The Natural West by Dan Flores

The Natural West Reviews

• 
  Richard Reese

  Dan Flores is an environmental historian. His book, The Natural West, focuses on the region of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. This ecosystem has been radically changed in the last 300 years, and a number of these changes have resulted in irreversible degradation. Flores has a misty vision of restoring the West, and his work explores issues that contributed to ecological imbalances. We can’t address challenges that we don’t understand.
  
  At the time Flores was writing, many green thinkers were indulging in a fantasy that imagined an environmental Golden Age, when the continent had no scars from human activities. Native Americans lived so lightly that they left almost no footprints. Flores was among the scholars who questioned the fantasy. What happened to the mammoths, mastodons, and camels? Where are the wooly rhinos and saber-toothed cats?
  
  He noted that many ecosystems were altered by the Indian practice of periodic burns to control the growth of brush, and to maintain grassland habitat that was ideal for bison. In The Ecological Indian, Shepard Krech wrote that some of these fires grew too large and killed entire herds of animals. Flores didn’t mention the “
  buffalo jumps,” where herds of bison were driven off the edge of cliffs. Of course, far more impact was caused by the technologically advanced settlers. Never before, in North America, have a group of humans wrecked so much, so quickly.
  
  Obviously, we would not be where we are today if hunter-gatherers possessed a level of ecological knowledge that a small herd of ecology experts now have (and the vast herd of consumers really need). If our wild ancestors had possessed wizardly understanding, then pockets of humans would not have reduced carrying capacity via overhunting, leading to the catastrophe of agriculture, and the resulting population explosion.
  
  Some Western Indians were bison hunters for more than 8,000 years. Bison can zip along at 35 miles per hour (56 km/h). On the wide-open prairie, sneaking up on a herd unseen, unheard, and unsmelled, required remarkable stalking skills. Then, Spaniards brought domesticated horses to the New World. Over the next 200 years (1680–1880), more than thirty Indian groups adapted horse-propelled bison hunting, which made it much easier to get lots of meat. This very unusual era was recorded by white painters, and it has become a common perception of traditional Native American life.
  
  Plains Indians imagined that there were infinite bison, it was impossible to deplete their numbers. Herds had been boosted by the cooler wetter climate of the Little Ice Age (1550–1850). Then, the shift to a warmer dryer trend reduced vegetation growth, which reduced carrying capacity for bison. Meanwhile, the horse population exploded, and horses competed with bison for the same vegetation. Among the many unwelcome gifts brought by settlers were bovine diseases like anthrax.
  
  The Gold Rush migration of 1849 brought cholera, which triggered a diarrhea rush, killing many natives. By 1850, there were many reports of starving Indians. Comanches were eating their horses. Competition for bison and horses spurred tribal warfare between 1825 and 1850. Tribe raided tribe to snatch horses. (See Paul Shepard’s book,
  The Others, for an excellent discussion of the many problems resulting from animal domestication.)
  
  So, it turns out that bison herds were not infinite, and that horse-propelled hunting very likely did not have a rosy future, even if whites had stayed out of the West. The experiment was cut short by industrial bison hunting, which accelerated after the Civil War ended in 1865. It rapidly brought the species close to extinction.
  
  I learned a lot from the chapter on the settlement of Utah, which got little notice in my history textbooks. In the early years, Mormon society was strikingly un-American. Rights to water and forests could not be privately owned by individuals. They belonged to the entire community. Joseph Smith believed that animals had souls, as did the Earth. Farms were limited to 20 acres (8 ha) to discourage the emergence of wealth inequality.
  
  Unfortunately, their impact on the ecosystem was similar to American communities everywhere. Population quickly grew. Most of the forests around Salt Lake City were gone in just ten years, and not reseeded. Grassland was overgrazed. War was declared on “wasters and destroyers” (wild predators). When the transcontinental railroad was completed, many non-Mormons moved into Utah, accelerating the turbulence by increasing cultural diversity and economic competition.
  
  In 1896, when Utah was admitted as a state, they were required to Americanize. Polygamy was banned. Firewalls were erected to separate church and state. Utah leaped onto the free market bandwagon, and grew like crazy. Explosive growth was not kind to the ecosystem. Everyone agreed that overgrazing was dumb, but everyone disagreed on which animals were the problem (not mine!).
  
  Americans brought many exotic weeds to the West, causing immense irreversible damage. Cheatgrass displaced native vegetation across large areas. It created biological wastelands, since cattle and wild grazers would not touch it. Cheatgrass was highly flammable. After a fire, exposed soil was vulnerable to erosion and gullying. When it rained, the runoff of water was rapid, leading to sudden floods. By 1930, the risk of repeated floods forced the abandonment of thirteen Utah communities. In the 1930s, four Utah valleys that were once lush grasslands became barren dust bowls.
  
  Flores was raised in a Mormon household. He laments that this culture (like most Americans) perceives humankind to be the crown of creation. The Earth is merely a funky waiting room on the journey to paradise, and if we trash it, it doesn’t matter. Many in Utah, and other Western states, want federal lands returned to the states, so that resources can be profitably extracted, as quickly as possible, without the annoying restrictions of regulations (sorry kids). The culture is conservative, and environmentalists are not warmly welcomed. Growth is the god-word.
  
  Flores circles the word “animalness,” and suggests that it might aid the healing process. Behaving like the masters of the world has been very harmful to the planet. What might happen if we came to perceive humans as one animal among many, in a circle of equals? Many of the vital lessons in life are learned from mistakes. Flores serves readers a lavish banquet of eco-booboos. The West has been dying for 200 years. What should we do? What does “restore” mean? Is it possible? Are we willing to bury industrial civilization and get a life?
  
  
• 
  Rob Bauer

  This is an extended review of this excellent, thought-provoking book about the American West.
  
  Have Americans romanticized any area of the country to the extent of the American West? From movies to music to novels, the realities of the West have become so obscured, it’s hard to differentiate fact from fiction. Indeed, the West is such a diverse place that what is fact in one area may be fiction in another. Historian Dan Flores recognizes this characteristic in his book The Natural West. It is a series of ten essays concerning various aspects of the Western experience. In it, Flores advocates a bioregional approach to the study of the West that considers both ideological and environmental factors in the history of the West.
  
  Flores sets the stage by defining and describing what environmental history entails, stating that “at base, history ought to be the study of the ecological relationship between humans and the natural world,” (11-12) and then goes on to describe his personal take on what environmental history should include. Though he does not dismiss threads in environmental history such as the study of how people involved in the capitalist economy have inured the natural world, Flores sees more to the story. He believes in extending the analysis to include the evolutionary history of humanity. Like a mathematician exploring fractal geometry, Flores sees patterns across time and space amongst the seeming chaos of how humans have manipulated the natural world over millennia. He concludes that “human environmental history is manifestly not a history of a once-godlike creature gone over the edge of sanity, but the story of a wildly successful species that has been doing the same things, for the same reasons, for 3 million years.” (27)
  
  In keeping with the bioregional approach to studying history, The Natural West includes three essays that describe events set in time and place. The first is a description of Red River ecology in 1806, the second a study of bison populations on the Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850, and there is also a look at the environmental history of Mormon Utah. The description of Red River ecology in 1806 comes from the work of naturalist Peter Custis, who accompanied the exploring party sent up the Red by Thomas Jefferson in 1806. The notes taken by Custis are helpful in establishing a baseline ecology (for restoration purposes) for the region before white settlement altered the landscape. However, taking the long-term view of ecology that Flores advocates, this idea of a baseline is problematic. It assumes that conditions were static prior to 1806, which they clearly were not. The Great Raft of the Red River, formed around 1200, had modified the surrounding lands for roughly 600 years by the time Custis observed it. Custis also noted abandoned Caddo Indian villages, depopulated mainly due to Old World contagious diseases prior to his arrival. Later interpretations of field notes from the expedition also indicate that Native Americans had modified the landscape over time by manipulating plant growth, especially by using fire.
  
  The story of the bison of the Great Plains demonstrates that several factors caused the near-extinction of the bison in the 1880s. Based on his research, Flores believes that the Southern Plains had an average carrying capacity of roughly 8.2 million bison; the Great Plains in total, 28-30 million. Over the course of the 1800s, and greatly accelerating after 1850, the number of bison declined. Occasional drought, imported livestock diseases, competition for grazing land, and human (both Indian and white American) hunting all played a role in the decline. The story of the decline of the bison is unique to a time and place, a theme also present in the story of Mormons Utah. Like the bison hunters on the Great Plains, their efforts to profit from nature’s abundance produced negative long term environmental effects, in this case ecological damage and natural resource depletion. Some of the results were flooding, changing plant distributions, and desertification.
  
  In addition to close consideration of specific topics like Red River ecology, Flores also devotes two chapters to an entire region, the Rocky Mountains. He takes issue with the fact that few writers about the West consider mountains a primary environmental, or cultural, influence. Instead, most follow John Wesley Powell, Walter Prescott Webb, and Wallace Stegner in seeing aridity as primary. Flores makes his case for mountains by stating:
  
  But far more than their mining history, their logging history, or their status as sublime landforms or recreational destinations, the Mountain West’s salient contributions to Western history are the core national forest public lands that today define the region as unique in the United States. That fact alone is what makes the aridlands thesis as a stand-alone environmental explanation for the West come up so short. (121)
  
  These chapters also discuss how humans have manipulated mountains in the West. Flores mentions the effects of erosion in the Southern Rockies, and comes down especially hard on historic developments in his home state, Montana, when he says
  
  the state slogan (“Oro y plata”) and nickname (“Treasure State”) still convey in overt terms its origin as a plunder colony for capitalism – or that Montanans are today precariously perched on top of frighteningly polluted rivers, sediment-laden streams, and mountain slopes branded with clearcuts. (159)
  
  The final two chapters of The Natural West look ahead to the future of the Great Plains and restoration in the West. The Western Plains convey an important lesson for the future of development. This region, more vividly than any other, demonstrates that “the wholesale assault on nature that modern, industrial, global-market living implies simply is not sustainable in every environment.” (167) What changes are in order? Flores is leery of technology as a panacea for all potential problems. He prefers greater concentration in urban areas with lighter agricultural and grazing use of the Plains, along with more publicly owned land. As for restoration, Flores recognizes that the issues are legion. He further elaborates on the problems inherent in trying to establish a baseline for restoration. One interesting, and likely correct, assertion is that the animal populations observed when Europeans and Americans first encountered the Great Plains may have been unusually large because the American Indians who hunted them had declined in population due to Old World contagious disease epidemics. Any vision of restoration must account for this possibility.
  
  The great strength of The Natural West is the range of ideas considered. Since it is a collection of essays, Flores has had the opportunity to revise and refine his ideas with continued thought and research. This fact gives The Natural West a coherence of argument that is sometimes lacking in other collections. In addition, many of the ideas presented are both interesting and thought provoking. As an example, I continue to come back to the problems in establishing baseline ecologies for any region when history is never static. In addition, there are several photographs that give visual representation to some of the places Flores writes about. One caveat for readers of The Natural West is that Flores often refers to the work of social scientists and their arguments. Readers not generally familiar with this body of work may find some of the arguments difficult to follow.
  
  Still, if you want to stretch your brain and think about the American West in ways you’ve probably never considered, this is a book you should not pass up. Flores has a unique writing style—it is certainly not the leaden prose of an academic.
• 
  Sarah

  recommended by betsy