American Serengeti





Once upon a time, the Great Plains of the western U.S. resembled the Serengeti of Africa, a vast prairie inhabited by abundant wildlife.  Each year, during the wet season, grasslands produce far more new biomass than forests do, per unit of land.  The greenery converts sunlight into carbohydrates, nutrients necessary for the existence of animal life in the ecosystem.  Thus, the usually sunny plains are a vast array of solar collectors that generate food for the vast array of animal life.  Bison meat is highly concentrated solar energy.

Dan Flores is an environmental historian, and he specializes in Big History, which focuses on entire ecosystems, and regards humans as just one group of the many actors on the stage.  Each species of plant and animal plays a role in the living drama.  In this book, American Serengeti, Flores described the drama of the Great Plains from a perspective that spanned millions of years, going back long before humans.  It highlights the sagas of six species. 

The notion of “climax state” asserts that ecosystems can achieve enduring balance and stability.  Flores doesn’t believe in climax states.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors succeeded in existing for a very long time in a low impact manner.  The fact that agriculture emerged independently in multiple locations indicates that the process could sometimes wobble out of balance, and whirl into ecological hurricanes.  We gradually expanded into new ecosystems, improved hunting methods, grew in numbers, and began bumping into limits.

Before Siberian hunters discovered America, the Great Plains were home to many species of large mammals, none of which had evolved adaptations for living near packs of aggressive primates with spears, dogs, and fire.  Between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, 32 genera and at least 50 species went extinct.  Losers included camels, mammoths, giant ground sloths, horses, steppe lions, dire wolves, long-toothed cats, long-legged hyenas, giant long-horned bison, and many others.  In addition to overhunting, it’s likely that intense climate change also played a role in the surge of megafauna extinctions. 

Eventually, the species that escaped extinction managed to adapt to the humans, and share the plains for several thousand years.  Then, two centuries ago, powerful primate hurricanes whirled in from Europe and launched a devastating war on the Great Plains ecosystem.  Flores says that today, “you feel as if you’re standing at the end of an immense line of dominos…” 

Pronghorn antelopes evolved from ancestors that emerged 25 million years ago.  They are the fastest mammals on the plains.  Males can zoom along at 55 mph (88 km/h), and females at 65 to 70 mph (104 to 112 km/h).  Pronghorns can run at 90 percent of their top speed for two miles (3.2 km).  They can easily outrun today’s wolves and coyotes, only their fawns are vulnerable to predation.

Pronghorns evolved traits to evade a number of speedy predators, all of which blinked out at least 10,000 years ago.  They are very well adapted to a reality that no longer exists.  Unfortunately, they are unable to leap fences, a fact that has benefitted their exterminators.  By 1900, they had declined from at least 15 million to 13,000.  Today, there are 700,000.

The coyote story is fascinating.  Indians had great respect for them.  Coyotes were often tricksters in their folktales — exceptionally clever, but their cleverness often backfired.  Along with wolves and jackals, coyotes evolved in America five million years ago.  By one million years ago, some wolves and jackals migrated west into Eurasia.  Gray wolves returned to America 20,000 years ago, and began bumping into coyotes, leading to friction.  Evolution solved this problem by making wolves larger, and coyotes smaller, adjusting them for different niches.

American settlers hated coyotes, leading to decades of extermination campaigns.  By inserting strychnine pellets into rotting carcasses, one lad could kill 350 coyotes in ten days — far easier than shooting them.  Many millions have been killed, and the U.S. continues to kill 500,000 every year.  Efforts at extermination almost always backfire.  Apparently it’s impossible to permanently eliminate them.

Coyotes, like humans, have fission-fusion families — they sometimes work in packs, and other times as individuals.  This versatility promoted their survival.  Wolves are solely pack hunters, an unfortunate limitation.  Coyotes are fertile at one year old, and their average litters have 5.7 pups.  But when food is abundant, or their numbers are dwindling, they have larger litters.  Persecution also inspires them to migrate and colonize new lands.  They now range from Alaska to Panama, in all Canadian provinces, and all U.S. states except Hawaii.  They’ve learned how to thrive in cities.

Horses, pronghorns, wolves, and coyotes originated in America.  The ancestors of horses emerged 57 million years ago.  At some point, the horse family discovered Asia, and spread to Europe and Africa.  In North America, they were extinct by 10,000 years ago.  Spanish settlers later brought them to New Mexico, where many escaped in 1680.  They fled into an ecosystem for which evolution had already fine-tuned them, and where extinction had eliminated their primary predators.  Paradise!

Given these conditions, they were tremendously successful.  One observer noted, “As far as the eye could extend, nothing over the dead level prairie was visible except a dense mass of horses, and the trampling of their hooves sounded like the road of the surf on a rocky coast.”

For Indians, horses provided huge benefits — with hunting, hauling, raiding, and rustling.  They gained wealth by capturing wild horses and selling them at white trading centers.  A number of tribes abandoned agriculture, moved to the plains, and became bison hunters.  Comanches were the dominant tribe.  They were eager to trade horses for cool stuff, fully intending to steal their horses back from the palefaces at the first opportunity.

Today, wild horses baffle Americans.  They compete for forage with livestock that have market value.  Americans are unwilling to consume organic, grass fed, high protein, low fat horse meat — ordinary food in countries including Mexico, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Poland, and China.  In the 1800s, pompous Anglo-Americans sneered at the disgusting meat that only low class immigrants would eat.  Thus, a cultural taboo evolved.  Countless horses ended up in dog food cans.  Today, instead of raising native animals fine-tuned for the Great Plains, like horses and bison, we continue to raise animals fine-turned for Europe — a region having a mild, moist climate, and a blend of vegetation optimal for raising cattle and sheep.

Grizzly bears were hammered in the last two centuries.  Settlers detested big strong animals that loved having lunch dates with settlers.  Five hundred years ago, the entire western half of the U.S. was grizzly country, home to 100,000 bears.  Travelers sometimes saw 30 or 40 in a day.  By 1900, only a few hundred remained, hiding in the mountains.  Today, there are zero bears on the plains, and maybe 1,000 close to national parks.

Giant long-horned bison from Eurasia discovered America about 800,000 years ago (today’s bison are dwarfed).  Both bison and pronghorns survived the megafauna extinctions.  Since then, both have coevolved.  Bison prefer to eat grasses, which encourages the growth of plants that pronghorns like.  Pronghorns prefer flowering plants and shrubs, shifting the advantage back to grasses.  They don’t compete for the same grub.

Following the megafauna extinctions, bison had few grazing competitors or predators, so their numbers swelled to maybe 20 to 30 million (others say 60).  Once upon a time, bison ranged from northwest Canada to Florida.  Sometimes a single herd took more than a week to pass.  “The buffalo was the essence of ecological adaptation to North America, perfectly suited to the grasslands.”  They survived drastic climate changes, and 100 centuries of human hunters.  Sadly, it took less than 100 years to reduce them to 1,073 animals by 1886.  They stood in the path of progress and civilization.

Before Indians got horses, hunting was far more difficult.  Fewer bison were taken, so scarcity was not often experienced.  Hunting did not seem to diminish their numbers, and many believed that the animals magically regenerated, the dead were renewed.  “The horse cast a dark shadow over the bison herds… no Indian could see that shadow.”  Then came the crazy Americans, for whom bison were walking gold pieces, which the magic of the marketplace deposited into the piggy bank.

The ancestors of wolves, coyotes, and dogs originated in America five million years ago.  Some wolves migrated into Asia, and spread to Europe and Africa.  Following the extinction spasm, a number of large predators left the stage, leaving a huge niche for both bison and wolves.  Wolves almost acted like shepherds to herds of bison and other large grazers.  They ate maybe four of every ten bison calves.  When horses were reintroduced, yummy colts were added to the menu.

As settlers, market hunters, and sportsmen moved west, they killed lots of game.  Wolves feasted on the banquet of leftovers.  The bison extermination campaign raged from the 1860s to 1880s.  As bison were depleted, market hunters turned to elk, pronghorns, bighorn sheep, and deer.  Countless millions of animals were slaughtered.  Then, the generous settlers began raising delicious wolf chow, dimwitted critters called cattle and sheep.  Enjoying 10,000 years of fine dining, wolves may have expanded up to 1.5 million animals.  Around 1850, America declared war on wild predators.  Wolves were shot, roped, gassed, stomped, strangled, poisoned, and trapped.  By 1923, wolves had been erased from the Great Plains.

The book closes with a discussion of recent efforts to rewild the west — remove the fences, and let bison, wolves, and others return to wild freedom.  A few projects are underway, and others are being considered.  For decades, Americans have been migrating out of the plains.  The Dust Bowl of the 1930s, nuked many farms.  Then came irrigation, extracting fossil water from the Ogallala Aquifer — an adventure in water mining that’s beginning to sing its death song.  Dust is returning.  Climate change may be the settlers’ last stand.  It’s expected to make the plains hotter and drier, maybe a desert.

“Before it was de-buffaloed, de-wolved, and de-grassed, the nineteenth-century Great Plains was one of the marvels of the world,” writes Flores.  “It took 13,000 years but the one, singular charismatic megafauna that walked upright did finally succeed in vanquishing, indeed nearly obliterating, all the others and bending the plains to its will.”  His book is fascinating, easy to read, short, and sad — an illuminating and uncomfortable look in the mirror.

Flores, Dan, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2016.

See my review of Flores’ earlier book, The Natural West, HERE.  YouTube has some Flores videos.  In 2010, National Geographic released a gorgeous and informative video titled American Serengeti.

The Natural West

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.