Dan Flores

Place: An Argument for Bioregional History

As he told the story, Walter Prescott Webb-widely-accepted among American environmental historians as one of the founding fathers of our discipline-began to conceptualize his most famous work, The Great Plains: A Study in Institutions and Environment, at the age of five. Raised as a young child in Panola County, Texas, deep in the heart of Southern culture, where thickly-timbered rolling hills screened the horizon and even the overhead sky was only partially visible through the soaring loblolly pines, Webb had not yet started to school when his family moved to Central Texas. In the Western Cross Timbers province at the edge of the Great Plains, the future thinker of big ideas found himself stimulated by another world. Here no loblollies blocked the skies, and across the grasslands the horizon was miles distant, visible like the encircling rim of a bowl in every direction. Here King Cotton and backwoods truck-garden farms gave way to fenced spreads enclosing the Sacred Cow. Young Walter Webb was fascinated at the

Z'ion in Eden: Phases of the Environmental History Of utah|

In seeking to discover the causes of modern ecological dilemmas, the environmental movement of the past two decades has developed a penetrating critique of a number of mainstream American institutitions. Historians Lynn White, Jr., and Roderick Nash, for example, have identified the Judeo-Christian religious ethic, which places man at the center of a subservient biosphere, as central to the development of environmental callousness and mistanagement.1 Philosopher Eugene Hargrove has argued that western, Lockean property concepts are 325

History, Environment, and the Future of the Great Plains

On the coasts Americans refer to the Great Plains, with more than a hint of contempt, as flyover country. Looking out the window of a jet or an air-conditioned auto, it seems at first view to be vast, flat, and mostly empty. Although it can be green with the rains preceding summer solstice, more often the operative color of the place is yellow. This neutral tone combined with the two dimensions of linear horizons and bowl-shaped skies gives the Plains one of its ancient names: the Horizontal Yellow. In fact, many names have been given to this enormous expanse of country stretching from Texas to Saskatchewan. Llanos, a Spanish word, has been in common use for 400 years and was eventually adopted and translated as “plains” by Northern Europeans, who had no suitable word for dry, grassy steppes. Upon first approaching the region, English speakers had appropriated a French term, Gran Prairie, to name a place as alien to Scots and Englishmen as the British Highlands would be to a Bedouin.

Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. By Mark Spence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. viii + 190 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index.

This book examines the ideal of wilderness preservation in the United States from the antebellum era to the first half of the twentieth century, showing how the early conception of the wilderness as the place where Indians lived (or should live) gave way to the idealization of uninhabited wilderness. It focuses on specific policies of Indian removal developed at Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Glacier national parks from the early 1870s to the 1930s.