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?
Flores, Dan, The
Natural West — Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains,
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2001.
3 comments:
For an understanding of the (Mormon) mindset of those who are seeking to return western lands from the federal public domain to the states and private parties, Google: "The New Anti-Federalists: The Wellspring of the Bundy Sagebrush Insurrection".
Hi Riversong,
You did a great job on the essay, The New Anti-Federalists.
So far, I haven't been able to discover if all of the occupiers were LDS. Do you know?
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