Dan Flores Quotes

I've spent most of the last few days looking at information to help me reimagine... a history... that digs into the stratum below the ones that carry wars or political affairs... many of the questions are new. ...they have to do with our interaction with our ecological landscape, with what we might call the "natural West," as both idea in the mind and as tangible rock, grass, and flesh...

Their colonization of our cities, from the small burgs... to the biggest, loudest, and most frenetic of our metropolises, has become the wildlife story of our time. It deserves some explanation.

Optimal Foraging Strategy models... have asserted that what appears to be "conservation" among hunting peoples was (and is) actually a by-product of attempting to maximize hunting efficiency and use of time. Thus hunter-gatherers ignored depleted habitats and placed taboos on certain species not to achieve conservation but in search of maximum yield for minimum effort. As wildlife populations shrank, this hypothesis argues, hunters actually hunted more, and they range farther afield.

[M]any of us came... through a tradition in Western writing that harkens back to ... ... and James Malin (who pioneered in systematic ecological history). All these pioneers in the field wrote between the 1890s and the 1950s. Brilliant contemporary writers like and Richard White may have made environmental history "the coolest history around"... but they didn't invent it. ...For many writers in the twentieth century, from Webb to the 1937 Committee on the Future of the Great Plains to Frank and Deborah Popper, the Great Plains are the ultimate proving ground of environmentalism's doomsday predictions for the Modernist experiment in a massively altered landscape.