Mountain & Prairie with Ed Roberson Dan Flores – A Deep Dive into the History of the Natural West
George Perkins Marsh Invented Environmental History
- George Perkins Marsh became an international diplomat before writing Man and Nature in 1864.
- His overlooked book pioneered environmental history and examined how human actions transform landscapes.
Public Lands Began As Watershed Protection
- Marsh argued that privatizing mountain watersheds would destroy the arid lands dependent on them.
- His solution was to keep mountain sources of water federally protected while surrounding lands were settled privately.
National Forests Created Managed Access
- John Wesley Powell and Theodore Roosevelt translated ecological understanding into a managed public-lands system.
- National forests balanced watershed protection with limited timber, grazing, hunting, camping, tourism, and recreation.
Dan Flores is back for another visit on the podcast. If you're a fan of the history of the American West, then Dan is no stranger—he's the author of many of my favorite books, including American Serengeti, Coyote America, and Wild New World. Most recently, he wrapped up a 42-episode series with the MeatEater network called The American West with Dan Flores, covering everything from bison and wolves to the origins of our public lands and what it means to belong to a place. It's the closest most of us will get to sitting in one of Dan's university classes, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
Dan is Professor spent much of his academic career at the University of Montana, but he's always been less interested in the Old West of cattle drives and gunfights than in what he calls the natural West—the landscapes, animals, Native people, and ideas that make this region unlike anywhere else. He grew up in Louisiana, a place with almost no public land, and spent the 1970s looking for a foothold in the real West. He found three: the canyon country outside Lubbock, Montana's Bitterroot Valley, and the Galisteo Valley south of Santa Fe, where he and his wife, Dr. Sara Dant, live today. In each place, he dug in, learned the country, and went to work restoring it.
As expected, we covered a ton in this episode: We started with the story behind The American West series and how a decades-long friendship with Steven Rinella finally turned into 42 episodes. We discussed the biggest epiphany Dan had while making it—that for those of us living here now, the public lands matter far more than the frontier ever did. Dan traces the origins of public lands back to George Perkins Marsh, a wildly influential public intellectual most of us have never heard of, and forward through John Wesley Powell, the first forest reserves, and the end of homesteading in the 1930s. We dug into Theodore Roosevelt's transformation from a young man who rushed to Dakota Territory to kill a buffalo before they were all gone into a president willing to break with his own Gilded Age class to protect the landscapes and wildlife he loved. We also talked about repeat photography and the staggering disappearance of the glaciers in Glacier National Park, the willful destruction of Western wildlife, bioregionalism and rewilding on a scale that any of us can manage, and a few book recommendations to round it out.
Be sure to check the episode notes for links to everything we discussed, including the full American West series and the new 2026 edition of Coyote America. Dan is as generous with his time and wisdom as anyone I know, and I always come away from these conversations with a longer reading list and a better understanding of this place.
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- The American West with Dan Flores podcast
- Dan's Books
- Full episode notes and links: https://mountainandprairie.com/dan-flores-2
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THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:
Mountain & Prairie is listener supported via Patreon, and brought to you with support from the Colorado Cattlemen's Agricultural Land Trust, MIRASOL: Looking at the Sun, Patagonia Books, the Rye Resurgence Project for their generous sponsorship.
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TOPICS DISCUSSED:
- 0:00 - Introducing Dan Flores and highlighting the Rye Resurgence Project
- 7:24 - From writing to audio
- 13:10 - The natural West
- 20:01 - Aha! moments
- 28:41 - George Perkins Marsh
- 44:43 - Animal eradication
- 52:31 - Teddy Roosevelt deep-dive
- 1:05:18 - Place
- 1:13:56 - Rewilding the Bitterroot
- 1:20:12 - Rewilding on your own scale
- 1:23:06 - Book recs and wrapping up
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