The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (review)

Over the past decade, Dan Flores has emerged as one of the leading historians of North America's environment. For much of his impressive career, Flores's preferred genre has been the essay rather than the monograph. His latest book, The Natural West, proves no exception to this trend. Despite an appearance that initially suggests a work with a single, unified narrative, The Natural West is, in fact, an anthology of ten of Flores's essays—the majority of them previously published—all illuminating various facets of the environmental history of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions of the American West. In an effort to make these pieces add up to a greater whole, Flores has not only revised some essays but has also added an introduction that portrays the book's various chapters as a collective exploration of the "evolutionarily derived 'human nature' that influences the way we—allof us—see and interact with the flux we call the natural world" (p. 5).

The unusualness—indeed, almost contrariness—of this goal, given the current academic fascination with cultural difference, conveys a great deal about what has long made Flores's essays such thought-provoking reading. Among the leading environmental historians of North America, Flores stands out as the one most comfortable in applying concepts from the biological sciences directly to the study of history. Upon occasion, such importations succeed spectacularly. Flores's celebrated article on the collapse of the buffalo population on the southern Great Plains in the first half of the nineteenth century—reprinted here with a new foreword as "Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy Redux"—brilliantly used scientific studies of grazing capacity, imported disease, and climate shifts to complicate the accepted story of the buffalo's decline. It has justifiably become a classic text in American environmental history and has inspired other scholars to reexamine the histories of the buffalo and of Indian environmental practices.

Not all of Flores's efforts to combine biological science with history, however, are so completely realized. Several of the essays included in The Natural West function more as thought pieces that gesture towards provocative new territory for historians, but never convey readers into this promised land. In an essay entitled "Nature's Children," for example, Flores issues a bold call for folding sociobiology into historical analysis, while in an essay titled "Place," he presents his case for "bioregional history." Both articles raise suggestive new ways of thinking about the past, but their rather abstract and proscriptive character leaves the reader with multiple unanswered questions. How does one move between the "bio-region" to incorporate other frames of historical analysis such as the nation-state or to study transnational processes? In what, if any, ways does "bio-region" differ from other ways of thinking about place in environmental history? And how is one to write a convincing history of the way in which the "genius and allure—and danger—of frontier economic culture . . . were all about releasing the selfish gene in human nature" (p. 26)?

Flores's essays succeed best when they move beyond such grand theorizing and anchor themselves in time and space. Much like Flores's essay on the buffalo, the other outstanding chapters in The Natural West offer close-grained studies of specific ecosystems. "Zion in Eden" examines the Mormon relationship with the land in Utah, demonstrating both the convergences and divergences in land-use practices between Mormons and their non-Mormon neighbors. Another comparative study, "The Rocky Mountain West," analyzes the different ways that Chicanos, Mormons, and "Anglos" faced the challenge of settling mountainous environments. None of these pieces issue clarion calls for new approaches to history or stake aggressive claims as to the import of human nature in the study of the past. However, their...