By Erik Molvar

President Donald Trump has made a point of invoking Theodore Roosevelt, one of our nation’s leading conservation icons, as his guiding light on environmental issues. His Secretary of Interior designee, Ryan Zinke, has done the same. Those are pretty big boasts.

Teddy Roosevelt was president around the turn of 20th Century, an era when bighorn sheep had all but disappeared from our western mountains. Wolves and mountain lions were being slaughtered to extinction by a nascent western livestock industry and its bloodthirsty allies. Elk and bison survived only in remnant populations in Yellowstone, and the pronghorn teetered on the brink of extinction. Sportsmen were only beginning to realize that the severing of wildlife migration routes, the habitat losses caused by the spread of “civilization,” river destruction caused by logging and livestock grazing, and unregulated overhunting was endangering American wildlife. It was the end of the era during which rugged individualism could be tested against the raw power of wilderness.

Teddy Roosevelt recognized this impending doom, and in 1906 he signed the Antiquities Act, granting presidents the authority to designate National Monuments to protect and preserve endangered landscapes. In all, he used the power of the pen to designate eighteen National Monuments, including Grand Canyon and Mount Olympus National Monuments. At the time, these designations were bitterly fought by local business interests who decried the new Monuments as the death knell of local economies. Contrary to those assertions, both of these Monuments went on to become crown jewels of our National Park system – Grand Canyon and Olympic – and engines of tourism economies that have sustained their regions even as extractive industries like logging and mining went bust.

In addition to his far-sighted focus on conservation, Teddy Roosevelt built an economic legacy as a trust-buster, taking on industrial monopolies of his day and fighting to give the average working American a fair shot at success. As timber and railroad barons decimated western forest lands with logging and human-caused fires, local western communities pled for the federal government to stand up to the fat cats and impose common-sense regulations to protect federally owned forests. In response, Roosevelt created the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and appointed Gifford Pinchot as its first Chief. New forest regulations set the nation’s legacy of public forests on a long and winding path toward recovery, a goal that the agency is still struggling to achieve today.

Today, Donald J. Trump wants to claim the mantle of Roosevelt. Trump entered the White House as members of his party are working to seize western public lands and sell them off to the highest bidder, and seeking to reverse President Obama’s National Monument designations at Bears Ears and Gold Butte. Zinke opposes the outright sale of public lands, but voted in favor of a bill to turn over management of National Forest lands to local committees, which would undoubtedly be dominated by corporate profiteering, reversing a century of Roosevelt’s National Forest legacy.

Trump’s decisions to approve the Dakota Access Pipeline and Keystone XL err on the side of corporate overlords while steamrolling the valid concerns of local communities and everyday Americans. And Trump’s avowed intention to dismantle federal regulations– including those that protect the health of our lands, water, air, and wildlife populations – threaten to reverse over a hundred years of conservation progress and drive wildlife populations to extinction.

These policies position Trump as the opposite of Roosevelt. If this trend continues, history will judge the Trump administration as the tipping point that reversed Teddy Roosevelt’s conservation achievements, rather than the standard-bearer of Roosevelt’s proud conservation legacy.

Will the real Teddy Roosevelt please step forward? In his actions as president, President Trump can either back up his Roosevelt rhetoric with real and tangible conservation leadership, or prove himself an empty blowhard and a cynical hypocrite. Trump can cultivate the policies of the beloved Roosevelt of teddy bear fame. Or he can follow in the footsteps of William Howard Taft, the fat-cat sycophant to corporate interests who occupied the White House after Roosevelt, reversed many of Roosevelt’s policies, and became a forgotten footnote in American history.

Americans are wide-awake and watching to see how the Trump administration handles our nation’s conservation legacy. History will be his judge.

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Erik Molvar is the Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project, and has dedicated his life to western conservation issues including preserving wilderness, defending wild forests, fighting the ravages of livestock and fossil fuel development, and restoring healthy wildlife populations. He is the author of 16 books on western public lands.