T.R. Roosevelt is everywhere this week. And as always, it is very appropriate.

PBS is running Ken Burns powerful series this week, “The National Parks, America’s Best Idea.” Historian Douglas Brinkley’s groundbreaking biography “Wilderness Warrior,” came out earlier this year. National Book Award winning author Timothy Egan of Seattle’s latest book “The Big Burn,” about the 1910 fires and the fight between Roosevelt and Idaho Sen. Weldon Heyburn, comes out in a few weeks.

Even Fox News star Glenn Beck has gotten into the act calling Roosevelt a "weird progressive," in an interview with CBS News Anchor Katie Couric.

The Burns series last night included an excellent portrait of Roosevelt, who, as much as any single man laid the foundation for conservation and preservation in America.

He was friends, colleagues and fellow traveler with the giants of 19th Century conservation, John Muir, Gifford Pinchot and George Bird Grinnell whose thoughts and lobbying contributed to Roosevelt’s remarkable legacy. But it was Roosevelt himself who saw how preserving the nation’s beautiful places, wildlife and natural bounty was an essential and largely unrecognized cornerstone of the nation’s democracy.

Just as Lincoln used his Gettysburg address as a transcendental speech to expand the meaning of American liberty and justice, Roosevelt made protecting nature an integral part of the American experience.

His personal legacy remains remarkable: Five national parks, 51 national wildlife refuges, 18 national monuments and 100 million acres of national forest. But it is his intellectual legacy that reaches into our lives today as well.

Born of money and power, Roosevelt came to the view that the most powerful forces in American society, wealth and capitalism had to be checked by government. A Republican, he saw how power corrupted politicians of all persuasions in the New York Legislature.

His conservation crusade put him up against the railroads, the Copper Kings and others who saw the American landscape as theirs for the picking. He eventually stared down John D Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan by crushing the monopolies that eventually come from unfettered capitalism and built a model for when government intervention was necessary in a society that values capitalism and liberty as much as democracy.

A century later, George Bush seemed an unlikely candidate to follow in Roosevelt’s government intervention path. But in the waning days of his presidency Bush, an admirer of Roosevelt’s, authorized the largest government takeovers of banks and businesses in history.

The jury is still out but an article by reporter James B. Stewart, “Eight Days” shows how free market conservatives came to the realization they had to act. They well may have saved the economy as JP Morgan himself was able to do in the Panic of 1907.

Deciding where that line between government and private power is a continuing challenge that underlies the environmental challenge of this generation, human-caused climate change. It comes from a market failure as large as or larger than Roosevelt encountered with the monopolies of the Gilded Age.

But it well may need the power of markets to quickly address. Boise State University Political scientist John Freemuth suggested that the crusade on climate change, which he himself is still not fully convinced is the crisis the scientific community presents, may be this generation’s transcendental conservation movement.

But who will be this generation’s Roosevelt? Whoever it is, man or woman, it will be as Roosevelt said, “the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."