Reference no: EM133346484

Question: Consider these two quotes from conservationist President Theodore Roosevelt, who travelled widely among the Native American tribes of the American West in during the late 1800s and early 1900s:

"I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature [the Grand Canyon] as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you, as one of the great sights which every American if he can travel at all should see." Theodore Roosevelt : Speech at the Grand Canyon, May 6, 1903

"We [the United States] have become great in a material sense because of the lavish use of our resources, and we have just reason to be proud of our growth. 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 shall have been still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation. These questions do not relate only to the next century or to the next generation. One distinguishing characteristic of really civilized men is foresight; we have to, as a nation, exercise foresight for this nation in the future; and if we do not exercise that foresight, dark will be the future! We should exercise foresight now, as the ordinarily prudent man exercises foresight in conserving and wisely using the property which contains the assurance of well-being for himself and his children. " Theodore Roosevelt: Conservation as a National Duty, May 13, 1908

Explore how Native American spirituality and ethics may have influenced Roosevelt's conservationist attitude toward the environment.