The world that was and the world humans have made
Nov. 3—Dan Flores isn't trying to bum you out. He just wants you to understand that the world was recently a richer place in biodiversity and that humans have been driving various species into extinction for thousands of years.
Flores won the 2023 Rachel Carson Award for Reporting on the Environment by chronicling the interaction between people and animals in North America in his book Wild New World — and he came to a surprising conclusion. The history of people moving around the Earth, he says, is also the history of extirpation.
Take two regional examples.
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Regional Environmental NonFiction
Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America by Dan Flores
W.W. Norton and Company, 2022, 446 pages
Flores points to the 1908 discovery of the Folsom site that evidenced an ancient civilization that hunted bison. Decades later, in Clovis, archaeologists found evidence of peoples who hunted mammoths 13,000 years ago. Shortly thereafter, those animals went extinct. So did saber-toothed tigers. And while the environment was a factor, Flores says humans were right there too.
"It's probably both," he says. "But everybody is pretty much coming to a conclusion these days that it has more to do with humans spreading around the world into places where animals have never encountered us before. And they don't know to fear us. They don't look at a human walking up for the first time and go, 'Holy cow. This is a predator. I need to flee,'" he says. "This is what's called Biological First Contact, because they're innocent of human predation. It turns out that everywhere humans go, all the animals they first encounter are really easy to kill, which is one of the reasons that humans spread all over the globe."
Flores, a longtime professor at the University of Montana and author of 13 books, has owned a property in the Galisteo Basin for two decades. He's watched as successive generations of coyotes with a distinctive white-tipped tail frolic around his property. He believes the white tip is evidence of contact with a dog generations ago. One of his books, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (Basic Books, 2016), tells the story of the animal's place in nature — and more.
While talking about his new book as well as human expansion, he points to a strange coyote survival fact: They moved counter to the flow of humans, even while being dependent on living near people to find their food.
"They hang around us because we have rats and mice in our houses," he says. "That's why coyotes are in every city in the United States. They started out as Western animals, but 75 or 80 years ago they started spreading east. All the wolves had been killed out, so that opened up a niche for a mid-size predator. They were being persecuted so much in the West, and they react to persecution by spreading. They ended up spreading across the whole of the eastern United States. Every state in the union has coyotes today, except Hawaii."
Flores, in the first chapter of his Wild New World, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Society Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, starts 65 million years ago to the Chicxulub asteroid impact in modern-day Mexico that wiped out the dinosaurs. That event ushered in the Age of Mammals, and the place we refer to as North America began to slowly develop its own unique species. Some of the animals that began to populate North America traveled over land bridges with Europe and Asia; Flores says that's where mammoths and bison came from.
By the end of the first chapter, he's covered animal history spanning millions of years up to North America from about 25,000 years ago. Flores references Folsom and Clovis peoples in the second chapter, and he relates the story of the fossilized footprints found at White Sands National Park in 2019 that indicate humans lived there more than 20,000 years ago. Taken together, the evidence indicates people have been in North America for far longer than scientists had theorized over the last few decades.
"It gave America an antiquity for the first time," he says of the Clovis culture discovery. "For the first time, we realize that America wasn't just a couple of thousand years old in terms of human occupation, but like the Old World — like Europe and like Africa — we had a very old human story and humans had been interacting with animals that had gone extinct a long, long time ago."
By 10,000 years ago, Flores says, most of North America's original animal species had already been killed off. Over millennia, the ecological niches shifted and found new balance. The early North American people were hunter-gatherers who moved around the country following their food sources, and Flores says the Clovis civilization spread from sea to sea.
Agriculture didn't come to North America until relatively recently, he says, due to environmental factors more than anything else. A warming era thousands of years ago caused lakes of the Great Basin to dry up, says Flores, and after it, people had to find a new food source.
"Agriculture basically comes into being when hunting people have exhausted all the animals around them," he says. "And because the Old World was settled so much more anciently than North America was, the animals disappeared there much earlier. As soon as the Pleistocene was over about 10,000 years ago when the climate began to warm enough to farm, people in the Old World began farming crops and they also began domesticating the few animals that were left. They started domesticating cattle and horses and camels and sheep and goats. The Agricultural Revolution in the Old World takes place 10,000 years ago, but it doesn't start happening here until about 2,500 or 3,000 years ago."
By the time Christopher Columbus began his explorations, Flores says that the population of North America was about five million people. It is sparsely populated, and the Europeans perceive it as abundant in wildlife.
Was that true, or was that just perception? Flores says there are two ways of looking at it. One, the arrival of the Europeans in North America resulted in the decimation of the local population due to disease. And at the same time, the loss of a hunting people resulted in an animal population boom.
Almost immediately, that changed with the increasing populations of Europeans coming to North American shores. Flores says that also brings a new mentality that completely decimates the balance of species that lived there for thousands of years. The people who came here, he says, could not fully conceive of what extinction means because they had no understanding of how long the Earth had existed before them.
"Their perception of the world is that God created it 6,000 years ago, made everything that's on Earth, and made it perfect," he says. "Nothing can ever become extinct. Nothing can ever go away. It's been the same from the beginning as it is now, and it always will be. They have to discover the whole principle of extinction, and then they began, of course, grappling with: Is extinction just in the past, or is it actually happening around us now? And if it is, why?"
Flores quotes Henry David Thoreau, who, in his diary in the 1800s, lamented that much of America's wildlife had been wiped out before his time. By then, says Flores, it was evident what people were doing.
"Our whole European image of America as Virgin America, as brimming with wildlife, is really a perception of a place where an ecological release in wildlife is taking place because human population is being suppressed by disease," he says. "Thoreau is reading these journals of people who were there in the 1620s and realizing that two-thirds of the animals they saw, even 200 years later in Massachusetts, they're not there anymore. They've already been wiped out.
"He writes this magnificent entry in his journal about how he feels as if some demigod had come before him and plucked from the heavens the best of the stars. He says it's like going to a symphony and thinking that you're hearing the whole thing and then realizing somebody has taken out the timpani and they've taken out the strings. He says at the end of these beautiful couple of paragraphs that he wishes to know an entire heaven and an entire Earth."
There's a shift after Charles Darwin, says Flores, back to the beliefs of Native Americans that people don't exist independently of animals, but rather as part of a web of interrelated species. Darwin chronicles 20th century conservation efforts, and he puts them in context by saying we need to do a lot more in the grand scheme of things.
"We start saving things at the beginning of the 20th century, but what we tend to save are things we like to hunt," he says. "We'll save ducks and geese. We'll bring elk back and pronghorns back. We'll bring back deer and partridges and bobwhite quail, and everything that humans want to hunt, we'll save. But all the things we don't care about hunting or that we think is going to interfere with our ability to hunt or our ability to raise domestic animals — like wolves and coyotes and jaguars and mountain lions and bears — we're gonna wipe all those out."
