“The slaughter and extirpation of North America’s Indigenous population is our original sin, our sin or origin. Anyone who cares to think deeply about the idea of America must contend with it, stare it in the face. We killed those who were here. Not just the animals, but the human beings.”

As I’m gearing up for my Next Big Adventure (I’m desperately hoping August will deliver us a relatively COVID-free world – or at least country – in which to wander), I find myself reading up on the people and places I’ll be exploring. A planned visit to the Badlands and Yellowstone led me to David Gessner’s new book, which came out last August: Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness.

Now listen, I’m just as tired of U.S. presidents as the next person – especially after the last four years. Whereas I used to be kind of a presidential nut, particularly in my travels (making sure to visit boyhood homes, adult homes, and graves), I have to admit I’m kind of… over it. By and large, presidents are deeply flawed, power hungry humans with dreams of grandeur. It takes a certain level of narcissism to even want the job in the first place.

It’s been a long time since a true, selfless public servant occupied the office. Perhaps never.

Even Abraham Lincoln, our most beloved president and north star for American optimism, was no friend to Native Americans. Among other things, he presided over the hanging of 38 Dakota men for “rebellion,” the largest mass execution in U.S. history. (Let’s conveniently forget that he didn’t do much to the white Confederate generals who literally rebelled and formed their own country.)

So when it comes to our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, I didn’t think I would be in the mood for a “reevaluation” or “reexamination” of the man whom I already knew to be full of stark contradictions. Teddy had a deep love of wild nature and did more to save and preserve our land than any other president (he created 5 national parks, 18 national monuments, 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, 4 national game preserves, and the United States Forest Service).

However, that love of the landscape grew out of another love – a love of killing things on it. He was devoted to preserving wildlife, but he was also hopelessly addicted to killing it. Politically, he was startlingly progressive on many fronts, yet he clung to the myth of American exceptionalism like a warm blanket. Ultimately, he believed Native Americans were simply in the way of the country’s rightful progress.

So it now the right moment to cast a complimentary – yet still critical – eye on Theodore Roosevelt? Meh. Even the American Museum of Natural History in New York recently came to terms with his racism and removed the awful statue of TR – flanked by bare-chested African and Native American men – from its entrance.

But the conceit of Gessner’s book appealed to me. It uses TR is a vehicle to tell a much more relevant and immediate story about America – really, the world – in 2021. Yes, Gessner does take some time to take a look at TR’s legacy (and he doesn’t hide the fact that he kind of “loves” the man, even though that admission might get him kicked out of the biographer’s guild), but the book is a fascinating mix of biography, travelogue, climate change warning, and journalistic reporting on the drama surrounding public land use in general… and Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument specifically.

In short, it’s a treatise on wilderness, wildness, conservation, and travel. And that is very much in my wheelhouse.

“Barely a day passes when we don’t wipe out a species, often a species that has never been categorized. We are killing the living world. We forget that we ourselves are just one sort of animal, though an animal that seems hell-bent on wiping out all others. We are the Borg on Star Trek assimilating all. This is not just morally indefensible, and species murder, but it is very likely species suicide for us.”

The first half of Gessner’s book reads like a travelogue that follows TR’s footsteps across the American West. Gessner and his nephew (who had never been to California) road trip across the country, spending time in TR’s beloved Badlands, Yellowstone, Muir Woods, and the Grand Canyon – where TR infamously announced in 1903 that we should “leave it as it is.” It is a historical look at conservation, an ode to wild places, and a hopeful analysis of our ability to “re-wild” a place.

The second half, after Gessner’s nephew heads home and Gessner himself heads for Bears Ears, is much more political. The book details the history of public land use, especially by western ranchers who lease land from the government at drastically reduced rates.

“If you think overgrazing is a small worry with everything else going on in the world, consider that, between the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and the Park Service, grazing is allowed on something like 379,000 square miles of public land. That is two Californias with a Maine and a Massachusetts . . . especially reserved for cows.”

Leave It As It Is then dives into the creation of Grand Staircase-Escalante (under Clinton) and Bears Ears National Monuments (under Obama), their historically significant reductions in size (under Trump and Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke), and the ongoing battles to protect both.

For its part, Bears Ears isn’t just an obscure patch of Utah desert. It’s one of the richest pieces of land – anthropologically, archeologically, geologically, and paleontologically speaking – in the entire country, perhaps the world.

Even though “the idea of loving a place, of fighting for it, begins to seem quaint in this overwhelming and always busy world,” it’s never been more necessary. Roosevelt fought to preserve wild places in the face of a hostile Congress and a public that, by and large, didn’t even know those places existed. We should do no less for the few places that have somehow managed to survive.

For these places – our national parks, our wild places, our public lands – are not really, as the saying goes, “America’s best idea.” Rather, they’re America’s best gift. These places are gifts given to us by those who had the forethought and passion to fight for them. We get to enjoy them because they cared enough to save them.

But the fight isn’t over. We need to continually fight for public land. We need to keep focusing on preservation and conservation, especially in light of the undeniable evidence of climate change and the damage being done to wildlife populations. Public land is never safe, as Trump and Zinke showed with Bears Ears.

Despite his flaws, Roosevelt had the capacity to change. To learn and adapt. “The language of the early twentieth century will not travel well into the future: even the sentences combating racism sound racist. But what [happened] inside Roosevelt [was] a kind of wrestling match between old ideas and new.”

He was able to maintain a sense of empathy and, to an extent, tear off the blinders of his time. Which is something people like Trump and Zinke are incapable of doing.

“Is it possible to both empathize with the other side and take a stand? [Trump gave] fighting a bad name, but can’t we advocate intelligently, without descending to name-calling and pettiness? Our twenty-sixth president had a little of the forty-fifth in him, and when he attacked he attacked like a street fighter. But at least he thought first. At least he listened. At least he read. At least he could consider opposing points of view. He could keep an open mind, but once that mind was made up, watch out.”