Dan Flores: Quotes about history

Dan Flores is American historian. Explore interesting quotes on history.
Dan Flores: 38   quotes 0   likes

“But the conventional narrative is lumpy, a story that glosses what passes for quiescence to focus on "events": the appearance of Lewis and Clark and [Father Jean Pierre] DeSmut, the removal of the native Salish people, the arrival of the railroads, irrigation and logging and town-building, booms in sheep, busts in apples. Settlement, local politics, participation in the nation's wars, schemes to make money. And now the resources are tourism and real estate based on scenery and an amenity lifestyle in a mountain paradise. These seem to be what we think of as history.”

Dan Flores

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

Money , War , People , History

“[M]any of us came… through a tradition in Western writing that harkens back to 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.”

Dan Flores

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

History , Future

“I write this sitting in my hand-built adobe-style home looking out on the Bitterroot Valley… It's a place where the "Old" West and the "New" confront one another daily in often bazarre ways. …I'm sort of a New Westerner myself. Because of relatively recent inventions like solar panels, satellites, cell phones, composting toilets, and four-wheel drive vehicles, I'm able to live where no one has since the Salish had the valley. …perhaps it all just seems new because the prism through which we're accustomed to view the history of the region has only recently been polished sufficiently to gain the deep view.”

Dan Flores

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

Way , Home , History

“I actually tried to find some other analogy around the world in modern history that provided an example of any country that had killed this many animals in a short period of time of only a hundred years, and came to the conclusion that in American history between 1800 and about 1920 we engaged in the largest destruction of animal life discoverable anywhere in world history. We take out 30 million off the plains into the mountains, wiped out all the bighorn sheep that were in the bad lands and canyons of the great plains, all gone by 1906. And so it's this slaughterhouse that takes place. And it takes place, interestingly enough, at the same time that the conservation movement is creating these big game parks in Africa, in Kenya, in what becomes Tanzania, in South Africa. And yet, on our own great plains we don't do it… because the great plains becomes the part of the west that we privatize with homesteads and with ranches, and everyone who settles on the great plains basically regards all these animals as an annoyance that we need to get rid of…”

Dan Flores

"Dan Flores, Historian and Author" Part 2 (aired Oct. 14, 2017) Report from Santa Fe produced by KENW, 13:03.

Life , World , History , Mountain

“Across the history of life on Earth, animals and birds of many species have routinely colonized new country. That's enough a marker of adaptive success that biologists apply the term "cosmopolitan" to species that are especially flexible regarding… habitats… Evolving in America, the ancestors of horses spread across Asia, Europe, and Africa, where they became zebras and quaggas. Bovine evolution in Southeast Asia eventually brought bison to North America… But the range expansion of a wild animal [i. e., the coyote] for thousands of miles in every direction, often through dense settlements of humans who in recent history have been committed to that animal's eradication, is truly remarkable. A suite of factors must be involved.”

Dan Flores

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

Life , History , Bird , Success

“Like Wilson and a slew of other authors working on what was once called "sociobiology" but is now usually called "evolutionary behavior" or "evolutionary psychology," I am convinced that there is a biological and universal human nature, and that it appears manifest in the human record. The question is, how might that insight… be folded into the narratives that give our immediate history meaning and power?”

Dan Flores

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

Behavior , History , Question , Nature

“I've spent most of the last few days looking at information to help me reimagine… a history… that digs into the stratum below the ones that carry wars or political affairs… many of the questions are new. …they have to do with our interaction with our ecological landscape, with what we might call the "natural West," as both idea in the mind and as tangible rock, grass, and flesh…”

Dan Flores

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

War , History , Idea , Question