mammal life here in arizona. And you mentioned the dustbowl, many, many of us have the images of people in oklahoma and in the Central States that were out of their homes and had to leave the great migration. You mentioned the impact on wildlife. It is devastating. By the the time Franklin Roosevelts president and 33, we had shot up the country. We had that big agriculture just took everything, no crop rotation, mashup sought soil erosion everywhere, d4 station, we were dealing with an america that had been stripped bare by the extraction industries, by big timber, by mining, they did not care, it is fdr came in and said my book, the land of america he said we are going to bring the land back. Many people talk about the Great Depression about wall street and the stock market crashed, the big story is what happened to agriculture in Rural America and how suffering and not just the dustbowl but chronic drought, soil erosion, d4 station, fdr whenever he would go and say occupation on the form, he would write tree farmer. He grew trees, that is what he did, he was a Christmas Tree farmer for churchills Christmas Trees were from his tree farm. So that hobby was forced tree, he believed any country in the world that d4 stated it was going to die. All you had to do today is if you fly over the hispaniola look at the Dominican Republic youll see trees, look at haiti they d4 state. So Roosevelt Roosevelt said we have to plant these trees, now we write about the planting out here, he did a shelter belt of giant trees like miles long of trees to try to stop the wind from the dustbowl from blowing. If you go to north dakota you are looking at 35 National Wildlife refugees, saving, saving it all over the place, giving ranchers easement to work with the federal government to rebuild their land, setting up soil erosion workshops to train farmers on how to properly bring the american landscape back, not only did he go on to save National Parks, places like the everglades and big ben, channel islands, joshua tree, the olympics and all of that. But he is really push the state parks, if fdr had the National ParkService Going into states that had no state parks and said get a state park system and all of the states. If you go to florida about the birds in florida, fdr goes down there and basically creates the park system and truly puts work relief, money, we are going to save this otherwise you will lose florida and he pushed through the protection of the everglades which was a bitter fight that does not come to its final manifestation when trumans president but it is Franklin Roosevelt in correspondence that i have with ernest co. , naturalist, naturalist of florida that he writes, fdr writes nationalist audubon people all of the time wanted to say the local species. Here here in arizona it was the boy scouts of arizona, under Major General burnham, one of the founders of the boy scout that was here that did a massive Arizona Campaign to save the desert Bighorn Sheep from extinction. If you go down, i wrote on the acreage, the mountains, those are all fdr, one organ pipe tactics is an fdr executive order here. Desert botany became a big thing for fdr. Protecting the southwest which people would just rape and not think it was a fragile beautiful landscape. I tell tell the book a story about obama, hamilton. Pasadena socialite who is a new dealer for fdr and she started collecting pictures of the joshua trees. She became the apostle of the desert. Not with ansell adams quality, she was able to insinuate that in 1933 a meeting to meeting to the white house because she had been a donor and have been part