When we celebrate the 250th birthday of this great nation on July 4th, the spectacular Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library will open in Medora, North Dakota.
It will be a marvelous tribute to our 26th president, with lots of interactive and hands-on learning experiences. It will also be a major tourist attraction, and bring in many people to a state they otherwise would never visit.
It’s fitting that the library will be located in western North Dakota. This is the area that transformed Roosevelt and where he said, “The romance of my life began.”
Theodore Roosevelt – National Park Service Government photo
Roosevelt also said, he “never would have been president if it had not been for my experience in North Dakota.”
Roosevelt was known as a steward of the environment and as the nation’s conservation president.
He said, “There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country. Just as we must conserve our men, women and children, so we must conserve the resources of the land on which they live.”
Roosevelt certainly practiced what he preached. In North Dakota, he formed the Boone and Crockett Club. Its mission was the conservation of large game animals and their habitats.
As president, Roosevelt created the U.S. Forest Service and established 150 national forests. He also created the first 55 federal bird reservation and game preserves, 5 national parks and the first 18 national monuments. In all, Roosevelt established about 230 million acres of public lands.
Roosevelt issued many executive orders to protect forest and wildlife lands. He also carved out habitat for wildlife.
Oh, and he also saved American bison from extinction. He did that by establishing federal protections for bison habitats.
All this brings us to former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who was the driving force behind the building of the Roosevelt Library. This happened when Burgum was an innovator, creative, and a strong leader.
Doug Burgum in the KFGO studio
Now that he’s Secretary of the Interior and a Donald Trump bootlicker, Burgum has shamefully done his best to destroy Roosevelt’s impressive legacy.
Burgum is allowing drilling for oil on federal land, and has already devastated the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service. The Park Service workforce has been slashed by 25%, meaning about 4,000 people have lost their jobs.
The parks are way understaffed, visitor center hours have been reduced, public safety has been reduced, as has park maintenance. To make matters worse, Burgum is proposing a whopping 40% reduction to the National Park Service maintenance budget.
Burgum recently illegally suspended leases for five offshore wind farms under construction off the East Coast, he’s evicting bison herds from their homes in the federal grasslands of Montana, and weakening other protections on federal land for threatened species and migratory birds.
“Burgum is on his way to becoming the worst Interior Secretary in history,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
Not to be overlooked is Burgum’s push for copper mining near Minnesota’s precious Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Voyageurs National Park.
That effort has been strongly opposed by four direct descendants of Roosevelt. Led by Theodore Roosevelt IV, a lifelong Republican and great-grandson of the former president, they wrote a scathing letter criticizing this idea.
They wrote, this policy “is diametrically at odds with the conservation legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt…Frankly, TR would be appalled at H.J. Res.140 and the misguided and harmful effort to revoke a sound and necessary mineral withdraw in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters…As TR’s Presidential Library formally opens in Medora, North Dakota on Independence Day, three pillars of TR’s life will take central stage: leadership, conservation, and citizenship. It’s one thing for politicians to say they believe in these pillars, and it’s quite another to act this way.”
What a shame that Burgum, the man who fought so hard to build the Theodore Roosevelt Library, has turned against Roosevelt’s excellent policies, and severely trashed his own reputation.
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