US President Barack Obama launched an initiative to develop “a 21st century strategy for America’s great outdoors” at a national conservation conference held Friday to kick off meetings across the country aimed at gathering grassroots input and new ideas.
Delivering the first major conservation speech of his presidency, Obama referred to a similar conference convened by President Theodore Roosevelt more than 100 years ago, which founded the modern conservation movement.
“I do intend to enrich that legacy, and I feel an abiding bond with the land that is the United States of America,” said Obama, although joking that, unlike Roosevelt, “I will probably never shoot a bear.”
The conference was both less ambitious than the one a century ago and was designed to frame a new model of conservation that takes into account a vastly changed country — more populated, more developed and more urban.
Both the fact that the speakers included Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker and that the first of the national gatherings later this year — to be attended by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar — is in Los Angeles underscored the administration’s focus on urban conservation.
The approach also will emphasize government partnerships with nonprofits, private landowners and others, which would be models for land preservation that are less grandiose than new national parks or wilderness areas, but also tend to generate less opposition.
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