America's 10 Best And Worst Environmental Presidents

America's natural heritage, or the destruction of it, is due in large part to the presidents who presided over the land at the time. Some were stalwart protectors of the beautiful landscapes we see today, while some were only interested in exploiting what resources were to be found within the land, regardless of how beautiful the citizens of the country thought it was. Here is a list of the top ten best and worst environmental presidents of all time. Coming in at the number five spot for worst environmental president of all time is a tie between Dwight D. Eisenhower and William McKinley. First, let's talk about Dwight Eisenhower. And so have assured that the business of the nation should go forward. If you're stuck in a hopeless and lengthy traffic jam on an interstate, you can probably thank Dwight D. Eisenhower for that. He championed the Federal Aid Highway Act, which accelerated car culture, suburban sprawl, and the decline of public mass transit. The sprawling suburbs and downtown urban decay is due in large part to his policies. Loss of wildlands and lack of open space, replaced by car culture and malls, and the need to drive miles to pick up a gallon of milk, is all in large part due to President Eisenhower. President William McKinley was certainly no environmental champion either. The concept of modern environmentalism did not really come into play until after he was assassinated in 1901. But it should have. His administration focused on industrial growth, tariffs, and foreign expansion, rather than land conservation or pollution control. McKinley strongly supported big business, manufacturing, and high protective tariffs. This prompted rapid industrial growth, which increased factory pollution and resource extraction. He was not conservation-minded and had no ethics regarding natural resource protection. McKinley never set aside federal land for national parks, forests, or wildlife refuges. His administration prioritized geopolitical and economic dominance in order to acquire territories for resource exploitation and extraction. He was a conventional pro-business conservative of the late 19th century. He always maintained a pro-business stance that favored industrial resource use over preservation. Coming in at number 5, Best Environmental President, is Richard Milhouse Nixon. I am Lara Crook! This one might shock you. Yes, good old tricky Dick Nixon, who was embroiled in the Watergate scandal and resigned in disgrace from office, was actually one of the best environmental presidents of the country. Nixon signed milestone legislation, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act, but only under intense political pressure in the run-up to the 1972 election. After re-election, he all but stripped the EPA's power to do its job. Nevertheless, due to his actions, we have clearer air and cleaner water than we would have had without him. President Richard Nixon signed the United States Endangered Species Act into law on December 28, 1973. The legislation passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress to conserve imperiled species and the ecosystems upon which they depend. Nixon, however, is one of only four presidents to never have created any new national monuments using the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives presidents the exclusive authority to create national monuments. Coming in at number four worst environmental president is Warren G. Harding. We're here to make a fuss, Warren Harding, you're the man for us. On many lists of our great presidents, Warren Harding often comes in first from the bottom. President Warren G. Harding's environmental legacy is defined by the infamous Teapot Dome scandal. His cabinet got down to being one of the most corrupt ever. In which his interior secretary secretly leased protected federal naval oil reserves in Wyoming and California to private oil companies in exchange for massive bribes. Harding transferred public oil reserves from the Navy to the Department of the Interior in 1921. Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall gave exclusive drilling rights to oil tycoons without competitive bidding. Fall accepted over 400,000 impersonal bribes and what they termed loans. Fall became the first U.S. cabinet member convicted and imprisoned for a crime committed in office. Fall sought to dismantle the conservation policies of Theodore Roosevelt. The administration actively worked to transfer federal public lands and natural resources over to private, commercial exploitation. Public resources were viewed strictly for immediate, unfettered industrial consumption rather than long-term stewardship. Landing in the number four spot as the best environmental presidents is a tie between Barack Obama and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Often considered one of the best overall presidents of all time, Franklin D. Roosevelt is also one of the best environmental presidents of all time. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. He guided America through the Great Depression and faced the Dust Bowl head-on, navigating the country through the worst of times. In the 1930s, FDR transformed American environmental policy by merging economic relief with massive resource conservation during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. He utilized New Deal programs to plant billions of trees, stop soil erosion, and expand public lands. FDR created the Civilian Conservation Corps, known as the CCC, reorganized and expanded the National Park Service, and fostered numerous acts and legislation protecting the environment, providing a basis for future conservation. With the CCC, three million young men were hired to plant over two billion trees, build 13,000 miles of trails, and fight forest fires. Massive rows of trees were planted across the Midwest to block winds and stop topsoil loss. A Soil Conservation Service was created to combat the Dust Bowl by researching erosion and teaching farmers sustainable soil and water practices. FDR expanded public rangelands and forests, adding millions of acres to the federal preservation system, and over 140 new wildlife refuges were established to protect birds and native animals. Roosevelt used executive authority and the Antiquities Act to enlarge and protect national monuments like Death Valley and Muir Woods. President Barack Obama pursued an aggressive climate and conservation agenda, utilizing executive authority to protect hundreds of millions of acres of land and water, invest heavily in green technology, and broker global climate agreements. His legacy, however, is somewhat mixed due to concurrent expansions in domestic fossil fuel production. Obama addressed climate change by launching the Climate Action Plan, joining the Paris Agreement, and setting strict fuel economy standards for vehicles. Obama protected vast tracts of public land and marine environments, designating large national monuments, like Bears Ears, using the Antiquities Act. Obama pumped nearly $90 billion into renewable energy and infrastructure through the 2009 Economic Recovery Package. He directed the EPA to establish the first national limits on carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants, and co-led global negotiations for the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015. Because of Obama, historic increases in vehicle mileage efficiency standards were implemented to curb oil consumption. President Obama designated 29 new national monuments and expanded five existing ones using the Antiquities Act. FDR's bold initiatives and Obama's cumulative actions cement them firmly in the number four best environmental president spot. Coming in at the number three spot for worst environmental president is Ronald Reagan. Though he's seen as standing strong during the Cold War, Reagan is a man who truly seemed to have contempt for nature and the environment. He stripped solar panels off the White House roof that Jimmy Carter had installed, rolled back environmental protections, and appointed one of the most anti-environmental secretaries of the interior the country has ever seen, James Watt. Reagan was on a mission to scale back the EPA with budget cuts and staff firings and vetoed the Clean Water Act renewal. Congress, however, overrode the veto. Not only did the Gipper tear off the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had installed on the roof of the White House, he also dismantled the federal energy standards Carter had put in place. Reagan proposed selling off public lands. He is one of only four presidents to never have created a national monument using the Reagan was paraphrased as saying, You've seen one, Redwood. You've seen them all. But the actual quote regarding the Redwoods was, I saw them. There is nothing beautiful about them. They are just a little higher than the others. And he actually said, Trees cause more pollution than automobiles. He also said, You know, a tree is a tree. How many more do you need to look at? Reagan's disdain for the natural world lands him in third place as the worst environmental president. The number three best environmental president is Bill Clinton, though Clinton might be known for other things, namely this woman. No, not her. Yeah, her. And a famous desk job he once had. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, but I had sex with her sister and it was hot. While it's been said that Nixon got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, it could also be said that Clinton got caught with his hand in the nookie jar. But seriously, Clinton was also a strong environmental president, learning from his mistakes early in his presidency when he allowed what was termed by environmentalists as the logging without laws bill to pass a wholesale giveaway to the timber industry. He later created the roadless rule bill in order to protect the last unroaded forested areas in the United States, some 58 million acres. He signed the California Desert Protection Act into law in 1994 and created the nearly two million acre Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in Utah with the Antiquities Act. Clinton blocked a gold mine near Yellowstone National Park and also implemented the Pacific Northwest Forest Plan to balance old growth protection and timber communities. Clinton's roadless rule was the result of a massive public outreach effort spanning 15 months including over 600 public hearings and 1.6 million public comments, more than any other administrative rule in U.S. history up to that time. It aimed to protect the wildest remaining undeveloped ecosystems. Clinton signed the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 to tighten pesticide standards on food. He also initiated toxic waste cleanup at hundreds of Superfund sites nationwide. Clinton signed an executive order to prioritize environmental justice for low income and minority communities facing disproportionate industrial pollution and defended landmark laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act from Congressional rollbacks. Ultimately he protected many millions of acres of public land. His actions safeguarding the natural world make him the third best environmental president. The number two worst environmental president goes to George W. Bush, probably best remembered for his dialogue gaffes which became Bushisms. The question asked, is our children learning? As yesterday's positive report card shows, children do learn. There's an old saying in Tennessee, I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, this says fool me once, shame on you, if you fool me you can't get fooled again. And looking impressed with himself when he completed a full sentence that he thought was witty. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people and neither do we. We don't conduct business where people don't shop. George W. Bush is frequently labeled by environmental advocacy groups and historians as one of the worst environmental presidents in U.S. history due to his administration's systematic efforts to weaken federal regulations, prioritize fossil fuel extraction, and reject international climate agreements. While his administration defended its policies as market friendly and balanced, critics documented over 400 major environmental rollbacks during his two terms. He disguised harmful bills in pleasant wording, such as clear skies and healthy forests, when in fact the bill was created to do the exact opposite of what they sounded like. The clear skies initiative allowed power plants to emit more mercury, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide than previously permitted, while the healthy forests initiative used wildfire prevention as an excuse to exempt commercial logging projects from rigorous federal environmental reviews. With one minuscule exception, Bush Jr. neglected to create any national monuments on land. That tiny exception was the half-acre African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City. He did, however, create a few national monuments far out in the oceans. His father, George H.W. Bush, never created any national monuments at all. A priority of George W.'s administration was weakening public land protections. The administration rescinded the Clinton-era roadless rule, which had protected nearly 60 million acres of national forest land from logging and road construction. The administration altered rule interpretations so that the massive industrial livestock operations could bypass Standard Clean Water Act oversight, worsening runoff pollution. Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, owned millions of dollars of stock in oil companies and Halliburton, an oil service company, so it's no surprise that he wanted to weaken protections and help extraction companies expand on public lands. Shortly after taking office, President Bush withdrew U.S. support for the Coyote Protocol, a major international treaty designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, arguing that it would harm the U.S. economy. Bush reneged on a 2000 campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, bowing to pressure from the energy industry. Federal agencies under his administration, including the EPA and NASA, were accused of editing, censoring, or burying scientific reports that highlighted the severity of climate change. Critics frequently pointed out that the administration staffed top regulatory positions at the EPA and the Department of the Interior with former lobbyists from the coal, timber, and oil industries. Led by Vice President Dick Cheney's National Energy Policy Development Group, the administration aggressively pushed to open protected public lands, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, to oil and gas drilling. Only one president has a worse environmental record than George W. Bush. Can you guess who that is? The second best environmental president of all time is Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter was a true lover of the outdoors like few other presidents. A small-town country boy, he grew up hunting small game and fishing. As he grew older, his passion and love for the outdoors only strengthened, and he became a skilled canoeist and wilderness traveler, as well as an avid fly fisherman, whitewater rafter, hiker, and camper. Carter protected over 157 million acres of public land, famously securing wilderness status for vast areas of Alaska. He vetoed destructive dam projects such as the Spruill Bluff Dam on Georgia's Flint River to preserve free-flowing waterways, expanded the National Wild and Scenic River System, and signed the Superfund Law to clean up toxic waste. Carter promoted clean energy by installing solar panels on the White House in 1979. He established or expanded 16 National Wildlife Refuges, safeguarding crucial habitats for native wildlife, and tripled the size of the National Wilderness Preservation System by setting aside roughly 57 million acres of pristine wilderness. President Jimmy Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act on December 2, 1980. This landmark law protected over 100 million acres of federal land in Alaska, doubling the size of the National Park System, and marking the largest single expansion of protected public lands in U.S. history. He protected traditional rural and Alaska native subsistence hunting and fishing rights on those public lands. Overall, Jimmy Carter added 39 official public units to the National Park Service during his single term. Carter did more for environmental preservation than any other president except for one. Securing the title of worst environmental president in American history is Donald John Trump. Donald Trump is, hands down, the worst environmental president of all time. There simply isn't enough time to tell you all the detrimental things he's done so far. Trump has set about on a course to dismantle or destroy just about all the gains regarding nature and the environment created by past presidents. He has done more to annihilate America's natural heritage than any other president in history. This is a man who has no respect for the natural world, or a world to be inherited by his grandchildren. There is no president who more viciously attacks and destroys nature and the environment, wilderness and the animals that live in it. He's not only never used the Antiquities Act to create new national monuments, but he's the only president in history to significantly shrink the size of existing national monuments. He's given a green light to polluters and repealed protections to endangered species and national parks. Trump is famous for denial of climate change. He's called it a hoax. He has changed language in the Endangered Species Act, which essentially guts its ability to protect the animals, has shrunk Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to almost nothing, reducing them by 90%, the biggest single rollback of land protections in American history. Trump has given a green light to industry and polluters to foul the waterways and pollute the air, and has eagerly provided avenues to exploitative industries to access and industrialize formerly protected public lands. He is currently ordering the destruction of what many consider the wildest region in Texas, Big Bend National Park. For what he calls border security. Trump has already waived all environmental safeguards and bulldozed and blasted with dynamite wide swaths through national monuments such as Organ Pipe in Arizona and wildlife refuges and formerly protected wilderness areas, in addition to sacred Native American sites. And now bulldozers are scraping away pristine wilderness in Texas with the intention of not only gouging a wide strip along the US-Mexico border, but also digging and blasting a network of access roads as well. Trump's administration has extensively unprotected and leased many millions of acres of public land for resource extraction, oil and gas drilling, mining, and timber. He is eager to auction off vast tracts of public lands to the highest bidder, and open up formerly protected lands, such as the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, to oil drilling. Trump signed a congressional resolution overturning a 20-year federal mining ban on roughly 350 square miles of the Superior National Forest near Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, eliminating protections in order to clear a path for a proposed copper-nickel mining project to proceed. The Trump administration has reversed actions taken by the Biden administration to address climate change, overturning 14 environment-related executive orders issued by the Biden administration. Those include policies that preserved forests, promoted environmental research, encouraged green investments in low-income areas, coordinated climate change policies across agencies, and more. Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, which is a concerted effort by nearly 200 countries to address climate change. It could also potentially undo a large portion of the reductions in carbon emissions that have already been achieved. The National Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its employees since the start of Trump's second term, according to the New York Times. Trump has also recommended cutting the National Park Service budget by one-third. Trump is eager to give away natural resources to fossil fuel companies, bypassing important environmental rules to offer them even more of our public lands at taxpayer-subsidized rates. And he wants to expand offshore drilling by promoting new offshore projects. Trump wants to freeze federal rulemaking to endanger the new restrictions on PFAs, the forever chemicals in our water supply, as well as the methane emissions fee that charges oil and gas companies for the damage caused by their destructive methane pollution. Trump has abused his emergency powers by declaring a national energy emergency in order to prop up a declining coal industry, another giveaway to the fossil fuel companies. Trump also wants to overturn recent emissions standards, making cars dirtier. The Trump administration is promoting oil drilling in the ocean and expanding liquefied natural gas exports, despite the findings of a recent government report that found that such an expansion would worsen pollution, raise prices, and help lock the world into a future of dirty energy. In a mad rush to open public lands to drilling and mining, Trump is selling out public lands at a shocking rate. Through December 2018, Trump had offered over 98 million acres of land and water for oil development – that's an area larger than the state of Montana – and stripped protections for 153.3 million acres of land and water – that's an area larger than California and Washington combined. One of Trump's signature anti-conservation efforts has been reducing the scope of the Clean Water Act in order to remove protections from more than half of U.S. wetlands. The Trump administration has obstructed efforts that would curb ocean trash like plastics and help marine life. They've also pushed policies that allow deafening underwater seismic tests that harm thousands of dolphins and whales, sometimes distorting their navigation or rupturing their eardrums. As I was editing this video, I came across Trump's latest plan of environmental sabotage to rescind the roadless rule created by Clinton so that the timber industry can bulldoze roads into remote areas in order to cut down the last untouched forests. Most of that is in the Tongass of Alaska, the largest remaining intact temperate rainforest left on Earth, and many trees there are older than the country itself, some thousands of years old. These are trees that belong to all people on public land that belongs to all people. In Donald Trump's world, there is nothing in the natural world that is sacred. So Donald Trump is the worst environmental president of all time. But who's the best? And now, drumroll please, America's best environmental president is Theodore Roosevelt. He is, far and away, the best environmental president of all time. He did more to preserve America's natural landscapes and the wildlife in them than anyone else. T.R. was a real man, a man's man, a president of the people, and a champion of the environment. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Rough Riders, went on hunting safaris in Africa, and was an Amazon explorer who went down what was called the River of Doubt and nearly died there. He was a devout hunter, and his love of nature and the ensuing passion he felt for preserving it helped formulate his ideology and actions to protect it. He would become the greatest conservationist president who ever lived. He was a visionary who knew that the rapid industrial and exploitative expansion, if left unchecked, would have severe consequences, and the nature and animals he loved would be all but eliminated. He'd seen the bison go from 30 million animals to becoming nearly extinct in his lifetime. He knew he needed to do something big and bold. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive Republican by his own definition, promoted the passage through Congress of the Antiquities Act, permitting him and future presidents to utilize their executive powers to create or expand national monuments, preventing the mining, drilling, or logging of wide swaths of land in America, and preserve those areas of natural beauty for future generations to enjoy. He established 18 national monuments using his authority under the Antiquities Act. He was the first U.S. president to use this power, starting with Devil's Tower in Wyoming. He created numerous national monuments such as Grand Canyon, as well as protecting historic landmarks, prehistoric structures, and objects of scientific interest. He doubled the amount of national parks. Theodore Roosevelt created the United States Forest Service, established 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, 4 national game preserves, 5 national parks, and 18 national monuments by enabling the Antiquities Act. He designated approximately 230 million acres of land as public property during his presidency, and created the first bird reservation. In total, he created 51 bird reservations, which laid the groundwork for what would later become National Wildlife Refuges. As an adult, Roosevelt did not hunt just for the sake of killing, and was against the senseless slaughter of animals. During one long, unproductive bear hunt in Mississippi, his guide tracked a bear and tied it to a tree so that the president could at least say he shot something. But Roosevelt refused to shoot the injured old bear, a scene that political cartoonist Clifford Berryman famously illustrated. After the cartoon appeared, a shopkeeper decided to call his toy bears Teddy's Bears and one of the most popular toys in history of this nation was born. Roosevelt was an adventurer extraordinaire. In 1914, he traveled through British East Africa and Sudan with his son Kermit, collecting over 11,000 animal specimens for the Smithsonian Institution. He also partnered with Brazilian explorer Candido Rondon to map an unknown river, the Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt, in the Amazon Basin. There, Roosevelt contracted severe malaria and an infected leg wound, nearly dying in the jungle. Teddy Roosevelt feared nothing and lived life fully. If not for TR, most of the beautiful natural areas you see today in the United States would likely be massive housing subdivisions, second home sites, industrial parks, and the like, with a network of roads and freeways. The next time you go to a secluded place in a national forest or a national monument, you can thank TR for it being there at all. If Teddy were alive today and Donald Trump talked smack to him, TR would likely beat the pulp out of him. After an assassination attempt in 1912, three years after TR's presidency had ended, he carried a bullet lodged in his chest for the rest of his life. Though Teddy Roosevelt is gone, his legacy, barring attempts by presidents current and future to destroy it, will remain for all the world to enjoy. So there you have it, the top ten best and worst environmental presidents of all time. Do you agree with the list? Are there others you would place on that list? Let me know in the comments.