Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
May 2002
Abstract
Prolific environmental historian Dan Flores has gathered together and revised many of his previously-published short works in The Natural West. Two ideas link the essays together: genetic evolution that has produced ingrained, even instinctive, environmental behaviors in humans; and the West's distinctiveness, deriving not from aridity but from the ecological (and historical) interrelationships of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains.
Drawing from the fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, Flores argues that humans are revolutionarily adapted to transform the environment in order to perpetuate the species. But, he admits, "I can't imagine that many historians are going to be willing any time soon to apply evolutionary interpretations to the history of events and the actions of individuals. I would not be comfortable doing so myself. Evolutionary insights are too blunt an instrument for such work." Although Flores does use evolutionary psychology throughout the book, he never loses sight of culture. For example, he uses cultural difference to explain the varying relationships the people of New Mexico, Utah (particularly Mormons), and Montana have forged with Rocky Mountain ecosystems. Flores is a provocative thinker, and his assertions about human animalness certainly rattle conventional wisdom about environmental history. In the end, though, he succeeds best when he works in the safer terrain of empirical history and ecology.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2 (Spring 2002). Published by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Copyright © 2000 Center for Great Plains Studies. Used by permission.