- The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is an example of sustainability and conservation.
- The Trump administration is pushing for greater resource development on public lands.
- There’s dissonance between the library, Roosevelt’s legacy and the current executive branch.
The brand new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opened in the Badlands of western North Dakota just in time for the 250th anniversary of the United State’s adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
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The nearly half-billion dollar development is at least seven years in the making, if not the full 117 since the president known as TR left office in 1909, and the results are impressive.
It’s a unique and fitting monument for one of America’s Mount Rushmore presidents. Spread out over 93 acres on top of a butte adjacent to the national park that bears his name, it includes revelatory history, playful engagement and enough natural splendor to become a cherished destination for years to come.
In its design, build, operational ethos and rhetoric, however, the library’s campus is a full-throated celebration of Roosevelt as America’s most prolific conservationist.
“The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose and method,” Roosevelt said in 1907, one of many quotes about his feelings toward nature.
And in 1916 he wrote, “Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations.”
The library upholds that legacy by taking the 26th president’s ethos at face value. As an architectural achievement, the property represents the vanguard of sustainable development and green energy potential.
“From the ground up in this project, we’ve looked at sustainability as really a very important aspect of the work that we’re doing,” said Jean Carrol, the library’s director of facilities, grounds and sustainability.
At the same time, it’s a darling of the Trump administration, which has been unabashed in its support for extraction on public lands and animosity toward all forms of renewable energy. President Donald Trump spoke in Medora, North Dakota, the remote location of the library, to celebrate the opening. But, in particular, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and former North Dakota governor, has been backing the project since it was nothing more than a hope and a dream.
In an interview with the Deseret News, Burgum made clear that he believes the library is “on the cutting edge of innovation” and offers “layers of lessons,” but does not find Roosevelt’s conservation ethic at odds with his department’s approach to energy production.
“We’re such a country rich with the abundant resources we have, and we end up having a lot of battles politically where we act like everyone should be afraid of the future and the scarcity and ‘we versus they’ and ‘them versus us’ and all that,“ Burgum said. ”There’s a message here of abundance and a message of innovation.”
Though the dissonance appears implicit, particularly in light of Burgum’s suggestion that public lands represent America’s “balance sheet,” he said that’s just a limited view.
“We’re saying that we’re a country where two things can be true at the same time,” Burgum said. ”We can be the world’s largest energy producer and we can do the best job at conservation. Those are not opposing, at all opposing.”
100 years in the future
Ed O’Keefe, the CEO of the library, said Roosevelt’s record as a conservationist will never be equaled. Not just because of the scale of his effort — with a view toward 100 years in the future, he preserved more than 230 million acres of land — but because he was the first to make it an American priority.
During Roosevelt’s time, conservation wasn’t a political topic but he made it one, O’Keefe said. When others thought the land was to be used and maximized for human economic gain, Roosevelt sought to conserve it in order to give it to future generations in a better state than they found it.
“Profoundly different perspective, and so at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, we look 100 years into the future of conservation and sustainability,” O’Keefe said.
“We’re doing today what TR would do were he here, and we want people to learn about conservation not just by seeing what we have done, but by actively being able to participate in it, to really understand what conservation in action looks like, to value that no one really owns the land. We are merely stewards for the next generations.”
As such, from inception through execution and beyond into its future, the entire library was built with sustainability, preservation and conservation in mind.
The campus is well on its way to achieving a “Living Building Challenge,” which is defined as “today’s most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment.” It’s designed to require zero outside energy, produce zero emissions and zero waste, and will require zero water from the grid.
Over 400,000 native plants, which the library worked with local universities to source, were planted across the 93 acres so the grasslands are being restored to a more natural state. The land will be grazed by local ranches, and they plan to do prescribed burns to foster greater biodiversity health.
Those are things that Burgum celebrates at the same time that he lambasts renewable energy as a loss on investment. “We spent a lot of money,” he said, “and we ended up with highly expensive forms of electricity.”
Yet, he also said that, “the library just is absolutely on the cutting edge of innovation, but Theodore Roosevelt was on the cutting edge of innovation too.”
Can development be conservation, too?
Regarding the “balance sheet” framing, Burgum said that Roosevelt “basically created” it.
“When he said, ‘I put these away for the benefit and the use of the American people,’ he understood that they were assets,” Burgum said. “They were assets that could be used for — through multiple use — whether it’s feeding the nation through grazing, affordable housing through timber development, whether it was energy development.”
Burgum described how when Roosevelt put away so much land, it was for the benefit and the use of the American people, and was to be left better for the next generation. As he understands it, that doesn’t mean to leave it alone because Roosevelt knew “that some of the biggest mineral deposits in the country were in the public lands.”
“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, it’s every acre is going to be a wilderness area. No one can set foot in it and we got to keep humans out.’ Sort of like that humans are bad,“ Burgum said.
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The land represents an opportunity, Burgum said, because of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act to develop it for multiple uses such as grazing, timber, mining, energy development or recreation.
“Most of the land isn’t wilderness area … a small percentage of it is the national parks. We can preserve all those,” Burgum said. “But on the rest of them, for doing conservation — which is leave it better for the next generation — that means we can develop our resources.”
With new innovations, too, he said there’s better reclamation than ever before and industry is finding ways to extract resources “smarter, cleaner, faster, more efficiently … than ever before.”
Are the library and the White House perspectives aligned?
The library’s innovations toward conservation and preservation are not consistent with the current presidential administration’s approach to energy production.
The White House’s approach can be summed up with the “drill, baby, drill” mandate that Trump signed on his first day in office with the “Unleash American Energy” executive order. That called for the land use and energy agencies to increase natural resource extraction on public lands, which the Interior under Burgum has actively pursued.
Burgum is a big fan of Roosevelt and said that the man laid the foundations for America’s greatness. Yet during his tenure at the Interior, the department has opened public lands to greater natural resource extraction, reinvested in America’s coal industry to develop more mining, stymied or stopped renewable energy projects — going so far as to pay foreign corporations to close offshore wind projects — and cut staffing at the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management.
The agency has also rescinded the “Public Land Rule,” which ensured “conservation” was among the multiple uses of public land, reduced protection in Alaska and opened up hunting across most wildlife refuges.
In light of those efforts, the library’s design is quite different and it shows that other options of development exist; that they can work and represent the heritage hoped for by one of America’s conservative icons.
What would Roosevelt say about conservation efforts today?
Unfortunately, the AI model of Roosevelt that the library created for visitors to interact with and ask questions of — which is based on a large language model from his prolific speech, letter and book writing — is restricted to his own time period.
O’Keefe does not know what Roosevelt would have thought about conservation today. And while conservation was not a political issue in Roosevelt’s time, it is today. As a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, O’Keefe could not weigh in. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought about it.
As he understands it, Roosevelt represents the first wave of American conservation but creating the first national forests, sanctuaries, the U.S. Forest Service and the mere idea that the effort was political.
The second is Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal efforts, which created a mobilization of public conservation, reclamation and water works.
Under Richard Nixon, the third phase is one of regulation where, now that the lands have been protected, the tension between industry and nature began to be addressed.
“We’re in this moment where we don’t know what the fourth phase of conservation is‚” O’Keefe said.
But if he were around to witness it, he believes that Roosevelt would be “vigorously engaged” and “fearlessly involved” in the debate.
“He would do what I hope we can do here, which is to gather many different organizations and people and perspectives and say there needs to be a concerted effort to understand what the future of conservation actually is,” O’Keefe said. “I don’t have the answer … but I do know that he would want us to do what we’re doing, which is to bring differing minds and perspectives together to try to figure out a path forward.”
Get in the arena
The reason that Burgum and the Trump administration don’t like renewable energy is that it does not sustain a base load of energy 24 hours a day. Wind blows when it blows and clouds block the sun.
When Burgum brought that up at a recent congressional hearing, Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., held up a battery.
Burgum’s point though is that “hydrocarbons are still providing in the world about 75% of the world’s power, and they were 40 years ago, they were 20 years ago.”
And in terms that mirror how Roosevelt talked about nature and conservation, Burgum said that the effort to make America the energy superpower it is will benefit generations of Americans.
“Everybody’s children for years to come are going to benefit from having affordable, reliable, secure energy,” he said. “That’s because more energy equals cleaner environments and more energy equals human flourishing.”
One way Roosevelt addressed it was similar, but also different.
“Conservation means development as much as it does protection,” he said in his 1910 “New Nationalism” speech about 18 months after he left office. But “the nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value.”
Which was why the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library came to exist the way it does. From the architecture, to the land, to the native plants, everything it did, O’Keefe said, celebrates Roosevelt’s conservation legacy. But, he said, it’s also a challenge to visitors to “get in the arena and make a commitment to our natural world.”
If not, Roosevelt had a warning for folks to consider.
“We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources,” he told the nation’s governors in 1908. “But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.”