book by douglas brinkley. it's about theodore roosevelt and the early days of the conservation movement. in last week's installment, mr. brinkley talked about the genesis of his interest in the subject. >> and what interests me is writing a book like "the wilderness warrior" is roosevelt really is the father of u.s. fish and wildlife. john muir's known as the creator of the sierra club, it's roosevelt that realized the federal government has an obligation to save species of birds and animals, to save plants and trees, and to be the -- the president has an obligation to make sure that we put aside for generations unborn natural wonders like roosevelt did, like, you know, the grand canyon or mt. olympus or the petrified forest. and they turned this training center for conservation into a museum almost for theodore roosevelt. >> that training center is the national conservation training center, one of the many places

doug brinkley went to research his book. >> we talked about the eagle's nest in our discussion with doug brinkley about his book on conservation. it's right over your shoulder there. when did that start? >> well, about five years ago we had a pair of bald eagles that came in, started trying to build a nest. the first season they didn't do a very good job. but the second season they came back, tried again. and they succeeded in building that nest. they had two eaglets that year, one died and the other one fledged out. >> what does this have to do with the business you're in? >> well, until very recently, the american bald eagle was an endangered species. and it's because of work by the fish and wildlife service and by many other conservation groups that it was actually taken off the endangered species list about a year ago. so, it's a good -- i think it's a good model for us to aspire to, where critters that were

almost gone off the face of the earth had come back. >> mark masters, why do you do this job here as a historian? >> well, i'm an environmental historian, so the dream for me was to actually work in a history job where you could make a difference. so, i help teach a lot of biologists that go to work in the field, the displays here are seen by about 15,000 students a year who go out and carry out conservation, so i feel i'm making a difference. >> the eagles nest is seen all over the united states and the world because they can see it on the web. does that do anything for you and the work you're doing? does it bring anybody to your telephone to know what's going on in history? >> well, we have a pretty good history website up. we have the fish and wildlife service website up and we've got a lot of information there. we put up artifacts and old historic books and a lot of people look for images for books or films they might be doing for dissertation, so we get a lot of

traffic on the web. >> give us the background on how this institution got here, where it is in the country, who supports it, who pays for it. >> we're located about 80 miles northwest of washington, d.c., here in shepherd's town, west virginia. and until this place was built, the u.s. fish and wildlife service did its training mostly at your typical airport hilton or airport holiday inn. and when we started to design this place, we looked to build it as a place that the people in the fish and wildlife service could call home. and a place that would represent the important service puts into investing into its employees. we have really talented, really dedicated folks to work for the fish and wildlife service, but it's really critical that they continue to build their skills so they can do a better job to deal with the really complex conservation challenges that we

face today and that we'll face in the future. >> mark madison, how much does this cost and who paid for it? >> steve would have to answer that. >> this place costs about $150 million for everything that we see here. >> who in congress was responsible for this? >> senator robert c. byrd made sure that we had the funding necessary to build the place, but both the first bush administration and the clinton administration requested funds for the project and supported the project. >> and how many buildings are here? >> we have about 17 buildings on about 540 acres. >> and how long did it take for it to be built? >> it took us about three years. >> what can a book like doug brinkley's writing about conservation and about theodore roosevelt do for the kind of work you can do? >> it can hem a lot. first of all it can hem our employees to have a more esprit de corps, and the parks and

refuges are really a rare and precious heritage item, and it helps us explain to the public what we do. a lot of us do a little talks at parks or refuges at parks or school that last an hour or so. it's really useful if we can turn them over to a substantive history book like doug's if they want to know more about the history. >> your background, i know you graduated from harvard, what year? >> i graduated from harvard in 1989 in a ph.d. in history and science. >> and how long have you been here? >> i've been here ten years. it's my tenth anniversary. and it's the best place i worked. i worked as a professor at harvard and in australia, but here i feel like i'm doing history in the field basically. it's a great place. >> steve chase, your background? >> i have a master's in public administration from the barney school in hartford and worked a lot of different jobs, environmental education, the outdoor business, and public government. and came into the fish and wildlife service as presidential management intern in 1990. and started in d.c., and then this project came along and i

was able to jump in right at the very start of it. i was on the planning team. did a lot of the operational planning as well and was privileged enough to be able to watch this place rise from an old farm in west virginia to probably one of the greatest conservation training locations on the planet. >> there are a lot of archives

in this country, and this one is devoted to fish and wildlife. how important are they to a historian's research? >> this is ground zero for anybody wanting to deal with the issues of wildlife protection because in these file cabinets here, in the samples that they have in the taxidermy here and the maps, this was how wild america got saved, so you can go and look at the old documents from what was called the biological surveys which later became u.s. fish and wildlife and you could track all over the country all different kind of species. if you wanted to really learn about gray wolves or you wanted to learn about manatees, this would be the place to come and start finding how the movement got underfoot. >> one of the people you write a lot about in your book is john burr burrows, and behind you is an old picture of him and theodore roosevelt, who was he? >> john burrows was a great american. he was a transendentalist, he

was taken under the wing of walt whitman during the civil war when he was a nurse with soldiers and he became -- whitman tapped him for greatness and he had an incredible mind as a naturalist and a poet, and he was the most popular person writing about nature after the civil war. talk about millions of copies of his book sold. he's a direct descendant of emerson, thoreau and whitman school. for john burrows, it's uncle john. he felt adopted by john burrows. and roosevelt wanted to be burrows in his writing and he thanks him in all his books. he even in one of them puts a letter of tribute of the greatest american is burrows. he was a person that lived up in the catskills, our great catskills naturalist and would write about his backyard about a

bluebird building a nest or about how a river flows or about clouds drifting. and it was nature in your backyard. john muir out in california was the grand dureur of alaska and california. burrows said you've got a universe in your backyard, sort of the whitman school, in a blade of grass you can learn about nature. a brilliant writer. i've been working hard with the burrows foundation up in new york to try to make sure all the homes get preserved and library of america does the books of the great writers, faulkner, f. scott fitzgerald, and burrows belongs in the top tier. i would say he's one of the top 20 writers we've ever had and in my opinion the finest naturalist writer in the united states. t.r. loved him as president. he had burrows come with him out to yellowstone. they went hiking and camping together. he brought burrows on the trip out west. and when roosevelt would spend time in pine knot outside of charlottesville, it was only for

his wife and kids and the only guest he would have in his country home was john burrows. they would go bird watching, and their correspondence is about what they are each seeing. there's no higher compliment than theodore roosevelt, he thought the best writing wasn't about hunting but it was about preservation. >> you had a very personal note in there about john burrows and you said that he loved walt whitman. and in a parenthetical, there's no evidence that they had a homosexual relationship. why to you need to write that? >> because walt whitman was gay and during the civil war, whitman literally adopted john burrows. burrows, you can tell by -- with the beard that when he was a young man, he had these extraordinary matinee idol looks and they basically have love notes to each other. he became the great student of walt whitman. whitman could have picked anybody, it was burrows, and yet their relationship was one of a platonic nature. and -- but he became burrows

almost a son to walt whitman. >> all right. we're in this archive facility here at the national center conservation center for training. how much time do you spend in this room? >> i would come down here. i didn't spend that much time in this room. this is the place where they keep the artifacts, you know, so we're getting special access although mark madison, the historian, would come and show me items here which really informed my writing. for example, behind me there's a bag that says biological survey poison and there was a time when the biological survey job was to do pest control and predator control so farmers wouldn't lose livestock to wolves. on the other side of that mission is farmers would sometimes just shoot birds willy-nilly. and it's the biological survey said, no, you've got to keep the birds. they're eating the mosquitos. they're controlling the insect. they're controlling the pestilence, and much of the period i'm writing about, the

biological survey is putting out information for farmers on why wildlife is important to keep on your farm, that you don't want to get rid of birds. you want to attract birds. remember, scarecrows are always about birds not eating anything, farmers don't want birds, but the sophistication started coming. and also issues of soil erosion and the role different animals can play in to helping an ecosystem staying alive and wish issues of deforestation. i don't think people in america, and i certainly didn't, brian, when i started this, realized how serious trees are. i mean, if you lose trees in this country, you lose everything. you'll have no farm. you'll get soil erosion. you'll have runoffs. you'll have problems with every part of growing produce if you're not keeping forests. so, theodore roosevelt as president would plant trees, like, in nebraska to also help with wind, you know, if a farmer's going to do corn, a windstorm would kill the corn,

now we have shorter hybrid corn due to norman borloge and the green revolution, et cetera, but back then you had to have trees around the corn, you had to keep a forest around it just, you know, to blunt wind. so u.s. fish and wildlife wasn't just about bag limits and, you know, monitoring wildlife refuges and protecting animals, it was also kind of the mission of helping farmers and people living out in the wild co-exist with nature in a way that was both economical, utilitarian and aesthetic. >> so to go back to the first time you thought about coming to this facility, how did it happen? where did you find out that it even existed? >> well, i wanted to begin my book with the birth of the '51 federal bird reservation, and the first one is called pelican island, florida, and i went to pelican island, florida, he's

near vecero beach. and you can't walk on it because you could step on birds' nest. the island, for example, there are many like this off our coast, but pelican island, for example, pelicans would come and they would breed in, you know, nest there, and so they'd all be in a cluster. but the millenary institute, women's fashion during the gilded age wanted feathers for women's hats. they wanted, you know, egret feather or a herring feather, et cetera. and so people would come and just gun them all down. and you were massacring birds. there would be heaps of dead birds just for a feather. and we were losing species in florida. wild florida, i mean, you think that the west was wild, florida was the last untamed place down around the swamps of the ev everglades and places, these were a lot of ex-con fed rats on the lam, people that couldn't stand the federal government with civil war memories. and their view was if it's a bird, i'll shoot it, there's money to be had.

roosevelt's first place in 1903 in march is pelican island, florida. and what happened is -- and we've got these here -- these are 1902 surveys is of pelican island which is like a dollop of land, a little island, but it was an incredible pelican and other species but mainly pelican resting area. and so this kind of information, these documents here, are talking about the bird life and it's the first mapping really we had of this part of wild florida. these ornithologists that were friends of roosevelt, mark chapson and others, but they eventually got to t.r. who was a fellow birder, an ornithologist who said we'll lose the birds of florida if you don't do anything. roosevelt looked into it a little bit and famously said is there anything to stop me? i so declare it a federal bird reservation. and just grabbed pelican island.

it was the first time ever that land was set aside to be run and controlled by a species. before that, you had, like, a yellowstone, but it was for people. this was off-limits. there were signs, no trespassing. and so these types of documents are here, and in florida, although i can go to the island and look at birds and talk to people, so i had to come here to see documents like this. here is the man if you go down to sebastian, florida, there's a statue of him down in florida and his home is right there, paul craigle grew up in germany and he loved storks because you weren't allowed to kill storks when they're in your chmnys because it was a bad luck to kill storks in europe. the famous folk call about the stork and babies were brought by storks. he came over to the united states first to new york and then chicago and as a teenager arrived down there in florida right across from pelican island where t.r. saved. and he saw these people slaughtering the birds.

and paul cregle started independently taking a shotgun and pointing it at people who would dare to approach and slaughter these birds. he became the pelican watcher. he was considered a bit of a kook because he cared about pelicans so much. but t.r. heard about him, he was a legendary person, and he became the first game warden in florida to stop what was known, brian, as the feather wars. roosevelt's game warden out of his first four usda, department of agriculture, federal government wardens, two of them were murdered down there. i write about the murder particularly of guy bradley in thigh book. here's the first guy's t.r. putting and two are killed because there was, like, a feather mafia going on and the industry here for women's fashion. cregle stays on the job. i went and i didn't and unfortunately put this in my footnotes of my book, for length reasons, but i went to his

ancest ancestor's home in florida and they showed me his first badge, theodore roosevelt's badge he gave him to be a warden and a shotgun, double-barreled shotgun, and he would point at anybody approaching the birds. t.r. dies, theodore roosevelt died in 1919, january, and he lived on in the '20s. and this is not p-- and they approach pelican island, he comes out on a boat, he's a boat maker and pointed his gun at the president of the united states and said i'm roosevelt's warden. t.r. was already dead, get out of here. and he turned harding and those guys back. the point is conservation in the beginning of the 20th century was a battle. there were two sides on it.

just like there are on land issues, should you drill in anwr or not drill, it was nasty in florida. not only did he create pelican island did t.r., he created a string of pearl strategy of bird refuges all the way down florida. if you grab a map and you see all of them, it was t.r. saving them and we would not have these species living in florida, we would have lost wild florida forever if roosevelt didn't act when he did. he had spent time in florida as a roughrider in tampa bay on his way to go to fight in cuba and here he is getting ready for battle and was taking notes on birds of the tampa bay area. so, places like around sanibel island, which is a beautiful place, along the gulf coast of florida he saved and most famous, key west, the dry tortugas, which were great bird breeding places. >> go back, go back to the beginning. how did you find this place? >> well, that was it. when i started going to the spots, did you go here, the

headquarters. >> i'm actually basically asking you these questions for others who need to research. how, then, did you get in the door? >> called mark madison who is the historian for u.s. fish and wildlife and part of his job is to interface with scholars, and they helped me to particularly -- not only looking at material, but with these, like slides. luke i was talking about these are the old lantern slides, there's a box of them, brian, i don't know if you are able to see this. >> there's a whole box. >> i don't know if you can see it, but maybe we can get an image put up, there's cregle in a canoe down there. they've all of the battles in oregon and washington state, and they have slides of florida of these early wardens and conservationists. we may not know, the people listening to this, who paul cregle, he's a hero, he's known all over. and like i said, he's got a whole monument down there in florida.

in fact, the singer articlo gute moved to be near him. >> you called mark madison? >> come here or come to any of the places, i've been to yellowstone and yosemite and other ones, too and you come here and try to look at documents, books and things i pretty much had. but they can find this kind of material. and also check with them even today before we were talking i was asking them, they have the up-to-date numbers here on species i'm writing about. for example, so louisiana, behind us, louisiana black bear, or louisiana bear, it's a subspecie of black bear and it's almost extinct. there are only 200-some left in the river region of louisiana, mississippi up there, near arkansas. so, this particular bear people don't even know, but there are only 250 approximately left in the united states. >> you mean that are alive. >> alive, that's it. we're about to lose the

louisiana black bear. there are only 250 alive. but here at u.s. fish and wild life, they're going down to louisiana and creating reserves for them. and the people of louisiana who used to hunt them including theodore roosevelt, there are local communities, i was speaking in monroe, louisiana, people want to save louisiana black bear, people are very proud of their bear history. william faulkner in mississippi famously wrote the short story modeled loosely on a man named holt collier who was a bear hunter and ben lilly. there are the legendary bear people down in the delta. but due to mass agriculture, overhunting, harvesting, killing bears because they were considered predators and we've almost destroyed them. but here is where they are rehabilitating them. well, t.r. went and spent time and wrote about the kennesaw river region in great detail. i needed to ask them what's

going on there today. what were the black bear populations like back then, that the biological survey had and what are they like today. for different species i was writing about, this is the place i had to check. >> when you come in a place like this, how long do you spend here, and what do you do while you're here? >> look at documents. look at books. i mean, to be honest one of the most helpful thing is not in this room but out there, they have a library. in fact, a minute ago they just gave me two titles that i didn't know about for perhaps future writing of mine, because they are collecting everything here. i mean, i just noticed a minute ago, behind in this cabinet, i never saw unfortunately this little book by c.b. colby on the history of fish and wildlife. they've got all these pamphlets, documents, photos, it's a great archive. but the problem with the -- why i'm kind of feeling i'm walking into a treasure trove, it's a lot of people writing on nature, focused on national parks only. the grand canyon, yellowstone,

yosemite, the great smoky mountains. which is the park service. ken burns in the fall is doing the national parks. people don't know enough about what u.s. fish and wildlife does. and that's what roosevelt cared the most about, more than the parks, was how to save species and their habitats. because if you don't have enough wetlands, you can't have the species. and so they monitor everything here. for example, fish and wildlife declared -- helped declare the florida panther an endangered species. and now many of them are getting hit by cars, modernity, making it very hard for them to survive, so our government's created a national wildlife refuge. under the roosevelt way of thinging, let's create a habitat so this panther can live. we're not saying there's going to be a million of them, but we should not lose the florida panther. we should not lose our jaguars along the new mexico and arizona and we should not lose the polar

bear in alaska. this is where they're fighting for species survival. this is where the endangered species act is real. these are the people at fish and wildlife that are out there on the ground and so my book isn't just about theodore roosevelt. it's about how we got to where this triumphant story if you like. we do have a great system. look at the maps we've got. the problem is we're not maintenancing proper due to not enough funding the wildlife refuge, and commercialization is always encroaching on these. people don't like it in florida if you want to build a development, you mean i can't build a condo complex because of a gray panther? and it's always that, you know, balance. >> how do we look to other countries, and are this other countries that do the same thing we're doing? >> all of them around the world in one way or the other. theodore roosevelt in my opinion was the progenitor of the global wildlife protection movement.

i don't do what-if history, but if he were alive today, like the cur cover of "time" magazine, he would be fighting, as his great grandson theodore roosevelt iv is doing now, to save the species of the planet that we're losing quickly. t.r. loved them, he was not what we call by modern terms a kind of holistic, you know, he believed in hunting. but he wanted to -- he did not believe in hunting so you make a species extinct. and so, yes, he cared about butterflies. he cared about wildflowers. he wanted to make sure we had a place for that in modern society. so, whatever people are learning in zimbabwe about wildlife protection or in australia, it's borne out of roosevelt's presidency, this sense of global wildlife protection. >> how often in your research for this book did you go away from either a conversation or a place and say, boy, they haven't

been doing their job? >> on the ground you mean at the -- >> just about -- i mean, how -- did you ever get irritated by the attitude that somebody had in research or one of these federal agencies that keep all this stuff or libraries, or do you think -- what kind of mark do you give them? >> i give them an "a" across the board about being open because not that many people are writing about the history of wildlife protection or the history of conservation as you might think. and so for me to come in, having written a number of books and say i'm interested in your collection, they like it a little less so at yellowstone or so yosemite because they've been written about a lot. but if you go to crater lake national park, every person should go to crater lake in oregon, spectacular, the most dazzling blue color lake in that whole region of southern oregon which t.r. did so much to protect. but he didn't -- the backstory

in a popular publication had never been written about crater lake, how it was saved, so they were helping be get documents left and right. particularly if you pick a site that hasn't been overcovered or overwritten about, they were thrilled about it, you really care about the history of our park. many people don't think about the history of the national park, they are come for a camping experience or hiking, they are less interested in the history of a park or wildlife refuge, where i was interested in the history. >> what evidence do you have or your publisher will sell? 1,000 pages. what sit 35 bucks apiece? >> 35 bucks, but when you get it online, immediately it's less than that. i think presidential studies go well, and theodore roosevelt is beloved like washington or lincoln. i think people want to read about a president. i wanted to do the book as thoroughly and accurately as possible. believe it or not, i had to cut a lot just to get it down to -- i mean, hundreds of pages i've

cut, just to get it down to 1,000-page book, because it's that rich a story with that much untapped archival material. and, brian, i don't write these books. particularly ones -- i'm not -- i'm not saying i won't do it in my career, but i wrote this book for future generations because of t.r. saying he's saving these parks for generations unborn. i wanted to lay this down as, like, a track for libraries that every kid will know what happened, that there were battles fought in this country to save these places. they didn't just happen by osmosis, we don't just sort of have a wind cave, south dakota, saved for no reason or, you know, or antiquity sites in the south that people love in new mexico states, each ground site was a battle, whether the federal government should have this land or not! and each state has a local hero, and i've tried to focus on some of those people. so, my book it's not a new york,