Ep. 25: Thinking About Big History in One Western Place

Summary

Podcast Summary: The American West – Episode 25: Thinking About Big History in One Western Place

Host: MeatEater
Guest/Writer: Dan Flores
Date: April 7, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, writer and historian Dan Flores presents a sweeping, “big history” perspective on the American West by focusing on one specific region: the High Plains. Through storytelling and analysis—grounded in a shared visit with Stephen Rinella to the Blackwater Draw World Heritage Site—Flores explores how human cultures and natural forces have repeatedly transformed this “ground zero” of American history. The episode traces 13,000+ years of continual human occupation and environmental change, highlighting threads from Paleoindian mammoth hunters, archaic foragers, agricultural innovations, the bison-based societies of the plains, to the present age of oil, cotton, and ecological threat. The conversation is enriched by thoughtful guest contributions from Randall and Stephen Rinella.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Big Picture: “Space + Culture = Place”

• Dan Flores opens with the dictum “space plus culture equals place,” laying the conceptual groundwork for a deep history that accounts for both natural settings and complex layers of human cultures (01:46).
• The chosen focal point is the High Plains, especially the Clovis site at Blackwater Draw, New Mexico—argued as America’s human “ground zero” (03:22).

2. Deep Human Time in the West

• First evidence of humans in North America is discussed:
  • White Sands site with 23,000-year-old footprints (03:30)
  • Clovis culture: 13,000+ years ago, the first known widespread culture whose spear points and campsites are found everywhere (04:16).
• Quote:

  "So far, no ancient culture whose remains archaeologists have unearthed seems to have draped itself over this continent with the geographic sweep of the Clovis Paleolithic hunters." — Dan Flores (03:28)

3. The Great Transition & Ecological Change

• The succession from Clovis mammoth hunters to Folsom bison hunters to Archaic specialists demonstrates how environmental changes (extinction events, droughts) forced cultural adaptation:

  • Clovis people arrived “when giants still roamed the continent” (08:18).
  • Folsom people shifted to bison after mammoths' extinction (09:52).
  • Archaic peoples (hunter-gatherers) adapted to a bison-rich but otherwise depauperate landscape (24:28).

• Quote:

  "The pattern in most places is one occupation after another, right down through today." — Dan Flores (04:45)

4. Historical Principles and the Constant of Change

• Flores argues that no place remains the same in “big history”—there is no true ecological ‘climax,’ only shifting baselines (12:00).

• Human groups always alter their surroundings; each new arrival interacts with a landscape already transformed by predecessors. The search for “unspoiled wilderness” is primal, but rarely realized (12:50–13:55).

• Quote:

  “Only the first human inhabitants to occupy a piece of ground get to interact with an unaltered space. ... It's why wilderness is so important to us.” — Dan Flores (12:59)

5. Geography, Possibilism, & Environmental Limits

• The “theory of possibilism”: Each region offers a limited set of resources and lifeways, but culture determines which are chosen (16:00).
• The High Plains’ geology, climate, and biology funneled human societies toward certain adaptations, especially those maximizing solar energy flow through grasslands and large grazing animals (19:39–20:48).

6. Trade, Agriculture, & Complexity

• Humans have always sought resources beyond their immediate environment—trade networks shaped place and simplified local ecologies (23:39–24:28).
• The adoption of agriculture (crops from Mexico and Mississippi Valley) fundamentally changed lifestyles and the complexity of societies on the plains (27:00–30:00).
• Experimental farming civilizations like the Antelope Creek people ultimately failed due to arid conditions (31:00).

7. The Arrival of Europeans, Domesticated Animals, and Ecocide

• Horses (reintroduced by Europeans) enabled new cultures (Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa) to reshape life on the plains, doubling solar energy capture for human use (32:15–33:00).
• The arrival of Europeans and Americans led to the destruction of native grasslands, mass exterminations of wildlife, and the transition to a fossil-fuel and cotton-based agriculture (34:00–36:00).
• Modern landscapes are indelibly shaped by these layers:

  “Now it organized the ancient rim of the elephant and the thousands of years of bison into a kind of landman place of oily trash, lined roads and mechanical nodding oil field pump jacks.” — Dan Flores (36:17)

8. Conservation & Modern Restoration Efforts

• The episode closes with reflections on restoration projects (American Prairie Reserve in Montana, Southern Plains Land Trust in Colorado) and the scale of challenge involved in “rewilding” the High Plains after so much transformation (38:00–39:30).

9. Q&A: Why Does “Big History” Matter?

• Randall asks why it matters to distinguish Clovis/Folsom/Archaic societies rather than lumping them as “cave people” (42:32).
• Stephen Rinella and Dan Flores argue that this granularity gives us context; we are “beads on a string,” all part of a deep sequence of cultural and ecological change (44:51–47:50).
  • Quote:

    “It applies a kind of a context to who we are. We are beads on a string. And that string extends a very, very long way back into the past.” — Stephen Rinella (44:51)

10. Environmental Collapse and Energy

• Each collapse (mammoth, then bison, then sheep/ranching, etc.) leads to new adaptations and recasts the landscape for those who come next (48:35–51:57).
• Environmental historians focus on “energy flows”—how societies transition from direct solar (grass to bison to humans) to fossil energy and how those shifts define both ecology and economy (52:54–56:02).

11. The Precarious Present of Grasslands

• Grasslands are among the world’s most imperiled habitats, chiefly because of plowing and privatization (56:02).
• Restoration is desperately needed, with projects like American Prairie seeking to bring back historic ecosystems (57:58–59:22).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On layers of history:

  "The places we now occupy have been altered by previous inhabitants multiple times over the past." — Stephen Rinella (46:13)

• On the vanishing wilderness:

  "In most American regions, the previous inhabitants altered the world, often repeatedly, but usually they handed down some semblance of original nature. On the High Plains today, you have to look hard to find tiny pieces of ground where any part of that original High Plains grasslands to the horizon still exists." — Dan Flores (37:40)

• On succession of collapse and adaptation:

  “If you track through it and think in the terms that you just presented for us, it’s actually a sequence of collapses. ... But nonetheless, that's another instance of an environmental collapse that means that you have to try something else. You've got to come up with another strategy.” — Stephen Rinella (48:35–49:55)

• On energy and history:

  “Societies of every kind, ecologies of every kind, have to run on energy of some form. ... The grassland solar direct, solar powered phase of this story occupies a much larger piece of time than the fossil fuel story. The fossil fuel story in this part of the world only dates to about 1900, and so it's little more than a century old. On the other hand, you go back 13,000 years with lifestyles based primarily on solar energy.” — Dan Flores (54:38–55:13)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:46: Opening geographic dictum; introduction to High Plains and big history approach.
• 03:20–04:45: Blackwater Draw and why Clovis marks “ground zero” for America’s human story.
• 08:18–09:52: Arrival of Clovis people, rise and extinction of megafauna, transition to Folsom culture.
• 12:00–14:35: Key historical principles—change, human impact, “space + culture = place.”
• 16:00–20:48: High Plains geology, ecology, solar energy as the foundation for all lifeways.
• 24:28–32:12: Post-Pleistocene societies, the rise of agriculture, and the diversification of trade and economic strategies.
• 32:12–39:45: European arrival, ecological change, modern era of ranching, farming, oil, and wind energy.
• 42:32–47:50: Q&A on why differentiating ancient cultures matters; the value of a “big history” perspective.
• 48:35–51:57: Environmental collapse as a theme—past, present, and future.
• 56:40–59:22: The current state and significance of grasslands as critically threatened landscapes.

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Final Thoughts

Dan Flores’s “big history” lens reveals the American West—specifically the High Plains—as a dynamic crucible where nature and culture perpetually transform one another. By following the winding road from mammoth hunters to cotton monoculture and fragmented prairie, listeners are invited to recognize their own place in a story stretching thousands of years into the past—and, perhaps, to consider their responsibility for what comes next.

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For More:
This episode is part of an ongoing exploration of Western history and landscapes. Future episodes promise to revisit the theme of human adaptation, ecological transformation, and the quest to restore what can still be saved.

Transcript

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[Dan Flores]

The famous geographic dictum, space plus culture equals place is nowhere more vivid than on the high plains of the west, where a succession of human cultures have repeatedly inhabited a setting already changed by previous inhabitants. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West. Thinking about big history in one Western place On a blustery gray day in March 20 years ago, Stephen Rinella and

[Stephen Rinella]

I spent an afternoon giving ourselves a tour of a piece of the west

[Dan Flores]

that ought to be as famous as Jamestown or Plymouth Rock. Stephen was then working on his book on buffalo, and on a visit to Santa Fe, where I'd recently built a house, he proposed that we take off across the Great Plains to see what then stood as a kind of ground

[Stephen Rinella]

zero in the American story.

[Dan Flores]

The place we were heading entirely lacked

[Stephen Rinella]

the schoolbook associations of a colonial Virginia

[Dan Flores]

or Massachusetts Bay or even of Santa Fe. Then closing in on its 400th year as the oldest city founded by Europeans

[Stephen Rinella]

in the American West.

[Dan Flores]

But the place we were driving towards did have one great advantage not enjoyed by those more famous sites. The Blackwater Draw UNESCO World Heritage Site outside Clovis, New Mexico, pushes definite human inhabitation of North America back more than 13,000 years in the past. In 2026, there are pretty definitive arguments for a human presence in America even older. Of course, the best evidence so far is the blockbuster find in 2019 of what turned out to be 61 beautifully preserved footprints, mostly left by children or adolescents, in the soft mud of an ancient lake a couple of hundred miles southwest of the Blackwater Clovis site in today's White Sands National Monument. Grass remains crushed by those feet have dated to 23,000 years ago, a full 10 millennia before Clovis. But so far, no ancient culture whose remains archaeologists have unearthed seems to have draped itself over this continent with the geographic sweep of the Clovis Paleolithic hunters, whose excavated campsites and tools cover every

[Stephen Rinella]

part of the present United States.

[Dan Flores]

For most of America, and this is certainly true of most of the American West, Places like White Sands, excepted Clovis, is the beginning of the human presence here, our human ground zero. Before Clovis, most pieces of the west truly were wilderness landscapes that lacked a human presence. After Clovis, the pattern in most places is one occupation after another, right down through today. In search of Clovis, America, Stephen and I were out in a country I'd once made home. We call it the High plains today. Although who knows what names most of its ancient inhabitants might have used for for these flat prairies. The names we do know seem to reference the region's endless horizontal flatness, a sensory impression that perhaps was universal for us upright primates. Stephen and I were headed for a very old set piece here Less than a century ago, when archaeologists discovered the spot, Clovis culture was unknown. And Blackwater Draw was about to be mined for gravel to pill roads through a a handful of nearby American farming towns. When archaeologist E.B. howard made discoveries here that rocked the world. Scientists named the culture whose large dramatic points they were finding after the closest of those towns, Clovis, New Mexico. With the addition of a grand new tool, radiocarbon dating, over the next half century, science would find evidence on all over the west and all over America of a Clovisia the Beautiful that had lasted 400 years, significantly longer than the

[Stephen Rinella]

250 years of the present United States.

[Dan Flores]

Stephen and I had made one cardinal mistake in our drive over to the Texas border from Santa Fe. We'd forgotten to check if the Blackwater Draw grounds and its visitor center were actually open. For some reason now lost to time, it turned out the site was in fact closed for the day. Which I'll confess, didn't really deter us. Interested in information and education rather than mischief. We simply climbed over the gate. And proceeded to give ourselves a self guided tour. Around one of our country's most famous ancient human sites. That tour made it clear that the Clovis people had arrived in America. And at a propitious time. Among the large cosmic forces that have shaped North America's big history. One of them had allowed these people their access to the continent. Hemmed up for thousands of years on the Beringian landmass. That formed between Siberia and Alaska. When much of the northern ocean waters were ice. The ancestors of these people had been blocked from entering America. Itinerant earlier groups like those who found white sands. Had probably followed the coastlines from Asia to America in some kind of watercraft. But 16,000 or so years ago, the Wisconsin Maximum had ebbed enough to open a passage out of Beringia and into North America. As best we can tell, by 13,000 years ago. The early Americans we now call Clovis. Were all the way down to Blackwater

[Stephen Rinella]

in today's New Mexico.

[Dan Flores]

The Clovis people were lucky enough to be here. When giants still roamed the continent. Indeed, it was the Pleistocene megafauna of the Americas. That drew humans out of Siberia in the first place. Across most of the American West 13,000 years ago. It was possible for Clovis people to do what so many humans love to do. Specialize economically. And what they appear to have wanted to specialize in was hunting big animals, especially elephants. The various species of mammoths that had evolved in America when they could. It was the discovery of large Clovis spear points. Embedded in the remains of mammoths, giant ground sloths, camels and horses. That rocked the world in the 1930s. It confirmed something the famed Folsom site. Found fewer than 10 years earlier. Had indicated that what many thought was a brand new American story. Actually was a very, very ancient one. With people hunting giant creatures so far back in time. These animals were no longer even found on Earth. Walking along Blackwater Draw, set into these vast plains that March afternoon through. The obvious observation to make was that the elephant hunt did not last. 28 of those mammoths died at human hands in this spot. Except for an isolated population on a tiny island in the Bering Sea. All the species of American mammoths went

[Stephen Rinella]

extinct during Clovis times.

[Dan Flores]

Then, in the early 1970s, archaeologists uncovered more than 8,000 artifacts at Blackwater Draw from from the Folsom culture, the people who followed the Clovis people in time, as indicated by the Folsom site and many others like it across the West. The extinction of the elephants had led the next inhabitants of the interior west, Especially on the high plains, to specialize in yet another of the great Pleistocene species. A massive early bison, now called Bison antiquus. But like the mammoths in time, Bison Antiquus was also fated to become extinct. While Folsom culture and its spin offs perfected bison drives, corrals and at adult technology to enable them to survive. Some 2,000 years around, roughly 11,000 years ago, this lifeway too collapsed. Looking around us at these windy, usually brightly lit savannas, now bereft of both elephants and giant bison, but populated in the present by oil wells and monocrop agriculture. Led Stephen and me to commence some reconstruction of the big patterns in the deep time history of this place. Track any part of the world across the large expanses of time since humans arrived. And a story begins to unfold that demonstrates how a set of principles about history. First, because the grand forces mean that the Earth is an evolving and endlessly changing world, no place remains the same across big history. The science of ecology once waxed eloquent about climax. The biophysical reality of natural environments if left undisturbed, supposedly. But every environment is endlessly undergoing disturbance or recovery from it. So that what appears to be climaxes are merely snapshots in time. Changing as we look is in fact the normal state of the world. Second, we human beings, like every other species, alter the places where we live. The famous geographer Yifu Chuan once composed a song, simple and elegant aphorism I long ago committed to memory. Space plus culture equals place. Space plus culture equals place. What he meant was take natural settings. Add in human economies and technologies and ideas about living and what you get or places. Yet the truth about life in a given place is that the past of a place never remains in the past. Only the first human inhabitants to occupy a piece of ground. Get to interact with an unaltered space. This is the biological principle that drove the human migrations out of Africa and around the world. The search for places other humans and haven't yet altered. Remains a part of our psychological makeup. It's why we love to find ourselves on a trail where no one is in front of us. Or on an overlook with no houses or other humans in sight. It's why wilderness is so important to us. As for inhabiting places, since we succeed one another in place after place, we human inhabitants end up in interacting not with pristine environments, but with settings that have already been changed by the people who have occupied the ground before us. Just as the Folsom people did. In the wake of 400 years of Clovis inhabitation of the High Plains, all of us who come later are engaging with someone else's previously created place. Henry David Thoreau's famous passage about wishing to know an entire heaven and an entire earth Included a line where he hoped some demigod, as he put it, hadn't preceded him and plucked from the heavens the best of the stars. Unfortunately for the natural world, that's often the narrative of human history. Someone else has already been there. The real question usually has to do with which of the best stars got erased and which few survived. What I want to do with this

[Stephen Rinella]

episode is to lay out what Stephen

[Dan Flores]

and I dropped into that day on the High Plains. The General patterns of 13,000 years of human conversion of space to place and then place into another place. And in honor of that day at Blackwater Draw, I think the best way to do this is to concentrate on that country, the country we were visiting then. The High Plains is one example of what seems to have happened in every place we live in the West. So I mean to provide the outlines of the big history. The French who study this in Europe call it la longue dure. In a region now divided by state lines and that today we tend to think of as New Mexico or Texas or Oklahoma or Colorado or Kansas. Yet like most regions, the. The High Plains has long been something real and discernible in and of itself. Whether we call it Kansas or Colorado, the High Plains have been shaped fairly uniformly by the grand forces of the planet and by an American story that has given it a regional arc through time. Here's one insight for thinking about things like this. There's a theory about human settlement in place, assembled as a kind of convergence of history, geography and ecology. And it's sometimes called the theory of possibleism. An eccentric Kansas professor of ecological history named James Malan, back in the 1930s, brainstormed that bioregional environments like the High Plains do not actually determine how people live in them. Instead, they offer up a range of possibilities from which we choose, based on our cultural preparation, what we recognize as potential resources and our technological abilities. A region like the High Plains doesn't offer unlimited possibilities, though. Whaling or an economy based on processing timber doesn't fall within the range of lifeways here. Yet on this expansive sunlit grassland whose offerings might seem quite limited, there's been a wide range of possibilities for human life. From Clovis times to the present. As is the case with every region of Earth, the geology, topography, climate and ecology of the West's High Plains have been the fundamental keys to human life here. Generally, this region's surface geology is a sedimentary outwash from the Rocky Mountains that buried ancient Carboniferous life forms from the Permian Triassic and in a few spots, the Jurassic periods. The overlying erosional wash from the mountains also buried very old mountain stream runoff in the form of a fossil underground lake we now call the Oglala Aquifer. As an erosional apron of the Rockies, the plains surface gradually slopes downward in elevation from west to east. So despite its appearance to the eye, the topography is not actually flat. Long before Clovis hunters arrived, rivers like the Arkansas, the Cimarron, Canadian and Pecos had carved arroyo and canyonated channels across this high plain surface. On its easternmost edge, that outwashed surface presents as a sharp plateau, the Caprock escarpment. For the last million years, another set of rivers born on the plateau itself, the Red Brazos and Colorado river of Texas, have spilled off the escarpment through deep brightly colored canyons that expose the underlying Permian and Triassic rocks. Pelo Duro Canyon, which I've mentioned a few times here lately in Texas, Panhandle is the most well known, but dozens of smaller million year old canyons run water off this giant plateau. While geology and topography have remained fairly constant since humans came to live here, climate and biology have changed greatly and often because the region is far inland from the Gulf of Mexico and the Southern Rockies intercept much of the moisture coming from the Pacific. The High Plains has a semi arid climate. Since Clovis times it's been drier than the country on either side of it, typically bathed in 320 annual days of sunshine and vigorously windswept. But its climate has always been truly variable over time, sometimes producing cool lush conditions. But there are always drought episodes and raging dust storms. One major dry period since humans have been in America, the so called altithermal

[Stephen Rinella]

prevailed for thousands of years on the High Plains.

[Dan Flores]

This kind of topography and this kind of climate have made the High Plains a short grass and mid height grassland for for most of human history. And that's important to this story. The energy that drives most terrestrial systems comes directly from the sun and sunny semi arid grasslands are a very direct converter of solar energy into forms that other life can use in one simple step of photosynthesis. Thermodynamic energy streaming from the sun is directly available to to animals that eat grass than to other animals that eat the grass eaters. So when early humans came to the high plains, they found biological life centered on the conversion of this massive solar energy charge had produced a remarkable and

[Stephen Rinella]

diverse world of different life forms.

[Dan Flores]

Those life forms, elephants and bison and their wide array of predators, became the first possible basis of human high plains inhabitation.

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[Dan Flores]

One other element influenced the range of

[Stephen Rinella]

possibilities on the High Plains.

[Dan Flores]

The geographical connections. As social animals, we humans seek out contacts with other human groups. If those groups live in environments different from ours. We trade what we produce for things we lack. And they have. Today's global market economy is the modern result. But more limited forms of the idea

[Stephen Rinella]

have always been around.

[Dan Flores]

During every part of High Plains history, people joined in economic systems that tied them by trade to people living somewhere else. Quite often, when people are using local nature to provide economic resources for people living in other places, those trade networks act to simplify the natural world.

[Stephen Rinella]

There are plenty of examples to follow here.

[Dan Flores]

This is the basic template of history in most of the west, in America, and the world on the High Plains. From the time of the Clovis elephant hunters, the Folsom hunters inherited a Clovis place. That Clovis culture had changed from its original condition. The place fashioned by the Clovis people no longer offered the possibility of a life based on hunting elephants. In the couple of thousands of years that followed, the Folsom people and their several offshoots dominated the High Plains and and concentrated their economies on the remaining animals, particularly herds of giant Pleistocene bison. But by 9,000 years ago, the huge Pleistocene bison were also gone. So were ground sloths, camels, horses, dire wolves, American cheetahs. Entire ecology that humans had found on the High Plains had vanished. So the next inhabitants inherited a place pretty drastically altered by two major predecessors. These new people, a collection of slightly different regional cultural groups who are collectively known as the Archaics, would live full and rich lives across the High Plains for the next 8,000 years. To offer a sense of scale that's almost 40 times longer than than the United States has existed, Archaic peoples were hunter gatherers who devoted far more attention to plant gathering than had their ancestors. But on the windswept, sun drenched High Plains grasslands, it was still a grazing animal that converted sunlight most efficiently into energy. Mammoths, camels and horses had left no successor species. But bison did. With most of its grazing competition eliminated, the modern bison exploded in an almost weed like efflorescence. Better adapted to the grasslands than even the Archaic people who hunted them. Bison made possible an archaic High Plains place that would survive across those 80 centuries. Think of that as we celebrate the two and a half centuries of the United States. The Archaic High Plains place did confront a major climate emergency that demanded an extreme response. About 6,500 years ago, climate in the American west cycled into an extremely warm dry phase that lasted nearly 2,000 years. This is the long hot drought climate historians call the altithermal. It may be a predictor for our response to global climate change in the West. In our time, the altithermal came close to turning the High Plains into a true desert and a vacant one. Not only did bison leave the region for wetter conditions to the east and north, evidence is strong that most of the Archaic peoples did the same. While a few villages of Archaics held on at permanent wetlands like Blackwater Draw and and at Lubbock Lake where springs bubbled the Oglala aquifer to the surface, pretty much everybody else left. Starting about 2000 years ago, significant change occurring on both sides of the High Plains began to create a new set of human possibilities. Crop growing as a brand new lifeway diffused northward from its invention in Mexico to to groups like the Mogollon and the Anasazi of the desert Southwest and to the mound building Mississippian cultures of the Mississippi Valley. When farming societies developed on either side of the High Plains, the opportunity to create new kinds of local places was underway. In present New Mexico, just west of the High Plains, corn growing, pottery making, pueblo building, societies of great sophistication and far reaching trade networks emerged to cast spheres of influence onto the Plains. Only a few hundred years later, agricultural village dwelling Mississippian peoples, Caddoan speakers in what is now East Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana also established vibrant societies that began to push up the rivers towards the High Plains. Looking for trading partners, that trade took on a tantalizing form. What High Plains people had in profusion were the products of the bison hunt. They had maroon and blue striped flints from a famous quarry called alabates, beautifully tanned robes and especially dried protein in abundance. What they had always had in insufficient supply of was a source of carbohydrates with Agricultural people not far away. Both hunters and farmers could overcome their dietary bottlenecks. A form of mutualism for all groups involved luxury and status. Goods like turquoise from the Pueblo mines lubricated that exchange. While these trade items would change over time, Immersion into far flung regional trade networks Was a new possibility that didn't depend on one's local resources to create place with a more imaginative take on the possibilities now, High plains people pursued life ways of increasing complexity. Between 1200 and 1500, in fact, a famous experiment on the high plains and involved a group called the Antelope Creek people who tried agricultural towns Far out in the heart of the high plains along the Canadian and republican rivers. Antelope Creek crops, points, pottery and tools Came from both the eastern and the western farming traditions. Rather than the hide teepees of the buffalo hunters. These people people built rock slab houses of multiple rooms, including one built Acoma style On the top of a butte now called Landergen Mesa. The architecture seemed to be based on the pueblo model from 250 miles farther west. Ideas from multiple cultures had made the act of creating place on the high plains More imaginative than it had ever been. Crop growing, though, is a strategy to extract solar energy directly. But plants need moisture, too, and the Antelope Creek people ultimately couldn't sustain farming on the high plains with the moisture that fell from the sky. Drought finally caused them to abandon their experiment. Other groups, Catawan speakers like the Wichitas and Pawnees and Siouan speakers like the Osages and Mandans, Would later push farming villages partway up the plains rivers. But it required a new technology in the 20th century, before anyone else would try to create farming places as far out on the High plains As the Antelope Creek people had 600 years earlier. When old worlders arrived on the scene and founded places like Santa Fe, Natchitoches, New Orleans, and St. Louis, radically New

[Stephen Rinella]

possibilities opened up on the High plains.

[Dan Flores]

Two developments, Domesticated animals from Europe and the bottomless trade lust of a truly global market Created dramatic new possibilities out on the grasslands. One of the animals was an old American native. The horse returned to America. It underwent a stage stunning ecological release. It took less than a century for new dominant horse riders. The Comanches, the Cheyennes, the Kiowas. To merge this animal with the bison of antiquity to create a new lifeway and a new place in the global market trade economy. For the high Plains, Horse and bison more than doubled the human capture of so solar energy Streaming into the grasslands. These horse riders built on old trade Networks to exchange bison products both for crops from farmers and now for European industrial goods. But the Comanches, at least, still saw the solar connection. They made the sun their primary object of religious veneration. And visitors to their villages said that in the mornings, the Comanches would hang their shields in full view of the sun and rotate them throughout the day like a field of leather sunflowers absorbing sun power. Of course, High Plains settlement and the creation of place didn't end here. The people who now came to the region had old World cultures that benefited from ideas and technology from across the globe. Bison and even grass would not survive them. Once their global market economy entirely obliterated bison, for a period of well over a decade, New Mexicans from west of the plains directed new grazing animals, in their case enormous flocks of sheep, onto the now strangely silent High Plains grasslands. This Old World animal introduction began the alteration of High Plains ecology by weakening the grass cover and introducing invasive weed species like tumbleweeds. Then Texans and other Americans from Old World backgrounds poured in from the east and populated the High Plains with cattle and ranches. Their animus is at Many of the remaining wild species eliminated wolves. That High Plains ancient keystone predator, they poisoned prairie dogs and black footed ferrets out of existence. They even waged a war of annihilation on coyotes and eagles. By the early 20th century, with deep drilling available to them to tap underground resources, these new arrivals discovered the fossilized solar energy of the High Plains carbon wealth in the Permian and other formations buried underfoot. This was a possibility for creating place that was entirely invisible and unimagined to all previous inhabitants. Now it organized the ancient rim of the elephant and the thousands of years of bison into a kind of landman place of oily trash, lined roads and mechanical nodding oil field pump jacks. The High Plains, especially the Texas and New Mexico parts, is still such a place. But there's competition now. Optimistic Americans became the first to try to farm the High Plains since the Antelope Creek Picture people had failed. They began by committing a kind of ecological sacrilege. They plowed under the ancient grasslands that had been so effective at converting sunlight to useful energy. That looked like a tragic mistake initially, when a degrassed High Plains hit by drought collapsed into the Dust bowl, the most epic disaster and human outmigration and in Western history. Nonetheless, the early 1940s produced a new technological miracle. V8 automobile engines strong enough to pump water up out of the vast Oglala aquifer for making the High Plains into a cotton empire today, oil field pump jacks and cotton to the horizons get some visual relief with the glinting spinning propellers of Don Quixote like wind farms. But you suspect that sucking up fossil carbon and drawing on a shrinking underground lake to grow cotton are experiments in place building that will have barely half the lifespan of Clovis culture itself. The briefest High Plains human episode so far, maybe half the lifespan. So if the present version of place on the High Plains is your thing, all I can say is best celebrate it while you can. Working through all this was pretty much how the conversation went as Stephen and I drove back to Santa Fe from our visit to Blackwater Draw. Sure, everywhere in America has experienced this kind of sequence of of human places superimposed on natural landscapes and previous human places. But somehow, amid the pump jacks and the flared natural gas, the center pivot irrigation and the wind farms, the obliteration of original nature from elephants to what's here now seems like a fairy tale that's almost not believable. In most American regions, the previous inhabitants altered the world, often repeatedly, but usually they handed down some semblance of original nature. On the High Plains today, you have to look hard to find tiny pieces of ground where any part of that original High Plains grasslands to the horizon still exists. The best preserved pieces on the High Plains today are its canyonlands and breaks, country that was just too rugged to remake. It's intriguing to look at this place now and imagine the stories through time that brought us to this point. It's also a frustrating reality check attempting here what American Prairie is trying in Montana or the Southern Plains Land Trust is doing in Colorado. Buying up ranches, tearing down fences and restoring their part parts of the modern High Plains to some semblance of its various pasts. It's probably as difficult on the southern High Plains as it is anywhere in America, given all the destruction and infrastructure of modern place building. If visionaries ever pull off large scale 21st century rewilding projects here, it will no doubt be one of the epic conservation accomplishments of modern American history.

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[Randall]

So Dan, this, this script covers a lot of ground and I'll begin it where you do with Clovis and Folsom people. And, and I guess the first question I wanted to ask is, you know, you grow up and, and you sort of think of, oh, there were cave people and Then there was civilization. Right. And there's this long oversimplification that I think is still pretty prevalent in our culture of thinking of cave people and civilization. But as you point out, there are these entire civilizations that have their own technology, their own culture. And so I wonder. It's something that's become very fascinating to me, but I wonder what it is that you get out of thinking about these. These cultures or these people as their own societies. Right. Like thinking instead of just looking at this broad spans of time as people were kind of hunter gatherers. But what you drill down here into the differences between Clovis and Folsom and those who came after. And I sort of wonder what it is, if you were trying to convince someone of the utility of thinking about these. These groups in such specific terms, what that might be.

[Stephen Rinella]

Well, I think to me, what an exercise like this one is all about. And Stephen and I did, as we were driving back from visiting that Clovis site. It's been 20 years or so ago when we did this. I mean, this was kind of what we were trying to. A symbol. Okay. How do you get from elephant hunters 13,000 years ago to a landscape that's dominated by cotton fields and oil field pump jacks and what falls in between to make that possible?

[Dan Flores]

So I think part of the appeal

[Stephen Rinella]

of something like this to me, and one could do this, by the way. I mean, this is just an example that applies to the southern high plains. But you could do this to just about any landscape around the world.

[Dan Flores]

And what it does, it seems to

[Stephen Rinella]

me, is it applies a kind of a context to who we are. We are beads on a string.

[Dan Flores]

And that string extends a very, very

[Stephen Rinella]

long way back into the past, as I mentioned in the script, with respect to this particular story, I mean, for the archaics, and they're just one out of several groups that obviously occupy this same ground. I mean, they are on the ground 80 times longer than the United States

[Dan Flores]

has existed in that same part of the world.

[Stephen Rinella]

And I think a lot of. A lot of Americans, we tend to be obviously dominated by thoughts about our own lives and about the present. I mean, we go through our lives, in many cases, sort of unaware, not thinking about the fact that we're a bead on this very, very long string. And that string goes back in fascinating ways into the past. And probably the most important thing that you could take from this is. And clearly I borrowed that aphorism from Yifu Tuan, the famous geographer, who came up with the idea of how you create Human places on the landscape.

[Dan Flores]

Space plus culture equals place, he said.

[Stephen Rinella]

And part of that understanding then enables you to realize that the space that we occupy now, the places that we've created on the space of a place like Montana, say, or. Or West Texas or eastern New Mexico, those places have been changed by previous inhabitants multiple times over the past. And so part of the. I mean, the. The two kind of models that I try to present here for people to think about this sort of big history is Yifu Tuan's place, or space plus culture equals place. And then the other idea, of course, is this idea of possibilism, or. Which takes Yifu Chuan's idea and tries to make you understand that every group that comes to a particular landscape brings a different way of looking at it. And they're able to create a place based on their abilities, their cultural abilities, their ideas, their technology.

[Dan Flores]

And so this particular spot on the

[Stephen Rinella]

ground, how do you get from elephants to oil wells, is a kind of a good example, I think, of how that works not just in this spot, but probably across most of the world. And, you know, to answer your question, why does one do this? I think it provides you with some sort of context about the spot you occupy in this large progression of history.

[Randall]

And one element of that, especially when you talk about transitions between cultures in this long, sweeping history, is environmental collapse. And I think if you were to just throw out that word to someone on the street, that's something that's in the future. And it's sort of this large, long declension narrative where we're still on our way towards that. It hasn't happened yet. But if you look into deep time, I mean, you don't even have to go that deep, really, in North America or Central America, there are these examples again and again of societies that suffered environmental collapse and catastrophe.

[Stephen Rinella]

Well, I mean, that's the explanation, for example, for why the Clovis culture comes to an end. These are people who specialize. I mean, they did other things too, but they seem to have been something of specialists, of a specialist economy based on elephant hunting, on hunting mammoths. And when the mammoths were gone, that particular culture was no longer viable. So there was one early environmental collapse that dates back to something like 12,000 years ago. And then they're followed by the Clove or the Folsom people, who have another specialty, which is on these large Pleistocene bison. And after a couple of thousand years, those animals are gone too, and you have another collapse. And so this story, if you track through it and Think in the terms that you just presented for us is actually a sequence of collapses. Sometimes they're supplied internally and sometimes they're supplied from external forces, which is probably what happened, for example, to the bison and the collapse of the bison economy that people had relied on for so many thousands of years. But nonetheless, that's another instance of an environmental collapse that that means that you have to try something else. You've got to come up with another strategy. And I, towards the end of this script, I tried fairly quickly to describe following the collapse of bison. What you get is a period, and it's a fairly brief one, when sheep herders from the Southwest will come to this landscape, and for about 15 or 20 or 30 years they'll herd sheep across the country, and then they're going to be pushed back into New Mexico by essentially Anglo Americans moving out from

[Dan Flores]

Texas who bring cattle.

[Stephen Rinella]

And so there's yet a ranching, a second kind of agricultural place building on the part of those Anglo Americans. And they're essentially ranchers. And of course, they have their own way of changing the landscape and creating a new place. And one of those is by getting rid of wolves and mountain lions and coyotes and prairie dog towns and, and on and on eagles and so forth. So if you look at this from the kind of big perspective, you not only see these environmental collapses that lead to the next step and people reimagining how one lives on a landscape like this, but you get a good sense, I think particularly you get a good sense when you reach the present that all these people who have lived on this particular landscape in the past have altered it in ways that create a different world for those of us who are alive now. I mean, you go down to the southern high plains now, you don't see wolves, you don't see bison, you don't see mammoths. You don't see, in fact, in many places, grasslands remaining that produced so much solar energy for all these early cultures. What you instead see is a world that has been transformed for the modern global economy. It's been turned into cotton fields and pumping units.

[Randall]

And you, you sort of bring this point up throughout the script that one of the ways in which environmental historians look at the past and, and analyze, you know, a given society is how they utilize energy.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

And you, you talk about, because Elliot West, I think, in the. The Contested Planes, Eliot west, he spends a few pages describing this cycle of energy from the sun. And this is where, as organisms, that's what sort of allows humanity to flourish in places, is their ability to utilize energy from the natural world. And you bring that up to the present. So I wonder if you could sort of talk about why environmental historians are interested in these questions and sort of how it, what insights it offers as far as the Great Plains.

[Stephen Rinella]

Well, with the Great Plains, clearly, I mean, what you had was a world that was propelled by solar energy. And it was a fairly direct translation of the energy from the sun into plants via photosynthesis, producing grasses that were eaten by grazing animals. And then of course, predators, and humans do play the role of predators in these early economies, are able to eat the animals that eat grass. So we're interested in this kind of thing throughout history because societies of every kind, ecologies of every kind, have to run on energy of some form. And solar energy is the most widely used, particularly has been up until the last few hundred years of human existence. I mean, we've relied on places that produce a lot of solar energy. So grasslands in the past were really wonderful spots for humans. And it's probably no accident that that's the kind of country that we evolved into consciousness. And we were drawn out of forests into grasslands in Africa, because those grasslands were producing a kind of a direct translation of solar energy into the kind of energy that we could use, into the sort of food sources that we could use. And historians, I think, have been intrigued by this because we've realized that over the past several generations of human history, we've moved away from this sort of direct application of solar power into the use of, in the modern world. Of course, it's been driven largely by fossil solar power, by the kinds of power that one is able to translate from these buried ancient sources of energy, of carbon that we began tapping into with the great industrial revolution that used coal. And now, of course, oil is our primary source of fossil fuel. And so that story, I mean, is really visible in the account of the southern high plains. And it's interesting to me that the grassland solar direct, solar powered phase of this story occupies a much larger piece of time than the fossil fuel story. The fossil fuel story in this part of the world only dates to about 1900, and so it's little more than a century old. On the other hand, you go back 13,000 years with lifestyles based primarily on solar energy. So it's, it's kind of another one of those fascinating things to think about. And that's probably why historians have spent a lot of time with it.

[Randall]

One last question, because you mentioned it in your previous answer, but when a lot of people think of grasslands they think of a big empty space, right? Yeah, but you raised the point in this article that it's one of our most threatened landscapes. It's one of our most threatened habitats. There's only a few chunks here and there that exist as. As they were, and it's still shrinking. So I wonder if you can just speak to appreciation for grasslands as a. As a Western landscape and in sort of the current state of our grasslands.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, that's. That's a good observation, to be sure, because, I mean, grasslands are one of the most threatened ecosystems all around the world, not just in the United States. And what happened to our grasslands and of course, our grand. We have grasslands in many parts of North America, but the vast grasslands of the Great Plains, that 500 miles basically west of the Mississippi river up to the foothills of the Rockies was the. That was the great bison belt. That was sort of the version of an American Serengeti with all these diverse animals. And it was a part of the west. And I'll talk about this in one of the future episodes. It was a part of the west that unlike the Rockies, unlike the Colorado Plateau, unlike the rainforest of the Pacific coast that didn't get much public land, most of the Great Plains, because it seemed to be easily plowed up and easily homesteaded, ended up being privatized. And that privatization, I mean, it's obviously one of the great legends and stories of the American west, the homesteading story.

[Dan Flores]

But that homesteading story basically destroyed a

[Stephen Rinella]

lot of the Western ecology of the grasslands. And so the grasslands ended up, many of them being plowed, being infested with weeds by the introduction of domestic animals from other parts of the world and hay from other parts of the world.

[Dan Flores]

And as a result, we've struggled in

[Stephen Rinella]

our own time to try to recreate some facsimile of what our great grasslands once were. I mean, that's what American prairie in central Montana I think is trying to do. They're trying to once again focus on the grasslands in this wonderful Serengeti country we once had, and also trying to reintroduce some of the animals that were lost from it. So it's one of the great, I think, losses and in some respects, kind of historical mistakes of the frontier of the American west that so much of that country was torn up and destroyed. I mean, I talked a little about the Dust bowl in this particular episode, and I'll talk about it more later, but it, of course, is the greatest environmental tragedy in the history of the American west, and it takes place in this kind of landscape.

[Randall]

Well, Dan, appreciate it.

[Stephen Rinella]

Thank you, Randall.

[Randall]

Thanks.

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