President’s Lecture: Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in the America

In a unique presentation, including selected readings and an on-stage discussion with Sara Dant, writer, historian, and former professor Dan Flores will engage topics such as why America no longer has elephants, how Native people sustained American diversity across 10,000 years, why Euro-Americans were so committed to destroying the continent’s wolves, and how religion and free-market capitalism allowed the United States to engage in the most massive destruction of animal life in modern history. Flores’s presentation and the discussion draw from his new book, an ambitious Big History of how we humans responded to the grand bestiary of American creatures that emerged in the wake of the Chicxulub Impact. Wild New World is a narrative history that begins in deep time and extends into America’s present time.
Dan Flores, Ph.D., is a writer, historian, and former professor who lives near Santa Fe and is A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of the History of the American West at the University of Montana-Missoula. Flores is the author of ten books including the New York Times bestseller and finalist for Pen America’s E.O. Wilson Prize in Literary Science Writing, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History and the Amazon bestseller American Serengeti, winner of the Stubbendieck Distinguished Book Prize.
Sara Dant, Ph.D., is Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor and Chair of History at Weber State University. Her work focuses on environmental politics in the United States with an emphasis on the creation and development of consensus and bipartisanism. Dant’s latest book is Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West about the interaction between people and nature. Dant is also an advisor and interviewee for Ken Burns’s The American Buffalo documentary film and the author of several articles on western environmental politics.