Fromer President Teddy Roosevelt in 1907 coined the blueprint on how Republicans (and Democrats) should be working together to protect our open spaces, encouraging biodiversity and keeping our water and air clean

THE CONSERVATION OF  NATURAL RESOURCES FROM THEODORE  ROOSEVELT'S SEVENTH  ANNUAL MESSAGE TO CONGRESS  DEC. 3 1907 THE PRESIDENT WHO  SET ASIDE MORE PARKLAND THAN ANY OTHER  PRESIDENT IN U.S. HISTORY To the Senate and House of Representatives: .The conservation of our natural resources and their  proper use constitute  the fundamental problem  which underlies almost every other problem of our  national life. . ..As a nation  we not only enjoy a  wonderful measure of present prosperity but if this  prosperity is used aright it is  an earnest of future  success such as no other nation will have. The reward  of foresight for this nation  is great and easily  foretold. But there must be the look ahead, there must  be a realization of the fact  that to waste, to  destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the  land instead of using it so  as to increase its  usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our  children the very prosperity which we ought  by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. For the last few years, through several agencies, the  government has been endeavoring to get our people  to look ahead and to substitute a planned and orderly development of our  resources in place of a haphazard striving for immediate profit. Our great river systems should be developed as national water  highways, the Mississippi, with its tributaries, standing  first in importance,  and the Columbia second,  although there are many others of importance on the  Pacific, the Atlantic,  and the Gulf slopes. The National Government should undertake this work, and I hope a beginning will be made in the present Congress; and the greatest of all our rivers, the Mississippi,  should receive special attention. Optimism is a good characteristic, but if carried to an excess  it becomes foolishness.  We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible;  this is  not so. The mineral wealth of the country,  the coal, iron, oil, gas, and the like, does not reproduce itself, and therefore is certain to be exhausted  ultimately; and wastefulness in dealing with it today means  that our descendants will feel the exhaustion  a generation or two before they otherwise would.  But there  are certain other  forms of waste which could  be entirely stopped-the waste of soil by washing,  for instance,  which is among the most dangerous of all wastes now in progress in the United States, is easily preventible, so that this  present enormous loss of fertility is entirely unnecessary. The preservation or replacement of the forests is one of the  most important means  of preventing this loss.  We have made a beginning in forest preservation, but . . . so rapid has been the rate  of exhaustion of timber in the United States in the past, and so  rapidly is the  remainder being exhausted,  that the country is unquestionably on the verge  of a timber  famine which will be felt in every household in the land. . . . The  present annual consumption of lumber is certainly three times as great as the annual  growth; and if the consumption and growth continue unchanged, practically  all our lumber will be exhausted in another  generation, while long before the limit to complete exhaustion is reached the  growing scarcity will make itself felt in many blighting ways upon our national welfare. About twenty per cent of our forested territory  is now reserved  in national forests,  but these do not  include the most valuable timberlands, and in any  event the  proportion is too small to expect that the reserves can accomplish more than a mitigation of the trouble which is ahead for the  nation. . . . We should acquire in the Appalachian and White Mountain regions  all the forest-lands  that it is possible to acquire for the use of the nation. These lands,  because they form a national asset, are as emphatically  national as the rivers which they feed, and which  flow through so many States before they reach the ocean. .