Over the past decade, Dan Flores has emerged as one of the leading historians of North America’s environment. For much of his impressive career, Flores’s preferred genre has been the essay rather than the monograph. His latest book, The Natural West, proves no exception to this trend. Despite an appearance that initially suggests a work with a single, unified narrative, The Natural West is, in fact, an anthology of ten of Flores’s essays—the majority of them previously published— all illuminating various facets of the environmental history of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions of the American West. In an effort to make these pieces add up to a greater whole, Flores has not only revised some essays but has also added an introduction that portrays the book’s various chapters as a collective exploration of the “evolutionarily derived ‘human nature’ that influences the way we—all of us—see and interact...

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