Speaker 1: The famous geographic dictum space plus culture equals place is
Speaker 1: nowhere more vivid than on the high plains of the West,
Speaker 1: where a succession of human cultures have repeatedly inhabited a
Speaker 1: setting already changed by previous inhabitants. I'm dan Flor's and
Speaker 1: this is the American West, thinking about big history in
Speaker 1: one Western place. On a blessery gray day in March
Speaker 1: twenty years ago, Stephen Ranella and I spent an afternoon
Speaker 1: giving ourselves a tour of a piece of the West
Speaker 1: that ought to be as famous as Jamestown or Plymouth Rock.
Speaker 1: Stephen was then working on his book on Buffalo, and
Speaker 1: on a visit to Santa Fe, where I'd recently built
Speaker 1: a house, he proposed that we'd take off across the
Speaker 1: Great Plains to see what then stood as a kind
Speaker 1: of ground zero in the American story. The place we
Speaker 1: were heading entirely lacked the school book associations of a
Speaker 1: colonial Virginia or Massachusetts Bay, or even of Santa Fe,
Speaker 1: then closing in on its four hundredth year as the
Speaker 1: oldest city founded by Europeans in the American West. But
Speaker 1: the place we were driving towards did have one great
Speaker 1: advantage not enjoyed by those more famous sites. The Blackwater
Speaker 1: draw UNESCO World Heritage Site outside Clovis, New Mexico, pushes
Speaker 1: definite human inhabitation of North America back more than thirteen
Speaker 1: thousand years in the past in twenty twenty six. There
Speaker 1: are pretty definitive arguments for a human presence in America
Speaker 1: even older. Of course, the best evidence so far is
Speaker 1: the blockbuster find in twenty nineteen of what turned out
Speaker 1: to be sixty one beautifully preserved footprints, mostly left by
Speaker 1: children or adolescents, in the soft mud of an ancient lake,
Speaker 1: a couple of one hundred miles southwest of the Blackwater
Speaker 1: Clovis site in today's White Sands National Monument. Grass remains
Speaker 1: crushed by those feet have dated to twenty three thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, a full ten millennia before Clovis. But so far,
Speaker 1: no ancient culture whose remains archaeologists have on Earth seems
Speaker 1: to have draped itself over this continent with the geographic
Speaker 1: sweep of the Clovis Paleolithic hunters, whose excavated campsites and
Speaker 1: tools cover every part of the present United States. For
Speaker 1: most of America, and this is certainly true of most
Speaker 1: of the American West, places like White Sands excepted. Clovis
Speaker 1: is the beginning of the human presence here, our human
Speaker 1: ground zero. Before Clovis, most pieces of the West truly
Speaker 1: were wilderness landscapes that lacked a human presence. After Clovis,
Speaker 1: the pattern in most places is one occupation after another
Speaker 1: right down through today. In search of Clovis America, Stephen
Speaker 1: and I were out in a country I'd once made home.
Speaker 1: We call it the High Plains today, although who knows
Speaker 1: what names most of its ancient inhabitants might have used
Speaker 1: for these flat prairies. The names we do know seem
Speaker 1: to reference the region's endless horizontal flatness, a sensory impression
Speaker 1: that perhaps was universal for us upright primates. Steven and
Speaker 1: I were headed for a very old set piece here
Speaker 1: less than a century ago when archaeologists discovered the spot.
Speaker 1: Clovis culture was unknown and Blackwater draw was about to
Speaker 1: be mined for gravel to pill roads through a handful
Speaker 1: of nearby American farming towns. When archaeologist E. B. Howard
Speaker 1: made discoveries here that rocked the world. Scientists named the culture,
Speaker 1: whose large dramatic points they were finding after the closest
Speaker 1: of those towns, Clovis, New Mexico. With the addition of
Speaker 1: a grand new tool, radiocarbon dating, over the next half century,
Speaker 1: science would find evidence all over the West and all
Speaker 1: over America of a Clovisia the beautiful that had lasted
Speaker 1: four hundred years, significantly longer than the two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years of the present United States. Stephen and I
Speaker 1: had made one cardinal mistake in our over to the
Speaker 1: Texas border from Santa Fe. We'd forgotten to check if
Speaker 1: the Blackwater draw Grounds and its visitor center were actually open.
Speaker 1: For some reason now lost to time. It turned out
Speaker 1: the site was in fact closed for the day, which
Speaker 1: I'll confessed didn't really deter us. Interested in information and
Speaker 1: education rather than mischief, we simply climbed over the gate
Speaker 1: and proceeded to give ourselves a self guided tour around
Speaker 1: one of our country's most famous ancient human sites. That
Speaker 1: tour made it clear that the Clovis people had arrived
Speaker 1: in America at a propitious time. Among the large cosmic
Speaker 1: forces that have shaped North America's big history, one of
Speaker 1: them had allowed these people their access to the continent
Speaker 1: hemmed up for thousands of years on the Baringian land
Speaker 1: mass that formed between Siberia and Alaska, when much of
Speaker 1: the northern Ocean waters were ice. The ancestors of these
Speaker 1: people had been blocked from entering America i Tinrant. Earlier
Speaker 1: groups like those who found White Sands had probably followed
Speaker 1: the coastlines from Asia to America in some kind of watercraft,
Speaker 1: but sixteen thousand or so years ago, the Wisconsin Maximum
Speaker 1: had ebbed enough to open a passage out of Beringia
Speaker 1: and into North America. As best we can tell, by
Speaker 1: thirteen thousand years ago, the early Americans we now call
Speaker 1: Clovis were all the way down to Blackwater in today's
Speaker 1: New Mexico. The Clovis people were lucky enough to be
Speaker 1: here when giants still roamed the continent. Indeed, it was
Speaker 1: the Pleistocene megafauna of the Americas that drew humans out
Speaker 1: of Siberia in the first place. Across most of the
Speaker 1: American West thirteen thousand years ago, it was possible for
Speaker 1: Clovis people to do what so many humans loved to do,
Speaker 1: specialize economically, and what they appeared to have wanted to
Speaker 1: specialize in was hunting big animals, especially elephants, the various
Speaker 1: species of mammoths that had evolved in America when they could.
Speaker 1: It was the discovery of large Clovis spear points embedded
Speaker 1: in the remains of mammoths, giant groundsloss, camels, and horses
Speaker 1: that rocked the world in the nineteen thirties. It confirmed
Speaker 1: something the famed fulsome Side found fewer than ten years earlier,
Speaker 1: had indicated that what many thought was a brand new
Speaker 1: American story actually was a very very ancient one, with
Speaker 1: people hunting giant creatures so far back in time, these
Speaker 1: animals were no longer even found on earth. Walking along
Speaker 1: Blackwater Draws set into these vast plains that March afternoon,
Speaker 1: the obvious observation to make was that the elephant hunt
Speaker 1: did not last. Twenty eight of those mammoths died at
Speaker 1: human hands in this spot. Except for an isolated pot
Speaker 1: population on a tiny island in the Burying Sea, all
Speaker 1: the species of American mammoths went extinct during Clovis times. Then,
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen seventies, archaeologists uncovered more than eight
Speaker 1: thousand artifacts at Blackwater draw from the Fulsome culture. The
Speaker 1: people who followed the Clovis people. In time, as indicated
Speaker 1: by the Fulsome site and many others like it across
Speaker 1: the West, the extinction of the elephants had led the
Speaker 1: next inhabitants of the interior West, especially on the high plains,
Speaker 1: to specialize and yet another of the great Pleascetocene species,
Speaker 1: a massive early bison, now called bison antiquis. But like
Speaker 1: the mammos in time, Bison antiquis was also faded to
Speaker 1: become extinct. While Fulsome culture and its spent offs perfected
Speaker 1: bison drives, corrals and at adle technology to enable them
Speaker 1: to survive some two thousand years around roughly eleven thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, this LifeWay too collapsed. Looking around us at
Speaker 1: these windy, usually brightly lit savannahs now bereft of both
Speaker 1: elephants and giant bison, but populated in the present by
Speaker 1: oil wells and monocrop agriculture, led Steven and me to
Speaker 1: commence some reconstruction of the big patterns in the deep
Speaker 1: time history of this place, track any part of the
Speaker 1: world across the large expanses of time since humans arrived,
Speaker 1: and a story begins to unfold that demonstrates a set
Speaker 1: of principles about history. First, because the grand forces mean
Speaker 1: that the Earth is an evolving and endlessly changing world.
Speaker 1: No place remains the same across big history. The science
Speaker 1: of ecology once waxed eloquent about climax the biophysical reality
Speaker 1: of natural environments if left undisturbed supposedly, but every environment
Speaker 1: is endlessly undergoing disturbance or recovery from it, so that
Speaker 1: what appears to be climaxes are merely snapshots in time
Speaker 1: changing as we look, is in fact the normal state
Speaker 1: of the world. Second, we human beings, like every other species,
Speaker 1: alter the places where we live. The famous geographer Ye
Speaker 1: Thutwan once composed a simple and elegant aphorism I long
Speaker 1: ago committed a memory. Space plus culture equals place. Space
Speaker 1: plus culture equals place. What do you meant was take
Speaker 1: natural settings, add in human economies and technologies and ideas
Speaker 1: about living, and what you get are places. Yet the
Speaker 1: truth about life in a given place is that the
Speaker 1: past of a place never remains in the past. Only
Speaker 1: the first human inhabitants to occupy a piece of ground
Speaker 1: get to interact with an unaltered space. This is the
Speaker 1: biological principle that drove the human migrations out of Africa
Speaker 1: and around the world. The search for places other humans
Speaker 1: haven't yet altered remains a part of our psychological makeup.
Speaker 1: It's why we love to find ourselves on a trail
Speaker 1: where no one is in front of us, or on
Speaker 1: an overlook with no houses or other humans in sight.
Speaker 1: It's why wilderness is so important to us. As for
Speaker 1: inhabiting places, since we succeed one another in place after place,
Speaker 1: we human inhabitants end up interacting not with pristine environments,
Speaker 1: but with settings that have already been changed by the
Speaker 1: people who have occupied the ground before us. Does the
Speaker 1: folsome people did in the wake of four hundred years
Speaker 1: of Clovis inhabitation of the high planes, all of us
Speaker 1: who come later are engaging with someone else's previously created place.
Speaker 1: Henry David Threaux's famous passage about wishing to know an
Speaker 1: entire heaven and an entire Earth included a line where
Speaker 1: he hoped some demi god, as he put it, hadn't
Speaker 1: preceded him and plucked from the heavens the best of
Speaker 1: the stars. Unfortunately for the natural world, that's often the
Speaker 1: narrative of human history. Someone else has already been there.
Speaker 1: The real question usually has to do with which of
Speaker 1: the best stars got erased and which few survived. What
Speaker 1: I want to do with this episode is to lay
Speaker 1: out what Stephen and I dropped into that day on
Speaker 1: the High Plains, the general patterns of thirteen thousand years
Speaker 1: of human conversion of space to place and then place
Speaker 1: into another place. And in honor of that day at
Speaker 1: Blackwater Draw, I think the best way to do this
Speaker 1: is to concentrate on that country. The country we were
Speaker 1: visiting then. The High Plains is one example of what
Speaker 1: seems to have happened in every place we live in
Speaker 1: the West. So I mean to provide the outlines of
Speaker 1: the big history. The French who study this in Europe
Speaker 1: call it La Longueiray in a region now divided by
Speaker 1: state lines, and that today we tend to think of
Speaker 1: as New Mexico or Texas, or Oklahoma or Colorado or Kansas.
Speaker 1: Yet like most regions, the High Plains has long been
Speaker 1: something real and discernible in and of itself. Whether we
Speaker 1: call it Kansas or Colorado, the High Plains have been
Speaker 1: shaped fairly uniformly by the grand forces of the planet
Speaker 1: and by an American story that has given it a
Speaker 1: regional art through time. Here's one insight for thinking about
Speaker 1: things like this. There's a theory about human settlement in place,
Speaker 1: assembled as a kind of convergence of history, geography, and ecology,
Speaker 1: and it's sometimes called the theory of possibilism. An eccentric
Speaker 1: Kansas professor of ecological history named James Malin back in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties brainstormed that bioregional environments like the High
Speaker 1: Planes do not actually determine how people live in them. Instead,
Speaker 1: they offer up a range of possibilities from which we
Speaker 1: choose based on our cultural preparation, what we recognize as
Speaker 1: potential resources, and our technological abilities. A region like the
Speaker 1: High Planes doesn't offer unlimited possibilities, though whaling or an
Speaker 1: economy based on processing timber doesn't fall within the range
Speaker 1: of lifeways here yet on this as if sunlit grassland,
Speaker 1: whose offerings might seem quite limited, There's been a wide
Speaker 1: range of possibilities for human life from Clovis times to
Speaker 1: the present. As is the case with every region of Earth,
Speaker 1: the geology, topography, climate, and ecology of the West High
Speaker 1: Plains have been the fundamental keys to human life here. Generally,
Speaker 1: this region's surface geology is a sedimentary outwash from the
Speaker 1: Rocky Mountains that buried ancient carboniferous life forms from the Permian, Triassic,
Speaker 1: and in a few spots the Jurassic periods. The overlying
Speaker 1: erosional wash from the mountains also buried very old mountain
Speaker 1: stream runoff in the form of a fossil underground lake
Speaker 1: we now call the Oblalla aquifer As an erosional apron
Speaker 1: of the Rockies. The plain's surface gradually slopes downward in
Speaker 1: elevation from west to east, so despite its appearance to
Speaker 1: the eye, the topography is not actually flat. Long before
Speaker 1: Clovis hunters arrived, rivers like the Arkansas, the Cimarron, Canadian,
Speaker 1: and Pecos had carved arroyo and canyonated channels across this
Speaker 1: high plane surface. On its easternmost edge, that outwashed surface
Speaker 1: presents as a sharp plateau, the cap Rock Escarpment. For
Speaker 1: the last million years, another set of rivers borne on
Speaker 1: the plateau itself, the Red Brazos and Colorado River of Texas,
Speaker 1: have spilled off the escarpment through deep, brightly colored canyons
Speaker 1: that expose the underlying Permian and Triassic rocks. Pelloduro Canyon,
Speaker 1: which I've mentioned a few times here lately in Texas's
Speaker 1: Panhandled is the most well known, but dozens of smaller
Speaker 1: million year old canyons run water off this giant plateau.
Speaker 1: While geology and topography have remained fairly constant since humans
Speaker 1: came to live here, climate and biology have changed greatly,
Speaker 1: and often Because the region is far inland from the
Speaker 1: Gulf of Mexico and the Southern Rockies intercept much of
Speaker 1: the moisture coming from the Pacific, The High Plains has
Speaker 1: a semi arid climate since Clovis times. It's been drier
Speaker 1: than the country on either side of it, typically bathed
Speaker 1: in three hundred and twenty annual days of sunshine and
Speaker 1: vigorously wind swept, but its climate has always been truly
Speaker 1: variable over time, sometimes producing cool, lush conditions, but there
Speaker 1: are always drought episodes and raging dust storms. One major
Speaker 1: dry period since humans have been in America, the so
Speaker 1: called Alta thermal prevailed for thousands of years on the
Speaker 1: High Plains. This kind of topograph and this kind of
Speaker 1: climate have made the High Planes a short grass and
Speaker 1: mid height grassland for most of human history, and that's
Speaker 1: important to this story. The energy that drives most terrestrial
Speaker 1: systems comes directly from the sun, and sunny, semi arid
Speaker 1: grasslands are a very direct converter of solar energy into
Speaker 1: forms that other life can use. In one simple step
Speaker 1: of photosynthesis, thermodynamic energy streaming from the sun is directly
Speaker 1: available to animals that eat grass, then to other animals
Speaker 1: that eat the grass eaters. So when early humans came
Speaker 1: to the high planes, they found biological life centered on
Speaker 1: the conversion of this massive solar energy charge had produced
Speaker 1: a remarkable and diverse world of different life forms. Those
Speaker 1: life forms, elephants and bison, and their wide array of predators,
Speaker 1: became the first possible basis of human high planes and habitation.
Speaker 1: One other element influenced the range of possibilities on the
Speaker 1: high planes geographical connections. As social animals, we humans seek
Speaker 1: out contacts with other human groups. If those groups live
Speaker 1: in environments different from ours. We trade what we produce
Speaker 1: for things we lack and they have. Today's global market
Speaker 1: economy is the modern result, but more limited forms of
Speaker 1: the idea have always been around. During every part of
Speaker 1: high plane's history, people joined in economic systems that tied
Speaker 1: them by trade to people living somewhere else. Quite often,
Speaker 1: when people are using local nature to provide economic resources
Speaker 1: for people living in other places, those trade networks act
Speaker 1: to simplify the natural world. There are plenty of examples
Speaker 1: to follow. Here is the basic template of history in
Speaker 1: most of the West, in America and the world on
Speaker 1: the high Plains from the time of the Clovis elephant hunters.
Speaker 1: The Fulsome hunters inherited a Clovis place that Clovis culture
Speaker 1: had changed from its original condition. The place fashioned by
Speaker 1: the Clovis people no longer offered the possibility of a
Speaker 1: life based on hunting elephants. In the couple of thousands
Speaker 1: of years that followed, the Fulsome people and their several
Speaker 1: offshoots dominated the high planes and concentrated their economies on
Speaker 1: the remaining animals, particularly herds of giant pleisosne bison. But
Speaker 1: by nine thousand years ago, the huge Pleistocene bison were
Speaker 1: also gone, so were ground sloths, camels, horses, dire wolves,
Speaker 1: American cheetahs. Entire ecologies that humans had found on the
Speaker 1: high plains had vanished. So the next inhabitants inherited a
Speaker 1: place pretty drastically altered by two major predecessors. These new people,
Speaker 1: a collection of slightly different regional cultural groups who are
Speaker 1: collectively known as the Archaics, would live full, in rich
Speaker 1: lives across the high plains for the next eight thousand years.
Speaker 1: To offer a sense of scale that's almost forty times
Speaker 1: longer than the United States has existed, Archaic peoples were
Speaker 1: hunter gatherers who devoted far more attention to plant gathering
Speaker 1: than had their ancestors. But on the windswept, sun drenched
Speaker 1: high planes grasslands, it was still a grazing animal that
Speaker 1: converted sunlight most efficiently into energy. Mammoths, camels, and horses
Speaker 1: had left no successor species, but bison did. With most
Speaker 1: of its grazing competition eliminated. The modern bison floated in
Speaker 1: an almost weed like efflorescence, better adapted to the grasslands
Speaker 1: than even the Archaic people who hunted them. Bison made
Speaker 1: possible an archaic high planes place that would survive across
Speaker 1: those eighty centuries. Think of that as we celebrate two
Speaker 1: and a half centuries of the United States. The archaic
Speaker 1: high planes place did confront a major climate emergency that
Speaker 1: demanded an extreme response. About sixty five hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: climate in the American West cycled into an extremely warm,
Speaker 1: dry phase that lasted nearly two thousand years. This is
Speaker 1: the long hot drought climate historians called the Alta thermal.
Speaker 1: It may be a predictor for our response to global
Speaker 1: climate change in the West. In our time, the Alta
Speaker 1: thermal came close to turning the High Planes into a
Speaker 1: true desert and a vacant one. Not only did bison
Speaker 1: leave the region for wetter conditions to the east and north,
Speaker 1: evidence is strong that most of the Archaic peoples did
Speaker 1: the same. While a few villages of Archaics held on
Speaker 1: at permanent wetlands like Blackwater Draw and at Lubbock Lake,
Speaker 1: where springs bubbled the Oglalla aquafor to the surface, pretty
Speaker 1: much everybody else left. Starting about two thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: significant change, occurring on both sides of the High Plains
Speaker 1: began to create a new set of human possibilities. Crop
Speaker 1: growing as a brand new LifeWay, diffused northward from its
Speaker 1: invention in Mexico to groups like the Mugga Yawn and
Speaker 1: the Anasazi of the desert southwest, and to the mound
Speaker 1: building Mississippian cultures of the Mississippi Valley. When farming societies
Speaker 1: developed on either side of the High Plains. The opportunity
Speaker 1: to create new kinds of local places was under way
Speaker 1: in president New Mexico, just west of the High Plains,
Speaker 1: corn growing, pottery making, pueblo building societies of great sophistication
Speaker 1: and far reaching trade networks emerged to cast spheres of
Speaker 1: influence onto the plains. Only a few hundred years later,
Speaker 1: agricultural village dwelling Mississippian peoples Caddo and speakers in what
Speaker 1: is now East Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana also established vibrant
Speaker 1: societies that began to push up the rivers towards the
Speaker 1: High Plains, looking for trading partners. That trade took on
Speaker 1: a tantalizing form. What High Plains people had in profusion
Speaker 1: were the products of the bison hunt. They had maroon
Speaker 1: and blue striped flints from a famous quarry called Alibates,
Speaker 1: beautifully tanned robes, and especially dried protein in abundance. What
Speaker 1: they had always had in ins dificient supply of was
Speaker 1: a source of carbohydrates. With agricultural people not far away,
Speaker 1: both hunters and farmers could overcome their dietary bottlenecks. A
Speaker 1: form of mutualism for all groups involved luxury and status.
Speaker 1: Goods like turquoise from the Pueblo mines lubricated that exchange.
Speaker 1: While these trade items would change over time, immersion into
Speaker 1: far flung regional trade networks was a new possibility that
Speaker 1: didn't depend on one's local resources to create place with
Speaker 1: a more imaginative take on the possibilities now high planes,
Speaker 1: people pursued life ways of increasing complexity between twelve hundred
Speaker 1: and fifteen hundred. In fact, a famous experiment on the
Speaker 1: high planes involved a group called the Antelope Creek people,
Speaker 1: who tried agricultural towns far out in the heart of
Speaker 1: the high planes along the Canadian and Republican rivers. Antelope
Speaker 1: Creek crops, points, pottery, and tools came from both the
Speaker 1: Eastern and the Western farming traditions. Rather than the hide
Speaker 1: tepees of the buffalo hunters, these people built rock slab
Speaker 1: houses of multiple rooms, including one built Acoma style on
Speaker 1: the top of a butte now called landergen Mesa. The
Speaker 1: architecture seemed to be based on the Pueblo model from
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty miles farther west. Ideas from multiple
Speaker 1: cultures had made the act of creating place on the
Speaker 1: high plains more imaginative than it had ever been. Crop growing, though,
Speaker 1: is a strategy to extract solar energy directly, but plants
Speaker 1: need moisture too, and the Antelope Creek people ultimately couldn't
Speaker 1: sustain farming on the high plains with the moisture that
Speaker 1: fell from the sky. Drought finally caused them to abandon
Speaker 1: their experiment. Other groups Catto and speakers like the Wichitas
Speaker 1: and Pawnees and sue and speakers like the O Sages
Speaker 1: and Mandans, would later push farming villages part way up
Speaker 1: the plains rivers, but it required a new technology in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century before anyone else would try to create
Speaker 1: farming places as far out on the high plains as
Speaker 1: the Antelope Creek people had six hundred years earlier. When
Speaker 1: Old worlders arrived on the scene and founded places like
Speaker 1: Santa Fe, Nacotish, New Orleans, and Saint Louis, radically new
Speaker 1: possibilities opened up on the high plains. Two developments, domesticated
Speaker 1: animals from Europe and the bottomless trade lusts of a
Speaker 1: truly global market, created dramatic new possibilities out on the grasslands.
Speaker 1: One of the animals was an old American native. The
Speaker 1: horse returned to America, it underwent a stunning ecological release.
Speaker 1: It took less than a century for new dominant horse riders,
Speaker 1: the Comanches, the Cheyennes, the Kiowas to merge this animal
Speaker 1: with the bison of antiquity to create a new LifeWay
Speaker 1: and a new place in the global market. Trade economy
Speaker 1: for the high planes horse and bison more than doubled
Speaker 1: the human capture of solar energy streaming into the grasslands.
Speaker 1: These horse riders built on old trade networks to exchange
Speaker 1: bison products, both for crops from farmers and now for
Speaker 1: European industrial goods. But the Comanches at least still saw
Speaker 1: the solar connection. They made the sun their primary object
Speaker 1: of religious veneration, and visitors to their vi villa said
Speaker 1: that in the mornings, the Comanches would hang their shields
Speaker 1: in full view of the sun and rotate them throughout
Speaker 1: the day like a field of leather sunflowers, absorbing sun power.
Speaker 1: Of course, high plane settlement and the creation of place
Speaker 1: didn't end here. The people who now came to the
Speaker 1: region had old World cultures that benefited from ideas and
Speaker 1: technology from across the globe, bison and even grass would
Speaker 1: not survive them. Once their global market economy entirely obliterated
Speaker 1: bison for a period of well over a decade, new
Speaker 1: Mexicans from west to the Plains directed new grazing animals,
Speaker 1: in their case enormous flocks of sheep, onto the now
Speaker 1: strangely silent high planes grasslands. This Old World animal introduction
Speaker 1: began the alteration of high plains ecology by weakening the
Speaker 1: grass cover and introducing invasive weed species like tumbleweeds. Then
Speaker 1: Texans and other Americans from Old World backgrounds poured in
Speaker 1: from the east and populated the high plains with cattle
Speaker 1: and ranches. Their animus at many of the remaining wild
Speaker 1: species eliminated wolves that high plains ancient keystone predator. They
Speaker 1: poisoned paride dogs and blackfooted ferrets out of existence. They
Speaker 1: even waged a war of annihilation on coyotes and eagles.
Speaker 1: By the early twentieth century, with deep drilling available to
Speaker 1: them to tap underground resources, these new arrivals discovered the
Speaker 1: fossilized solar energy of the High Plains, carbon wealth in
Speaker 1: the Permian and other formations buried underfoot. This was a
Speaker 1: possibility for creating place that was entirely invisible and unimagined
Speaker 1: to all previous inhabitants. Now it organized the ancient rim
Speaker 1: of the elephant and the thousands of years of bison
Speaker 1: into a kind of landman place of oily trash line
Speaker 1: roads and mechanical nodding oil field pumpjacks. The high plains,
Speaker 1: especially the Texas and New Mexico parks, is still such
Speaker 1: a place, but there's competition now. Optimistic Americans became the
Speaker 1: first to try to farm the high planes, since the
Speaker 1: Antelope Creek people had failed. They began by committing a
Speaker 1: kind of ecological sacrilege. They plowed under the ancient grasslands
Speaker 1: that had been so effective at converting sunlight to useful energy.
Speaker 1: That looked like a tragic mistake initially when a de
Speaker 1: grassed high plane's hit by drought collapse into the dust bowl,
Speaker 1: the most epic disaster and human out migration in Western history. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: the early nineteen forties produced a new technological miracle, v
Speaker 1: eight automobile engines strong enough to pump water up out
Speaker 1: of the vast Oglalla aquifer for making the high planes
Speaker 1: into a cotton empire. Today, oil field pump jacks and
Speaker 1: cotton to the horizons. Get some visual relief with the glinting,
Speaker 1: spinning propellers of don Quixote like wind farms. But you
Speaker 1: suspect that sucking up fossil carbon and drawing on a
Speaker 1: shrinking underground lake to grow cotton are experiments in place
Speaker 1: building that will have barely half the lifespan of Clovis
Speaker 1: culture itself. The briefest High Planes human episodes so far
Speaker 1: maybe half the lifespan. So if the present version of
Speaker 1: place on the high Plains is your thing, all I
Speaker 1: can say is best celebrated while you can working through all.
Speaker 1: This was pretty much how the conversation went as Steven
Speaker 1: and I drove back to Santa Fe from our visit
Speaker 1: to Blackwater Draw. Sure everywhere in America has experienced this
Speaker 1: kind of sequence of human places superimposed on natural landscapes
Speaker 1: and previous human places. But somehow, amid the pump jacks
Speaker 1: and the flared natural gas, the center pivot irrigation, and
Speaker 1: the wind farms, the obliteration of original nature from elephants
Speaker 1: to what's here now seems like a fairy tale that's
Speaker 1: almost not believable. In most American regions, The previous inhabitants
Speaker 1: altered the world, often repeatedly, but usually they handed down
Speaker 1: some semblance of original nature. On the high Plains today,
Speaker 1: you have to look hard to find tiny pieces of
Speaker 1: ground where any part of that original high plains grasslands
Speaker 1: to the horizons still exists. The best preserved pieces on
Speaker 1: the high Plains today are its canyon lands and breaks
Speaker 1: country that was just too rugged to remake. It's intriguing
Speaker 1: to look at this place now and imagine the stories
Speaker 1: through time that brought us to this point. It's also
Speaker 1: a frustrating reality check attempting here. What American Prairie is
Speaker 1: trying in Montana are the Southern Plains Land Trust is
Speaker 1: doing in Colorado. Buying up ranches, tearing down fences, and
Speaker 1: restoring their parts of the modern High Plains to some
Speaker 1: semblance of its various pasts is probably as difficult on
Speaker 1: the Southern High Plains as it is anywhere in America.
Speaker 1: Given all the destruction and infrastructure of modern place building,
Speaker 1: I and areas, ever pull off large scale twenty first
Speaker 1: century rewilding projects here, it will no doubt be one
Speaker 1: of the epic conservation accomplishments of modern American history.
Speaker 2: So, Dan, this this script covers a lot of ground,
Speaker 2: and I'll begin it where you do with Clovist and
Speaker 2: Folsome people. And I guess the first question I wanted
Speaker 2: to ask is, you know, you grow up and you
Speaker 2: sort of think of, oh, there were cave people and
Speaker 2: then there was civilization, right, And there's this long, you know,
Speaker 2: oversimplification that I think is still pretty prevalent in our
Speaker 2: culture of thinking of cave people and civilization. But as
Speaker 2: you point out, there's there are these entire civilizations that
Speaker 2: have their own technology, their own culture, and so I
Speaker 2: wonder it's something that's become very fascinating to me. But
Speaker 2: I wonder what it is that you get out of
Speaker 2: thinking about these cultures or these people as their own societies, right,
Speaker 2: like thinking instead of just looking at this broad spance
Speaker 2: of time as people were kind of hunter gatherers. But
Speaker 2: what you drill down here into the differences between Clovis
Speaker 2: and Folsome and those who came after. And I sort
Speaker 2: of wonder what it is if you were trying to
Speaker 2: convince someone of the utility of thinking about these groups
Speaker 2: in such specific terms, what that might be.
Speaker 1: Well, I think, to me, what an exercise like this
Speaker 1: one is all about, and Steven and I did as
Speaker 1: we were driving back from visiting that Clovis site. It's
Speaker 1: been twenty years or so ago when we did this.
Speaker 1: I mean, this was kind of what we were trying
Speaker 1: to assemble. Okay, how do you get from elephant hunters
Speaker 1: thirteen thousand years ago to a landscape that's dominated by
Speaker 1: cotton fields and oil feel pumpjacks and what falls in
Speaker 1: between to make that possible? So, I think part of
Speaker 1: the appeal of something like this to me, and one
Speaker 1: could do this by the way. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: just an example that applies to the the Southern high Plains,
Speaker 1: but you could do this to just about any landscape
Speaker 1: around the world. And what it does, it seems to me,
Speaker 1: is it applies a kind of a context to who
Speaker 1: we are. We are beads on a string, and that
Speaker 1: string extends a very, very long way back into the past.
Speaker 1: As I mentioned in the script with respect to this
Speaker 1: particular story, I mean for the archaics, and they're just
Speaker 1: one out of several groups that obviously occupy this same ground.
Speaker 1: I mean, they are on the ground eighty times longer
Speaker 1: than the United States has existed in that same part
Speaker 1: of the world, and I think a lot of Americans
Speaker 1: we tend to be obviously dominated by thoughts about our
Speaker 1: own lives and about the present. I mean, we go
Speaker 1: through our lives in many cases sort of unaware, not
Speaker 1: thinking about the fact that we're a bed on this
Speaker 1: very very long string, and that string goes back in
Speaker 1: fascinating ways into the past. And probably the most important
Speaker 1: thing that you could take from this is and clearly
Speaker 1: I borrowed that aphorism from Yefuchwan, the famous geographer who
Speaker 1: came up with the idea of how you create human
Speaker 1: places on the landscape. Space plus culture equals place, he said,
Speaker 1: And part of that understanding then enables you to realize
Speaker 1: that the space that we occupy now, the places that
Speaker 1: we've created on the space of a place like Montana,
Speaker 1: SA or West Texas or eastern New Mexico, those places
Speaker 1: have been changed by previous inhabitants multiple times over the past.
Speaker 1: And so part of the I mean, the two kind
Speaker 1: of models that I try to present here for people
Speaker 1: to think about this sort of big history is Yefu
Speaker 1: Twan's place or space plus culture equals place. And then
Speaker 1: the other idea, of course, is this idea of possiblism,
Speaker 1: which takes Yefu Twan's idea and tries to make you
Speaker 1: understand that every group that comes to a particular landscape
Speaker 1: brings a different way of looking at it, and they're
Speaker 1: able to create a place based on their abilities, their
Speaker 1: cultural abilities, their ideas, their technology. And so this particular
Speaker 1: spot on the ground, how do you get from elephants
Speaker 1: to oil wells is a kind of a good example
Speaker 1: I think of how that works, not just in this spot,
Speaker 1: but probably across most of the world. And you know,
Speaker 1: to answer your question why does one do this, I
Speaker 1: think it provides you with some sort of context about
Speaker 1: the spot you occupy in this large progression of history.
Speaker 2: And one element of that, especially when you talk about
Speaker 2: transitions between cultures in this long sweeping history, is environmental collapse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I.
Speaker 2: Think if you were to just throw out that word
Speaker 2: to someone on the street, that's something that's in the future,
Speaker 2: and it's sort of this large long declension narrative where
Speaker 2: we're still on our way towards that. It hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 2: But if you look into deep time, I mean, you
Speaker 2: don't even have to go that deep really in North America,
Speaker 2: or Central America. There are these examples again and again
Speaker 2: of societies that suffered environmental collapse and catastrophe.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, that's the explanation, for example, for why
Speaker 1: the Clovis culture comes to an end. These are people
Speaker 1: who specialize. I mean they did other things too, but
Speaker 1: they seem to have been something of specialists of a
Speaker 1: specialist economy based on elephant hunting, on hunting mammos, and
Speaker 1: when the mammoths were gone, that particular culture was no
Speaker 1: longer viable. So there was one early environmental collapse that
Speaker 1: dates back to something like twelve thousand years ago. And
Speaker 1: then they're followed by the clove or the folsome people
Speaker 1: who have another specialty, which is on these large plesss
Speaker 1: in bison. And after a couple of thousand years, those
Speaker 1: animals are gone too, and you have another collapse. And
Speaker 1: so this story, if you track through it and think
Speaker 1: in the terms that you just presented for us, is
Speaker 1: actually a sequence of collapses. Sometimes they're supplied internally and
Speaker 1: sometimes they're supplied from external forces, which is probably what happened,
Speaker 1: for example, to the bison and the collapse of the
Speaker 1: bison economy that people had relied on for so many
Speaker 1: thousands of years. But nonetheless that's another instance of an
Speaker 1: environmental collapse. That means that you have to try something else.
Speaker 1: You've got to come up with another strategy. And towards
Speaker 1: the end of this script, I tried fairly quickly to
Speaker 1: describe following the collapse of bison what you get as
Speaker 1: a period, and it is a fairly brief one when
Speaker 1: sheep herders from the Southwest will come to this landscape
Speaker 1: and for about fifteen or twenty or thirty years they'll
Speaker 1: herd sheep across the country, and then they're going to
Speaker 1: be pushed back into New Mexico by essentially Anglo Americans
Speaker 1: moving out from Texas who bring cattle, and so there's
Speaker 1: yet a ranching, a second kind of agricultural place building
Speaker 1: on the part of those Anglo Americans, and they're essentially ranchers,
Speaker 1: and of course they have their own way of changing
Speaker 1: the landscape and creating a new place, and one of
Speaker 1: those is by getting rid of wolves and mountain lions
Speaker 1: and coyotes and prairie dog towns and on and on,
Speaker 1: eagles and so forth. So if you look at this
Speaker 1: from the kind of big perspective, you not only see
Speaker 1: these environmental collapses that lead to the next step and
Speaker 1: people reimagining how one lives on a landscape like this.
Speaker 1: But you get a good sense, I think particularly you
Speaker 1: get a good sense when you reach each the present
Speaker 1: that all these people who have lived on this particular
Speaker 1: landscape in the past have altered it in ways that
Speaker 1: create a different world for those of us who are
Speaker 1: alive now. I mean, you go down to the southern
Speaker 1: high plains. Now you don't see wolves, you don't see bison,
Speaker 1: you don't see mammoths, you don't see in fact, in
Speaker 1: many places grasslands remaining that produced so much solar energy
Speaker 1: for all these early cultures. What you instead see is
Speaker 1: a world that has been transformed for the modern global economy.
Speaker 1: It's been turned into cotton fields and pumping units.
Speaker 2: And you sort of bring this point up throughout the
Speaker 2: script that one of the ways in which environmental historians
Speaker 2: look at the past and analyze, you know, a given
Speaker 2: sis society is how they utilize energy. Yeah, and you
Speaker 2: talk about because Elliott West, I think in the in
Speaker 2: the Contested Planes, Elliott West, he spends a few pages
Speaker 2: describing this this cycle of energy from the sun, and
Speaker 2: this is where as organisms we you know, that's what
Speaker 2: that's what sort of allows humanity to flourish in places,
Speaker 2: is their ability to utilize energy from the natural world,
Speaker 2: and you bring that up to the presence. So I
Speaker 2: wonder if you could sort of talk about why, why
Speaker 2: why environmental historians are interested in these questions and sort
Speaker 2: of how it what insights it offers. As far as
Speaker 2: the great planes.
Speaker 1: Well, with the great planes, clearly, I mean what you
Speaker 1: had was a world that was propelled by solar energy,
Speaker 1: and it was a fairly direct translation of the energy
Speaker 1: from the sun into plants via photosynthesis, producing grasses that
Speaker 1: were eaten by grazing animal and then of course predators
Speaker 1: and humans do play the role of predators in these
Speaker 1: early economies, are able to eat the animals that eat grass.
Speaker 1: So we're interested in this kind of thing throughout history
Speaker 1: because societies of every kind, ecologies of every kind have
Speaker 1: to run on energy of some form, and solar energy
Speaker 1: is the most widely used, particularly has been up until
Speaker 1: the last few hundred years of human existence. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've relied on places that produce a lot of solar energy.
Speaker 1: So grasslands in the past were really wonderful spots for humans,
Speaker 1: and it's probably no accident that that's the kind of
Speaker 1: country that we evolved into consciousness in. We were drawn
Speaker 1: out of forest into grasslands in Africa because those grasslands
Speaker 1: were producing a kind of a direct translation of solar
Speaker 1: energy into the kind of energy that we could use,
Speaker 1: into the sort of food sources that we could use.
Speaker 1: And historians, i think have been intrigued by this because
Speaker 1: we've realized that over the past several generations of human history,
Speaker 1: we've moved away from this sort of direct application of
Speaker 1: solar power into the use of in the modern world.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's been driven largely by fossil solar power,
Speaker 1: by the kinds of power that one is able to
Speaker 1: translate from these buried ancient sources of energy of carbon
Speaker 1: that we began tapping into with the Great Industrial Revolution
Speaker 1: that used coal, and now, of course oil is our
Speaker 1: primary source of fossil fuel. And so that story, I
Speaker 1: mean is really visible in the out of the southern
Speaker 1: high plains. And it's interesting to me that the grassland
Speaker 1: solar direct solar powered phase of this story occupies a
Speaker 1: much larger piece of time than the fossil fuel story.
Speaker 1: The fossil fuel story in this part of the world
Speaker 1: only dates to about nineteen hundred and so it's little
Speaker 1: more than a century old. On the other hand, you
Speaker 1: go back thirteen thousand years with lifestyles based primarily on
Speaker 1: solar energy. So it's kind of another one of those
Speaker 1: fascinating things to think about, and that's probably why histories
Speaker 1: have spent a lot of time with it.
Speaker 2: One last question, because you mentioned it in your previous answer.
Speaker 2: But when a lot of people think of grasslands, they
Speaker 2: think of a big empty right, Yeah, but you raised
Speaker 2: the point in this article that it's one of our
Speaker 2: most threatened landscapes. It's one of our most threatened habitats.
Speaker 2: There's only a few chunks here and there that exist
Speaker 2: as as they were, and it's still shrinking. So I
Speaker 2: wonder if you can just speak to appreciation for grasslands
Speaker 2: as a Western landscape and in sort of the current
Speaker 2: state of our grasslands.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's a good observation, to be sure, because
Speaker 1: I mean, grasslands are one of the most threatened ecosystems
Speaker 1: all around the world, not just in the United States,
Speaker 1: and what happened to our grasslands and of course our
Speaker 1: grand We have grasslands in many parts of North America.
Speaker 1: But the vast grasslands of the Great Plains, that five
Speaker 1: hundred miles basically west of the Mississippi River up to
Speaker 1: the foothills of the Rockies was the that was the
Speaker 1: great Bison Belt. That was sort of the version of
Speaker 1: an American Serengetti with all these diverse animals, and it
Speaker 1: was a part of the West. And I'll talk about
Speaker 1: this in one of the future episodes. It was a
Speaker 1: part of the West that unlike the Rockies, unlike the
Speaker 1: Colorado Plateau, unlike the rainforest of the Pacific Coast, that
Speaker 1: didn't get much public land. Most of the Great Plains,
Speaker 1: because it seemed to be easily plowed up and easily homesteaded,
Speaker 1: ended up being privatized. And that privatization, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: obviously one of the great legends and stories of the
Speaker 1: American West, the homesteading story. But that homesteading story basically
Speaker 1: destroyed a lot of the Western ecology of the grasslands.
Speaker 1: And so the grasslands ended up many of them being plowed,
Speaker 1: being infested with weeds by the introduction of domestic animals
Speaker 1: from other parts of the world and hay from other
Speaker 1: parts of the world, and as a result, we've struggled
Speaker 1: in our own time to try to recreate some facsimile
Speaker 1: of what our great grasslands once were. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: what American Prairie in Central Montana, I think, is trying
Speaker 1: to do. They're trying to once again focus on the
Speaker 1: grasslands in this wonderful Serengetti country we once had, and
Speaker 1: also trying to reintroduce some of the animals that were
Speaker 1: lost from it. So it's one of the great I
Speaker 1: think losses and in some respects kind of historical mistakes
Speaker 1: of the frontier of the American West, that so much
Speaker 1: of that country was torn up and destroyed. I mean,
Speaker 1: I talked a little about the dust Bowl in this
Speaker 1: particular episode, and I'll talk about it more later, but
Speaker 1: it of course is the greatest environ our mental tragedy
Speaker 1: in the history of the American West, and it takes
Speaker 1: place in this kind of landscape.
Speaker 2: Well, Dan, appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Antal. Thanks