Schoolchildren learn that Teddy Roosevelt loved the great outdoors. That same President Roosevelt — the Republican one — also put his bully pulpit where his hiking shoes were. Roosevelt oversaw the largest expansion of protected land of any president of either party.
According to the president of Republicans for Environmental Protection (a group with a name that increasingly sounds like an oxymoron), Roosevelt “quadrupled the acreage in national forests, invented the National Wildlife Refuge System, and proclaimed 18 national monuments, including 868,120 acres of the Grand Canyon and 639,200 acres of Mount Olympus. He even dispatched the Marines to Midway Atoll to protect the Laysan albatross — which was prized by feather collectors — from poachers.”