Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America PDF Author: Dan Flores
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 132400617X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
One of Kirkus Review's Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 A deep-time history of animals and humans in North America, by the best-selling and award-winning author of Coyote America. In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America’s known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s evolutionary richness. Distinguished author Dan Flores’s ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the “wild new world” of North America—a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before. The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. He shows how our long past as carnivorous hunters helped us settle America, initially establishing a coast-to-coast culture that lasted longer than the present United States. But humanity’s success had devastating consequences for other creatures. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today’s “Sixth Extinction” to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades. In thrilling narrative style, informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human cultures and individuals who hastened its eradication, studied America’s animals, and moved heaven and earth to rescue them. Eons in scope and continental in scale, Wild New World is a sweeping yet intimate Big History of the animal-human story in America.

Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America PDF Author: Dan Flores
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 132400617X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 478

Get Book

Book Description
One of Kirkus Review's Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 A deep-time history of animals and humans in North America, by the best-selling and award-winning author of Coyote America. In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America’s known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent’s evolutionary richness. Distinguished author Dan Flores’s ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the “wild new world” of North America—a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before. The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. He shows how our long past as carnivorous hunters helped us settle America, initially establishing a coast-to-coast culture that lasted longer than the present United States. But humanity’s success had devastating consequences for other creatures. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today’s “Sixth Extinction” to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades. In thrilling narrative style, informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human cultures and individuals who hastened its eradication, studied America’s animals, and moved heaven and earth to rescue them. Eons in scope and continental in scale, Wild New World is a sweeping yet intimate Big History of the animal-human story in America.

Coyote America

Coyote America PDF Author: Dan Flores
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465098533
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The New York Times best-selling account of how coyotes--long the target of an extermination policy--spread to every corner of the United States Finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "A masterly synthesis of scientific research and personal observation." -Wall Street Journal Legends don't come close to capturing the incredible story of the coyote In the face of centuries of campaigns of annihilation employing gases, helicopters, and engineered epidemics, coyotes didn't just survive, they thrived, expanding across the continent from Alaska to New York. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won, hands-down. Coyote America is the illuminating five-million-year biography of this extraordinary animal, from its origins to its apotheosis. It is one of the great epics of our time.

American Serengeti

American Serengeti PDF Author: Dan Flores
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 070062466X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
America's Great Plains once possessed one of the grandest wildlife spectacles of the world, equaled only by such places as the Serengeti, the Masai Mara, or the veld of South Africa. Pronghorn antelope, gray wolves, bison, coyotes, wild horses, and grizzly bears: less than two hundred years ago these creatures existed in such abundance that John James Audubon was moved to write, "it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals." In a work that is at once a lyrical evocation of that lost splendor and a detailed natural history of these charismatic species of the historic Great Plains, veteran naturalist and outdoorsman Dan Flores draws a vivid portrait of each of these animals in their glory—and tells the harrowing story of what happened to them at the hands of market hunters and ranchers and ultimately a federal killing program in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Great Plains with its wildlife intact dazzled Americans and Europeans alike, prompting numerous literary tributes. American Serengeti takes its place alongside these celebratory works, showing us the grazers and predators of the plains against the vast opalescent distances, the blue mountains shimmering on the horizon, the great rippling tracts of yellowed grasslands. Far from the empty "flyover country" of recent times, this landscape is alive with a complex ecology at least 20,000 years old—a continental patrimony whose wonders may not be entirely lost, as recent efforts hold out hope of partial restoration of these historic species. Written by an author who has done breakthrough work on the histories of several of these animals—including bison, wild horses, and coyotes—American Serengeti is as rigorous in its research as it is intimate in its sense of wonder—the most deeply informed, closely observed view we have of the Great Plains' wild heritage.

Horizontal Yellow

Horizontal Yellow PDF Author: Dan Louie Flores
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826320117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Personal and historical meditations explore the human and natural history of the large expanse of land the Navajos once named the Horizontal Yellow.

Nature's Ghosts

Nature's Ghosts PDF Author: Mark V. Barrow, Jr.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226038157
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
The rapid growth of the American environmental movement in recent decades obscures the fact that long before the first Earth Day and the passage of the Endangered Species Act, naturalists and concerned citizens recognized—and worried about—the problem of human-caused extinction. As Mark V. Barrow reveals in Nature’s Ghosts, the threat of species loss has haunted Americans since the early days of the republic. From Thomas Jefferson’s day—when the fossil remains of such fantastic lost animals as the mastodon and the woolly mammoth were first reconstructed—through the pioneering conservation efforts of early naturalists like John James Audubon and John Muir, Barrow shows how Americans came to understand that it was not only possible for entire species to die out, but that humans themselves could be responsible for their extinction. With the destruction of the passenger pigeon and the precipitous decline of the bison, professional scientists and wildlife enthusiasts alike began to understand that even very common species were not safe from the juggernaut of modern, industrial society. That realization spawned public education and legislative campaigns that laid the foundation for the modern environmental movement and the preservation of such iconic creatures as the bald eagle, the California condor, and the whooping crane. A sweeping, beautifully illustrated historical narrative that unites the fascinating stories of endangered animals and the dedicated individuals who have studied and struggled to protect them, Nature’s Ghosts offers an unprecedented view of what we’ve lost—and a stark reminder of the hard work of preservation still ahead.

Caprock Canyonlands

Caprock Canyonlands PDF Author: Dan L. Flores
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603441808
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Twenty years ago, Dan Flores’s Caprock Canyonlands became one of the first books ever to treat the flat, arid landscape of the southern High Plains as a place of uncommon beauty and enduring spirit. Now a classic, Caprock Canyonlands has been favorably compared by readers to the work of such icons of nature and environmental writing as William Bartram, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau. Containing the author's stunning photography, a foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Proulx, author of "Brokeback Mountain," an afterword by environmental historian Thomas R. Dunlap, and a new preface by the author, this twentieth anniversary edition makes available to a new generation of readers Flores's knowledgeable and heartfelt narrative of the canyons and badlands of eastern New Mexico and western Oklahoma and Texas. He evokes the history and natural history that shaped the region, drawing upon geology, mythology, botany, art, history and natural history that shaped the region, drawing upon geology, mythology, botany, art, history, and literature. "Caprock Canoynlands keeps its place on our bookshelves . . . for its exploration of a deeply human activity: the search for the beauty of the earth, the depth and strength of our ties to it, and the ways those appear in a particular landscape . . . here illuminated by love."--from the afterword by Thomas R. Dunlap

The Natural West

The Natural West PDF Author: Dan Flores
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806135373
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The Natural West offers essays reflecting the natural history of the American West as written by one of its most respected environmental historians. Developing a provocative theme, Dan Flores asserts that Western environmental history cannot be explained by examining place, culture, or policy alone, but should be understood within the context of a universal human nature. The Natural West entertains the notion that we all have a biological nature that helps explain some of our attitudes towards the environment. FLores also explains the ways in which various cultures-including the Comanches, New Mexico Hispanos, Mormons, Texans, and Montanans-interact with the environment of the West. Gracefully moving between the personal and the objective, Flores intersperses his writings with literature, scientific theory, and personal reflection. The topics cover a wide range-from historical human nature regarding animals and exploration, to the environmental histories of particular Western bioregions, and finally, to Western restoration as the great environmental theme of the twenty-first century.

First Peoples in a New World

First Peoples in a New World PDF Author: David J. Meltzer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108498221
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
A study of Ice Age Americans, highlighting genetic, archaeological and geological evidence that has revolutionized our understanding of their origins, antiquity, and adaptations.

Great Plains

Great Plains PDF Author: Ian Frazier
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466828889
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
National Bestseller Most travelers only fly over the Great Plains--but Ian Frazier, ever the intrepid and wide-eyed wanderer, is not your average traveler. A hilarious and fascinating look at the great middle of our nation. With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey of more than 25,000 miles up and down and across the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains. A travelogue, a work of scholarship, and a western adventure, Great Plains takes us from the site of Sitting Bull's cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.

Canyon Visions

Canyon Visions PDF Author: Amy Gormley Winton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
A gorgeous combination of photographs, original art, and descriptive text that celebrates the wild and seldom-visited canyonlands of the Texas Plains. Exploring an environment largely unknown to even native Texans, both writer and artist take the reader on an intimate and compelling visit to an unforgetably beautiful corner of Texas.