Their colonization of our cities, from the small burgs... to the biggest, loudest, and most frenetic of our metropolises, has become the wildlife sto… - Dan Flores

Whose natural West has this been all along? Is it evolution's superorganism? Or did the United States inherit a natural stage actually shaped by the very long human inhabitation? ...Why do places like Hispanic New Mexico, Mormon Utah, and Montana seem so different when nature would seem so similar in all three? Or are they actually all that different? ...[I]s there something else more universal that our richly layered cultures disguise, perhaps something as essential as an evolutionarily derived "human nature" that influences the way that we—all of us—see and interact with the flux we call the natural world?

[T]he human past... belongs not only to (say) the Blackfeet or the Mormons, but to all of us. ...[W]e humans cannot be considered as separate from the earth of our evolution. We, too, are "natural."

[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.