Dan Flores

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

“[C]oyotes have now become the most common large wild predators most Americans have ever seen... The tawny, tail-swishing, sharp-nosed wild dog of the American deserts is now our furtive alley predator everywhere from Miami to Anchorage, San Diego to Maine, and the stories are piling up.”

“Chaco unquestionably had coyotes in town; coyote bones are common in the archeological sites of the inner city.”

“A thousand years later we still use a form of the original Aztec name... coyotl, pronounced COY-yoht, accent of the first syllable... Their rich mythology produced numerous coyote gods... {{w|Huehuecoyotl}}, or "Venerable Old Coyote"... sounds so much like the widespread North American god-avatar... that the empire-minded Aztecs may have borrowed him from tribes far northward...”

“[T]he truth is that coyotes have never been solely wilderness creatures. ...for the 15,000 years since we humans have been in North America, coyotes have always been capable of living among us. ...A coyote's primary prey happens to be... the mice and rats that flourish around and among us... By the time Europeans got to America, coyotes had long since sought out the major Indian cities of Mesoamerica.”

“Their colonization of our cities, from the small burgs... to the biggest, loudest, and most frenetic of our metropolises, has become the wildlife story of our time. It deserves some explanation.”

“Southwestern Hispanos... have long said that the only thing smarter than a coyote is God.”

“In one of the myriad ways humans and coyotes eerily mimic each one another, like us coyotes are cosmopolitan species, able to live in a remarkable range of habitats.”

“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?”

“Optimal Foraging Strategy models... have asserted that what appears to be "conservation" among hunting peoples was (and is) actually a by-product of attempting to maximize hunting efficiency and use of time. Thus hunter-gatherers ignored depleted habitats and placed taboos on certain species not to achieve conservation but in search of maximum yield for minimum effort. As wildlife populations shrank, this hypothesis argues, hunters actually hunted more, and they range farther afield.”

“The humanities have usually left evolutionary nature to the biologists. But some of the other questions here are... posed by the multidisciplinary field known as {{w|environmental history}}.”

“[T]he human past... belongs not only to (say) the Blackfeet or the Mormons, but to all of us. ...[W]e humans cannot be considered as separate from the earth of our evolution. We, too, are "natural."”

“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...”

“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.”