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	The Natural West Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains by Dan Flores University of Oklahoma Press, 2003
	A native of the Near Southwest bio-region stretching from New Mexico to Louisiana, environmental historian Dan Flores previously published a human and natural history of his homeland entitled Horizontal Yellow. This new text examines his adopted environs in the Rocky Mountains and the neighboring Great Plains under a similar set of spectacles, looking for man's place in an environment that, many suspect, would be better off without him.		On an invigorating morning in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, with the first big snow of the season draping the sagebrush, and the sun angle yet low enough that as frost settles out of the intense blue the heavens seem to be raining glitter, I strap on skis, whistle for my wolf-hybrid to join me, and set out across the foothills of the Sapphire Mountains to look for elk. It is one of those incredible daybreaks that in late twentieth-century human description (or so the thought forms in my mind) would come across, frankly, as so beautiful, it's almost corny.
	The introduction and 10 essays in this book combine science, literature and Flores' personal reflections in ther examination of the environmental histories of the Rockies, the Great Basin, the Red River, and the Plains. Human impacts on the grizzly and bison are studied in separate chapters, as is an examination of efforts aimed at restoring the West to a more natural state.
	Flores describes the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains as two regions "anciently spooled together in a kind of ecological yin/yang interlock... The Plains is western America's great experiment with privatization, the Rockies our historic communal lands experiement. That we're now entering the second century of these two radically different land-use strategies coexisting side by side makes comparative environmental history here interesting to ponder."
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