Interview with Dan Flores author of Wild New World

Join host Tripp Collins for a sweeping conversation with environmental historian and author Dan Flores about his award-winning book Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America.

In this episode, Dan takes us on a 65-million-year journey through North America's natural history—from the Chicxulub asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs to the present day. We explore the continent's lost megafauna, including woolly mammoths and dire wolves, and discuss the heartbreaking extinctions of iconic species like the Carolina parakeet and passenger pigeon.

Dan shares insights into his writing process, the challenges of weaving together paleontology, genomics, and environmental history into a compelling narrative, and why he believes books have a unique power to "rearrange the furniture in your head." We also dive into America's evolving relationship with nature—from the hubris of market capitalism and wildlife slaughter to the birth of the conservation movement and the passage of the Endangered Species Act.

Plus: Dan reveals exciting news about his involvement with Colossal Biosciences and their groundbreaking work on de-extinction, including genetically edited dire wolves, and previews his upcoming book project Homestead: Building a Green Lifestyle in the Modern American Countryside.

Topics covered:

• Deep time history and the Chicxulub impact
• Ancient human migration to North America (23,000-year-old footprints at White Sands)
• The extinction crisis and changing attitudes toward conservation
• De-extinction science and CRISPR gene editing
• The role of nature writing in American culture
• Why books matter in an age of podcasts and film

Find Dan Flores:

• Podcast: The American West
• Books: Wild New World, Coyote America, American Serengeti
• All books mentioned on Book Science
  
  

Book Science:

• Website: TrippCollins.com
• Show notes & transcripts: https://www.trippcollins.com/episodes
• Check out the Book Science Book Shop
• Instagram: @booksciencepodcast

Transcript

Tripp Collins: The book is Wild New World, the epic story of Animals and People in America, and I'm joined by the author Dan Flores. this book was sweeping, it was entertaining. at the same time, sections of this book are, intensely emotional. I mean, there are so many heart-wrenching stories of hubris, of waste, of excess.

and as you say, these, are stories that need to be told so that we can learn from them and hopefully do better in the future. But I kind of wanna start by hearing in your words, what is this book all about?

Dan Flores: Well, wild New World is, it's a book that has been simmering along in my mind for a long time, and, um, which accounts for some of the qualities of it.

I mean, it's, you know, pretty long. It's 398 pages. I was committed to the idea of only doing, 400 pages for this topic, and it was a tremendous struggle to hold it to that. But I think the way I've, I've felt about it both when I was writing it and, and since then, is that it's a book that attempts in one volume to tell a story that I think Americans in particular, although this is a story about North America, don't seem.

To know and have not folded into their sense of the American past of understanding what it's like to have an entire heaven and an entire Earth. And I think most Americans, are kind of unaware of what we once had here and what we, in a very spin thrift way, primarily and mostly wasted. So I wanted to get this story out there, so that,

People would understand something more about American history. And you know, I will say I've been gratified, on a couple of occasions to have people, one fellow who told me that he was trained in what he regarded as the best wildlife management program in any university in the United States. And they had talked about virtually none of this in the course of his education.

And so that made me realize, of course it is, it is a story that, even among wildlife managers and other people who ought to know better, is kind of something that's been swept under the rug. So that's why I wanted to write it and get it out there.

Tripp Collins: Yeah. I want to step back a little bit and ask about your background and how, where you live informs how you write. So I've listened to some of your other interviews, and you're from a small town in northern Louisiana. and I've heard you say split your childhood between the library and the outdoors. so that was obviously formative in terms of, setting the path of a life of books and writing, but also of nature. how do you see the role in place, like where you're living, how does that inform your writing?

Dan Flores: Well, I'm, one of those people who has, for a very long time, at least when I could make it happen, wanted to live away from cities not too far from cities. I like cities. I like restaurants and museums and all the other things that go with cities, and bars and nightlife and all the rest.

But, I do like, living in natural settings and I've basically done that all of my adult life. from the time I first had a university position in West Texas, after three or four years of being there, I sought out a place about 15 miles outside town. And, settled on a piece of ground 12 acres of ground with a house that was partially built that I finished over several years and lived there, out of town and drove into town when I needed to teach my classes or do other things

You know, cities, compel you to go in for, and then I did the same thing in Montana when I was at the University of Montana. I was there for 22 years in Montana, the longest stretch I was ever, at a particular university in my academic career. and in that case, I, had a place about 30 miles outside the university town, Missoula, where I taught and did the same thing.

Except this time I've started with a raw piece of ground and just built a house around me and a little ranch which took virtually the entire 20 plus years I was living there to do it. and now I live, outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, in northern New Mexico. In a very similar kind of situation.

I've got 11 acres, about 15, 16 miles from town. it's easy to get into Santa Fe, which is a wonderful, little city. But, I like living out and so I think. that sort of lifestyle has always kept the natural world and the interactions of various aspects of the ecologies around me, front and center in my mind, because I walk out the door in the morning as the sun is rising and I have this gorgeous, expansive view of a canyon and rolling hills and can see mountain ranges 15 and 20 miles away. And so it's just a sort of lifestyle that for some reason I felt compelled to do. And I do think it probably translates into what I write and how I write.

Tripp Collins: Yeah, so definitely sounds like it draws you closer in contact with nature and, and a lot of your writing is about nature, inspired by nature, but do you feel like you need that sort of solitude in order to get the writing done or is writing something you can do anywhere?

Dan Flores: It probably helps to have this kinda solitude, although I have demonstrated to myself on a number of occasions that I can pretty much write, anywhere no matter what's going on around me. I have done this on numerous occasions. I tend to drop off so deeply into my head, into my mind, when I'm writing that, the rest of the world just kind of fades out and becomes background.

So I've written, chapters of books sitting in cafes and, very busy situations and done the same in other kinds of noisy circumstances that you wouldn't think would necessarily lend to writing. But I don't need the solitude, but, I tend to somehow favor it and desire it. It's kind of like that.

Tripp Collins: And you mentioned a little bit about the inception in the book. It sounds like maybe there wasn't like a particular point, of inception. It was something maybe that grew over time and I think I heard somewhere else that maybe Sapiens was an inspiration, at least in terms of scope. Can you talk about that a little bit, like wanting to write about the sweeping history, the deep time history of the Americas?

Dan Flores: you know, to speak to my training as a way of getting at this, I was, an English major as an undergraduate, which is one of the reasons I like characters and storytelling and, a narrative plot and all that.

But, I got my PhD in a new field, at least it was new back in the seventies called environmental history. And so it's the kind of thing that you train to do, obviously with, the relationship between people and the environment, the natural world. You have to, immerse yourself in scientific writing and anthropology and paleontology, and archeology and ecology, biology and so forth.

You have to do that sort of thing, but you also have to really kind of. Imagine how you fold all those things into a story that makes sense and historians are trained to rely on. Paper and documentary evidence. And in order to tell some of the stories that I've wanted to tell in my career, I had to go farther back in time mm-hmm.

Than human beings were writing. And so I had to use some of these other fields to, to sort of immerse myself into deep time history. And you're absolutely right. Yuval Harari's Sapiens was really successful book that I thought pulled off that kind of big time, big picture sort of context for, a public readership.

And so that's what I tried to do, I mean, I've done it before while New World, and I would say that in some respects, writing the previous two books, one of them was called American Serengeti, which was about the last big animals of the American Great Plains. And the other book that proceeded while New World was, coyote America.

the subtitle of which was a Natural and Supernatural History. It's kind of a biography of this particular animal. And so both of those books kind of crept me for taking on this rather more daunting task where I looked at a lot more creatures, than just the handful on the Great Plains book or the single creature in Coyote America. And I also looked at these vast stretches of time to try to make sense of the story. but yeah, Harari's book Sapiens was definitely an inspiration for.

Tripp Collins: You've been a professor, you've written for magazines. you're now the host of a podcast. There's so many ways to communicate science, communicate history. Why put all this effort into writing a book? what is it that books do that other forms can't do?

Dan Flores: Well, all those other forms can certainly get you, listeners and, and readers in the case of magazine articles. I think a book is a special, a special thing. It's unlike say, film, which can sort of do the same thing, you know, because it's a, an expenditure of time, your investment of time in something.

in the case of a film, maybe for long ones, two and a half or three hours. But you can often do that in conjunction with someone else or with a group of people. You can have. Yeah. You know, my wife Sarah and I watch movies together and, and documentary films and, sometimes friends will come over and we'll watch a particular kind of film.

Reading a book is a more solitary kind of thing. And the result of that to me is that it enables you, if you're open to it as a reader, to have a book change your view of the world. I mean, one of the phrases that I've used a number of times since I heard a, a colleague use it to refer to one of my pieces, what it did for him is a book has the ability to rearrange the furniture in your head.

And when that happens, you're not ever the same again. You've been altered by that experience. I mean, a lot of other things can do that. Obviously, podcasts can do that and films can do it, but I think a book has a special quality because of the solitary nature of your, your immersion with it.

Tripp Collins: Definitely, and you know, it's probably the deepest way to connect with someone, especially someone like you who spent a lifetime studying a subject and pouring all that knowledge into a single, to a document you can hold in your hand. I, on the other side of the world can go through that at my own pace and connect with you on those topics. I mean, it's really an amazing technology. You sort of already hinted at this already in terms of the scope of the book and it being a bit, maybe a bit daunting. so can you talk to some of the challenges of putting together a book like this one?

Dan Flores: Well, the opening challenge for, a project like this, and this is why it was dawning, is that, It begins 65 million years in the past. and with the intent of bringing the reader up to the present moment, I was finishing that book, in the spring of 2022. And so I was, writing about things that were happening in the news, right up until March and April, before the book was published in October of that year.

So the task was to somehow make that expansive time into a narrative story that one could drop off into and follow through time and have it lead a reader naturally to the present moment and where we are and how all This prior information has led us to this point and the emotional reaction that we might have to it.

And so that was a daunting thing to take on. in part it was daunting because as I mentioned, one has to rely on all sorts of, specialized scientific information. This particular case, for example, I was very intrigued by and very committed to the idea of getting as much genomic science into this book as I could.

Because one of the things that's happened in the last 17 or 18 or 20 years is that. Basically genetic science and particularly genomic science, has kind of completely revolutionized our way of being able to reconstruct the past. And so I wanted to utilize that as much as possible. But of course, it's not anything that I had ever taken a class in or trained in, and so it relied, I had to rely on simply sitting down with the material and attempting to absorb it and understand which parts of it I could plug in, in order to make this story track and follow through time.

So, Those were all pretty daunting parts. And I mean, I will assure listeners that you might have trip that the, of that 65, 60 6 million years, which means that the book starts with the chicxulub impact. The asteroid impact that took out the dinosaurs and ushered in the age of mammals.

And it focuses specifically, of course, on how this, recovery takes place in North America. That first, 65.98 million years. Is taken care of in the first chapter. The next chapter picks up a time period that begins roughly about 25,000 years ago and goes through the conclusion of the pleistocene and then chapter three.

And while New World does this 10,000 year period from the end of the pleistocene down to the time that old Worlders that Europeans come to North America. Mm-hmm. And so that's the first three chapters that get you down to roughly 1500. And so the rest of the book is about, the remaining seven chapters are all about the period since Europeans have gotten here.

But I felt that the book needed those first chapters because the story is not really completely intelligible without understanding that deep time history.

Tripp Collins: Yeah. And that chicxulub event, because it occurred in North America, was almost like a clean slate, a place to start it.

Dan Flores: It hit, I mean, chicxulub is a Mayan town, on the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. And so the impact which struck nearby in the Gulf of Mexico has been named after that particular settlement. But yeah, it was a strike in the Gulf of Mexico, and obviously the nearest two continents were South America or Central America really. and North America

And yeah, it almost starts. Life over again in North America. Mm-hmm. There are a handful of species that survive it, and a few places sort of isolated behind mountain ranges and the far distance, away from the Gulf where, some life forms survive. But really it kind of resets the whole biological clock, around the globe.

I mean, we lost 75, this is one of those, those global extinction scenarios where we lost 75% of all life on earth. So we basically had to start the hard drive all over again, right. In order to recreate life around the planet. And, certainly North America is one of those places where this happened.

And we certainly don't know the counterfactual, but it's hard to imagine that mammals would rise to dominance the way they did unless some event took out the dinosaurs like that. And in that way. I talk a little bit in the early chapters about contingency events, those unplanned, unexpected, out of the blue kind of events that take place, that change history. And the chicxulub impact is very definitely one of 'em because lacking that, obviously, the chances of us sitting here on a Zoom conversation between Australia and New Mexico are very unlikely. Those chances sort of dwindle to, zero because the age of mammals might not ever get started. and we don't know if the age of mammals, and our domination of the planet would've ever gotten going without this particular asteroid strike. So yeah, this is one of those contingencies that very definitely changed the world.

Tripp Collins: I think this book is very entertaining. Your voice really shines through. I felt like a lot of your writing is very fun. it felt to me like you're having fun writing and do you have to balance your presentation having fun versus more hardcore history telling the, given the facts? Or are these not really in opposition to each other in the way that I imagine?

Dan Flores: I don't think they're necessarily an opposition for me, in part because when I'm attempting to assimilate those hardcore facts and make sense of them in a way that I can understand them well enough to be able to convey to a reader, I find that really fun and enjoyable.

And so, but you're right. I mean, I enjoy writing. I've been a writer for most of my life. I was writing for the high school newspaper when I was in high school, and, I published my first articles in national magazines when I was still an undergraduate in college. So I've been doing this for a long time and I think, you know, I don't really ever.

I believe draw any conscious, notations about my voice because I've had my own writing voice for a really long time. And so I just sort of naturally drop into it. Now, I do pay a lot of attention because the magazine editors I had many years ago trained me to do this. I pay a lot of attention to who the audience is.

Tripp Collins: Mm-hmm.

Dan Flores: And so, I'll write differently. For example, when I'm trying to do, an academic, back in the days when I did those academic papers, I would write differently when I was addressing an audience of my colleagues and a feel like environmental history. But since I retired from the university 10 years ago, I've sort of reverted to my earlier career as a magazine writer where I just began writing for what I thought were more public general readership audiences.

And you get to have, to me a quite a bit more fun that way. Because you know, in academic writing, they don't like you to use the first person pronoun. They don't like you to bring your own experiences into the game. and most of the things that I've written, particularly the books I've written since I retired from the university, my idea has been to get some of the experiences that I've had in putting a book together into the book, because I think it's possible for a reader to sort of latch on to a human interest traveler, a fellow traveler in the story.

books like Wild New World obviously have quite a number of episodes that I experienced in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for example. running a Buffalo jump in Montana, experiencing, the loss of so many creatures in modern life and trying to figure out how to feel about that.

Tripp Collins: When you're talking about audience, do you have like a particular person in mind, a reader in mind, or is it more kind of like just a general idea of like a popular audience?

Dan Flores: It's probably a more general idea. Part of I think the ability to maybe visualize a general audience has to do with having actually been a university professor for, a great many years where you have students who come into your classes who their preparations vary pretty considerably.

But you can sort of draw a conclusion about how sophisticated a delivery you can do to a group of say, 20, 21 year olds who are two or three years into college and have been exposed to quite a bit of learning and quite a number of different disciplines, but still aren't going to know how to. Put things together in a kind of a coherent package, right?

so that's, I think, probably what I almost in a unconscious way have drawn on are those, many of the classes that I had and people who are certainly bright and intelligent and informed about some things, but might not be able to put together this particular story that I wanted to tell them

Tripp Collins: on the largest scale of the book proceeds on chronological order. But I think in detail it's much more complicated than that. So I noticed you tended to cluster stories about a particular animal around maybe a pivotal point in their timeline. And there are definitely exceptions. The human relationship with wolves are sort of recurrent throughout the text. and I got the feeling there's an overarching chronological structure, but

It didn't bind you. You still felt like you could bring elements from stories in other time periods when you needed to. So the structure is simple in the face, but in practice or in reading is actually much more complicated, especially for a book of this size. I felt like maybe this was something you had to think about.

Dan Flores: Yes, you're right. I did have to think about that and I had to plot the chapters pretty carefully about exactly where they were going to go and you're also correct about the fact that, sometimes I will introduce. a character, for example, in two of the chapters, about two thirds of the way through the book, there are two biologists and writers, Vernon Bailey and his wife Florence Miriam Bailey, who appear as characters in one chapter and get married in that chapter.

But they also appear in a later chapter where they sort of track the continuing story of the relationship of, Americans with Wolves into the 1930s and 1940s. And I tried to do that to sort of keep them, in those two chapters pretty much where they were in time. But there were instances where I had to tell pieces of their stories that both began earlier in time than the chapter was focused on.

As I said, I had to ultimately carry them into a second chapter to bring them to the end of their careers and their lives. So that kind of thing, I plotted out as I went along. I tended to do that chapter by chapter, and you're right, the book sometimes can be, somewhat complex because it will consist, some chapters will consist, for example, of a series of three or four page and effect kind of essays on a particular topic.

And that topic will then set up the next three or four pages, which will be related, but will often. Be on, a different kind of track. And so that was one of those kinds of things where by the time I got to the end of the book, I was in a couple of instances taking five and six page pieces and pasting them somewhere else.

But I Will say I didn't do that very often. I can only remember about two times where I actually took a piece of the book and relocated it to a different part of the narrative. But that sort of complexity was a result of the fact that, you know, stories don't remain necessarily confined to a particular slice of time. They tend to have repercussions down the timeline that sometimes you need to grapple with.

Tripp Collins: Yeah, definitely. I love that you used the word epic in a subtitle. I know authors don't often get the chooser title, so maybe it wasn't even you. But I think there's no better adjective. I mean, this is the grand narrative of wildlife, including people in America.

So I was gonna ask you like, very roughly, what do we know about the timeline of people in America? And I guess in conjunction to that, like some of the charismatic megafauna that are in the foster records that we no longer see?

Dan Flores: Well, my answers in every case are no doubt the answers of the moment. As we all know, the science of the story of earth, uh, is continuing to unfold.

Uh, and we get new work all the time about, not only the, the best sheary of North America from the Paleontological record, when things, Emerged evolved here or migrated here when they disappeared. And of course we also are sort of endlessly getting new stories about the human appearance in North America and the the one that while New World follows.

Is the current one. But I will say that that current story only broke about three years before, while New World was published. that story is that the first really good evidence we have of the human presence in North America is 23,000 years ago. And that evidence is in the form of preserved.

Footprints in my home state here in the us, uh, at least at the state where I now live New Mexico, down in the southern part of New Mexico and what is now White Sands National Park. About five years ago now, a park archeologists discovered the first of a series of footprints that were set down in mud along a Lakeshore that existed 23,000 years ago.

And the reason we have a good radiocarbon dating of these prints is because the people who left them were stepping on top of a species of grass that grew. Then, that left us a biological record that could be radiocarbon dated, and that radiocarbon date was 23,000 years. That's before the high point of the Wisconsin Ice Age.

And so it means that. We don't know how long the people who left these prints were here in North America, but it does mean that they got to North America without following the bearing straight Land bridge because that route was completely blocked by ICE at that point. Mm-hmm. And so this is evidence, for example, of a theory that we've known for probably 30, 35 years.

there's been a lot of speculation that people could get into the Pacific Current and follow what's known as the Kelp Highway across the Northern Pacific. And that would end up dumping you somewhere along the Pacific Shore of what is now the United States. And from that point, people would begin working inland, to find situations that they particularly liked.

And one of the places that they found was here in Southern New Mexico. That's the earliest we know of, but that we have good hard evidence of. But, you know, that is a story, as I said, that's only about five years old now.

Tripp Collins: Wow. And the difficulty is when you get footprint dating, obviously you can't ask anyone where, how did you get here?

You know, there's no other physical evidence. It's really just a matter of speculation. That's what makes prehistory such a difficult topic.

Dan Flores: Yes, indeed. you're trying to spin as expansive a story as you can from a very small bit of evidence.

one of the things we know, for instance, is that one of the people, there were about three people who left these footprints. One of the people who did so was a young woman who had a child on her hip. And at one point in her journey along this Lakeshore, she put the child down. And so there are children's footprints beside where this mother or the young woman at least who was carrying a child.

We can't extrapolate and say it's the mother. It could have been a sister or. Somebody else. But, whoever was carrying, the woman who was carrying the child, put the child down and turned around, retraced their footstep and went back in the other direction. And in the interval before they passed a second time, a ground sloth, a Shasta ground sloth, had walked across the tracks that these two humans had left.

And the ground sloths reaction was to rare. Back in alarm perhaps set the scent that was left in those tracks. And so we actually have a little story that goes along with this. And there was also a dire wolf that crossed the tracks that she had made, carrying the child. And a Colombian mammoth had also walked across these tracks.

And so, yeah, we have this kind of, you know, classic pleistocene, bestiary of a ground sloth, a mammoth and a dire wolf. and the mammoth and the dire wolf didn't seem to make any reaction to the footprints, but the ground sloth did react, in what appears to be some sort of form of alarm

Tripp Collins: among the many things I learned. Reading the book was that bison and wooly mammoth animals that we consider like quintessentially American were relative newcomers to the American bestiary.

Dan Flores: Yes. I mean, they were interestingly, you know, the, the American bison is now our national mammal, so created by, president Barack Obama. This animal, which is kind of in the. The global mind, I think synonymous with the American frontier, as this iconic creature. the best evidence we've got these days indicates that bison probably didn't get to North America, in a form known as bison priscus, which was, ancestor of the, the later modern animal, until about 400,000 years ago, less than half a million years ago, and maybe more recently than that, bison, uh, evolved.

Uh, their origins are the same as cattle. They come out of Southeast Asia and they slowly migrated across Eurasia and across the bearing land bridge because animals were going, and humans too, in both directions across the bearing land bridge. Animals in particular, whenever that bridge was open, American animals like horses and camels, for example, that had evolved here, crossed the land bridge and went into Asia and Africa and Europe, in the case of horses in particular, all the way into Western Europe.

And of course, other animals like bison and mammoths were coming from the other direction and entering North America. And so the mammoth has been here, longer. it's been here, several million years, but or had been. But the bison, was quite a recent arrival. And that's of course a bit ironic considering the role that the bison sort of plays and, what the, memory of the American story is to most people in the world.

Tripp Collins: I was also surprised how recent the woolly mammoth was, I mean, they were living out, somewhere like I think the last heard was somewhere along the aleutian chain And how long ago was that? Maybe a thousand years ago?

Dan Flores: Well, down, yeah. Down to about 4,000 years. four. Okay. Yeah. There's a, on an island just to the south, west of the Aleutians, a group of mammoths managed to get on that island when it was a part of the bearing land bridge.

And when, the climate began to warm as the Wisconsin Ice Age receded waters rose around this particular island and trapped this group of mammoths on it. And what makes this an interesting story? A couple of things are interesting about it. For one thing, they far outlasted mammoths on the mainland, which were primarily gone by about 10,000 years ago.

Okay. Uh, about the beginning of the Holocene, but this group of mammoths lasted, in the aleutian region, lasted down to 4,000 years ago. this has been used by a lot of scientists to try to argue that. it clearly wasn't climate changed that did end animals like mammoths.

It was something else. And this was a population of mammoths that humans never discovered in contrast to the animals that were on the mainland. And so they lived much longer, but they ultimately died. And what caused them to die was, a classic of modern genomic science and genetic variability in species.

They brought such a low genetic. Diversity in a limited number of animals to this particular island. over time they reached, a point where they couldn't read and have offspring anymore. They suffered what? Scientist college genomic meltdown. Mm-hmm. And died out as a result of that. And that, of course, is something that we worry about with endangered species all over the world today.

You don't wanna let animals, populations get so low that the genetic diversity dwindles down to the point where they can't really survive anymore. Or even if there are individuals left, the genetic diversity has to remain broad enough that, your species can exist.

Tripp Collins: Right. In a lot of ways, this book tells a story of extinctions.

And I was very interested in the history of just the idea of extinction. And as I understand it, the paradigms roughly went from God created a static set of animals. They're here forever. And then they found a lot of strange animals and the fossil records. And the question was, well, where did they go?

So that changed it to maybe there are extinctions, but only from natural pressures. And then at some point, we admit humans might be contributing to the extinction of other species. And then we very quickly go into like, we're actively trying to eradicate so-called vermin. and then at some point we go, wow, maybe that was a little bit hasty.

Maybe we shouldn't have done that. so it, in some ways this all mirrors like the evolution of our attitudes towards something like climate change. Would you mind just reflecting a little bit on our changing attitude towards, extinctions and, and conservation?

Dan Flores: Yeah, you did a, you did a, a good summary of, you know, probably about four chapters or more of the book.

I wish I could have been that concise. first of all, you started it at exactly the right point because, old Worlders brought with them the notion that the earth was a deity created phenomenon, and that it was perfect because the deity was perfect and everything the deity created was perfect.

And therefore, in a perfect world, since humans and all other creatures had been created in a state of perfection, you could not ever. Lose anything. Everything was going to be completely static. There was no evolution, no change. Everything would just continue, as God had set it in motion in the beginning.

And that was obviously a very comforting thought. That enabled a population of people who also brought over the idea of, market capitalism to convert the animal resources of, the globe and my story of North America into, a moneymaking enterprise. That meant that, wow, there are no restrictions on what we can do, right?

We can just wade in and slaughter animals right and left, and because the world is perfect, they will never disappear and everything will be wonderful forever. This was, articulated in kind of a graphic mapping of early. Global earthly ecologies called the great chain of being, which goes back to the Greeks and Aristotle and the great chain of being.

Set all this up and right until the beginning of the 18 hundreds, most people around the globe still believe this was how the Earth functioned. But as you pointed out, as a result of, mining quarries, particularly in Western Europe, and in some instances finding the remains of extinct animals like mastodons around salt lakes in places just like Kentucky, people were confronted with these skeletal remains of creatures.

No one had ever seen that There was no record of in the ancient texts going back to the Greeks. And so what in the hell was this? What were these animals? And, were we going to find them somewhere out there? Thomas Jefferson, for a time before he became a converter to the idea of extinction, he believed that when he sent Louis and Clark West, they were gonna find mammoths.

They were gonna find elephants. Mm-hmm. Living in the American West. and so he told 'em to look for elephants and camels and, and all these things that, we had the fossil records for already. But by. 1810 or 1815, most people of science were beginning to realize, okay, we can't deny this extinction thing.

There have been creatures that have gone away and they don't seem to ever be coming back, and we don't know what happened to them. We don't know what this says about the age of the earth or what was here before our knowledge extends, into time The whole story kind of comes to a head in North America and really across the North Atlantic and Western Europe too, with the loss in the 1840s of one of the most common of birds in the North Atlantic.

It was called the great Auk, and it was our mm-hmm. Northern hemisphere penguin. But like so many birds that had never confronted humans interested in their eggs and in killing them before, great auks were just sitting ducks for ocean going travelers. And great auks became extinct by about 1842. Mm-hmm. And they became extinct largely because of the role that humans had played in slaughtering them for food and for their eggs.

And so now we suddenly had to confront, okay. Not only is extinction real, but it looks like we humans can play some role in it. And that of course leads us to this long trek through time where, as you pointed out, very much as with modern climate change, we start out by kind of arguing, well, there's no way humans could have wiped out animals like mammoths or No way in the world that ground slots could be gone in North America because of humans.

And so we do this denial thing where surely we're not responsible until the evidence just begins to stack up higher and higher and higher. That it sure looks as if humans are probably a major factor in. The extinctions of animals around the globe. When we migrated out of Africa and went to places first the Middle East, then Europe, then Asia, then the Americas, and then the islands.

all over the world were animals that had not ever evolved with human predators. Were kind of sitting ducks for us. Because they didn't see us and initially react with fear. In fact, they often just kind of stood there. This is called biological first contact and it's a phenomenon that's happened all over the earth as humans.

Tripp Collins: Expanded range. You mentioned Jefferson and that was funny to me to learn that he was, he was sort of motivated to show. People in Europe that, hey America is, we, we've got some, we have animals too, and our animals are, are better than your animals, type of deal. yeah. So there are a lot of incidents in this book, which are uniquely American.

And I'm thinking in terms of the magnitude of the destruction of nature, which is not a good look, but there's another perspective which, America has had to some extent since European contact, which is, it's a spectacular wilderness. And I, you know, as Americans, I think this is something we should think about and hold more dearly.

America is a land of truly amazing natural places. It's filled with incredible animals. And one of the lessons I draw from the book is that if we want America to continue to be a land of amazing wilderness, well we need to prioritize conservation. we need to keep in check our other very American tendencies of exploitation or there's gonna be a little left to be proud of.

Do you, would you agree with this or you see it kind of differently?

Dan Flores: No, I, I completely agree with you and I. You know the story. I certainly tried to tell the story of how we. Began to adopt a more enlightened, scientific and compassionate kind of attitude towards attempting to preserve, all this marvelous life that we, we old worlders inherited in North America because, as you pointed out, it really is extraordinary.

it required a number of things in the early 20th century. It required the science of ecology to begin to mature, the American society, for ecological science didn't have its first meeting until 1916. And so, this is barely, a little more than a hundred years ago, that finally we get the science on hand That enables us to begin to understand what happens if you take out all the predators that have been playing a role in North American ecologies for at least 5 million years.

In the case of wolves, for instance, and probably for dire wolves longer than that, maybe closer to 7 million years. And with them all gone, this obviously is going to, tamper with how ecologies function. But we just bring with us in the beginning the kind of old world folk knowledge of what you do about predators, which is.

We old worlders have been herding goats and sheep. Mm-hmm. And cows and horses forever. And so predators are the enemy. So we go to America and the first thing we try to do is we try to wipe out all the wolves and mountain lions in America. I mean, one of my arguments in the book, of course, is that, and I credit Aldo Leopold with realizing this by the 1950s, is that we didn't have to try to make.

The United States into a clone of England or France or another western European country. But that's kind of instinctively what we did because we thought those countries rep represented civilization. Right. But Leopold realized by the middle of the 20th century, you know, we did something different than Western Europe did.

Thanks to Teddy Roosevelt and people like that. We created this vast system of public lands owned by the American people, managed by various federal agencies. And so we have preserved a kind of a wilderness body of lands that Western Europe never got to do. And that means we can chart a different. Force into the future with, with, wild animals than Western Europe did.

Mm-hmm. And I think those kind of realizations don't start happening in America until the 1960s when people are reading, Leopold of Sand County Almanac and the ecology movement in the first Earth Day takes place. And of course, the culmination of all that for wildlife, to me in the American story is the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973.

That's sort of the act that saves America for wild animals.

Tripp Collins: Yeah, I'm gonna ask you exactly about that. So you tell that whole story of the environmental movement in the book. It was catalyzed by, Rachel Carson, silent Spring. It crested in the early seventies, with the Endangered Species Act, like you said, passing in 73.

And some people might be surprised to learn that the environmental movement had a very unlikely ally in the form of Richard Nixon, who of course didn't care much for the movement in principle, but he was very politically savvy. Yeah. and it's interesting to me that like in these times, polarized times, when it's hard to bring people together, it seems to me that your work in particular, a book like Wild New World, are one of these rare bridges over the political divide because whether you're a hunter or an outdoorsman, or if you're an environmentalist, you share this like love for nature.

And this is true despite your book containing some very pointed cultural and political critiques. So how do you explain like the ability of nature to bring people together in this way? And more broadly, how do you see the role of books like Wild New World and Society?

Dan Flores: I think the, the Natural World is a common ground for so many of us, regardless of the political perspective that we come at nature from, regardless of, Where we grew up, where we live, whether we're urban, rural, everybody, you know, and I, I've made the same kind of argument with, my podcast about the American West. Everybody is in love with the American West. And so there's a common ground here that regardless of where you stand politically, everybody can agree.

Wow, man, the American West is a really cool thing. And its story is really terrific. And I think the same thing is true of the nature story in America. And I, I tried to to point out for instance, that not only does Richard Nixon, for example, sign the Endangered Species Act into law, create the Environmental Protection Agency when he's president, ends poisoning of coyotes, on public lands in the United States.

the Endangered Species Act, which to me is one of the. Straight pieces of legislation the United States has ever passed. I mean, it belongs up there with the top four or five. That piece of legislation was passed in Congress with only in the house of represent, or in the two houses in the Senate and the House together with only 12 votes against it.

Mm-hmm. And 392 votes for it. That means that it was voted to be passed by Republicans and Democrats alike. And so that kind of common ground to me is the sort of thing that one needs to stand on these days to try to make clear to people on both sides of the political divide that Okay. We all love having these kind of creatures, right?

In the past, some of us didn't do well. It's not really associated with a political party, but in some instances it's associated with market capitalism. Yeah. With without any kind of restrictions on, it tended to wipe out animals like passenger pigeons nearly wiped out the American bison. I mean, those stories, we just have to look straight in the eye and say, okay, we're all capitalists, but.

You really have to regulate and be careful that you don't let capitalism run amok on the natural world because the history of this points to some pretty bad outcomes.

Tripp Collins: Yeah, exactly right. Something a little bit lighter. Just for fun. Which American Animal and Alex Dean would you have been most, curious to see in the wild?

And, why is it the dire wolf?

Dan Flores: Well, you know, it is the dire wolf actually. And, I hope I'm going to get to see, the three animals that, colossal Biosciences has recreated. I have to indulge the information to your listeners that, I'm on the, conservation advisory Board of Colossal.

And so, I knew this was all coming about six months before, the announcement back in the, in the late fall, or, or actually it was. First of the year here in 2025 that we had dire wolves, but I couldn't say anything to anybody. I was pledged to silence. And I'm hoping that having trusted me to be silent about the existence of, genetically, edited dire wolves is going to allow me at some point this summer to actually go and see those animals.

Tripp Collins: What are we talking about here? They've produced Yeah. Via genetic technology. A is this a hybrid wolf or is it a, an actual dire wolf?

Dan Flores: Yeah. So, colossal Biosciences, is one of several organizations. That is attempting to use CRISPR gene editing genetic science to try to recover. The term of art is de-extinction.

To try to engage in de Extincting some of the creatures we have lost in the past. Mm-hmm. And colossal at the moment. I mean, it's, it's probably first came to public notice when, George Church at Harvard announced that he was attempting to do this, to bring back with, Asiatic elephants to bring back a wooly mammoth.

but it turned out, and there are teams at Colossal that are working on the Dodo. they're also, another organization is working on de-extinction of the passenger pigeon and what you do, the reason they've, and thylacine and, and, Tasmania is another, the Tasmanian. Mm-hmm. tiger. Tiger Wolf.

Yeah. Is another creature that, colossal is working on. What you attempt to do is my understanding of the science, goes, is you try to find the closest living relative of one of these extinct species. And in the case of the dire wolf, which was the easiest of these animals I've mentioned to do because canid morphology and evolution in genetics seems to be a little simpler to manipulate than is the case with something like a dodo, for example, whose closest living relatives are pigeons.

And it's going to be hard, for example, to all of you probably have seen that. That gigantic beak that is on the specimens of dodos that we have. Well, there's not a living pigeon that has a beak like that. So there's gonna be, some difficulty in reproducing a dodo that's probably gonna require several more passes through genetic editing.

But with a dire wolf, what the team did was to take the genomic information from a modern gray wolf, an extant gray wolf, and found two different viable fossil. Specimens of dire wolves, one about 13,000 years ago, and the other, about 73,000 years old. Wow. And managed to get enough genetic material from those two specimens to put together a good piece of the dire wolf genome.

And they picked out then 20 specific genes that they believed were critical and were clearly different. In comparing the dire wolf genome from the gray wolf genome, they picked out 20 specific genes and edited them into a embryo, a pup embryo, and had a foster dog, mother have these pups. And so what you get in effect is a gray wolf with 20 dire wolf jeans edited into it.

And what immediately became apparent when these pups were born was that. They had a coloring, unlike any gray wolf, except for the ones that we have in the far arctic, and that was not the one that they used. Uh, it had a coloring that was unlike other gray wolves. These wolves were born pure white and their coats were, of a different kind of texture than those of the gray wolf.

So one thing they know that they edited for correctly was a different kind of coat and a different coloration of coat on the animal. What they also believe they probably edited correctly for was the size, because a dyer wolf is about 30 or 40 pounds larger, about 150 or 160 pound wolf. Whereas a gray wolf, a good male, may weigh 115 or 120 pounds.

And these animals, by the time they got to four months old, they were already at 85 pounds. And so they're obviously going to be very large. They're white. They, we think are going to look resemble, morphologically a dire wolf. Now here's where of course the argument comes in. A dire wolf in the past would be an animal like a modern gray wolf that would have a wolf culture.

It would learn about from progenitor and family member wolves. These dire wolves have nothing like that. They're the first dire wolves that we've had on the planet in at least 9,000, 10,000 years, and so. They're not going to have dire wolf culture. They're also, these first animals are not going to be released into the wild anywhere.

In fact, colossal doesn't have any plans to release any of the animals that they're trying to recreate into the wild, at least not yet. What they're trying to do is to demonstrate the scientific efficiency and efficacy of being able to do something like this.

Tripp Collins: That is wild. That is, science fiction.

Come, come reality.

Dan Flores: Yeah. It's, it is really, it's Jurassic Park in a way.

Tripp Collins: Yeah. I wanted to, since you mentioned a few books, I wanted to ask you about your favorite science books. and I welcome you to talk about any one you want. but you call out a number of influential books by name in Wild New World.

and here's just a few, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, that was published in 1854, the Wolves of Mount McKinley by Adolf Mur, published in 1944. Almanac, and sketches here and there written by Aldo Leopold, published in 1949 and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, 1962. Do you wanna speak to any one of these or maybe another one?

Dan Flores: Well, all of those are a part of the cannon that, I came up on in terms of, you know, I mean, I read, All of those books in college and used several of them. I've used both a Sand County Almanac, and Silent Spring in classes that I taught at the University of Montana in environmental history.

They're part of a, to me, a long literature in America that focuses on. How Americans have related to the natural world. And I mean, I started, I think that that list of books with William Woods, Pilgrim's progress about Massa, the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the 1630s, because he has such marvelous passages describing all these strange new creatures that, Europeans are encountering in the Americas.

And I went on to talk about, I even started one of the chapters talking about William Bartram's book travels. Mm-hmm. I mean, that is one of the remarkable books of Colonial American history. Here's a guy, a young, he's basically a kid who, his has a father who is the king's botanist, William Barro goes on this.

Jaunted across the American south from Philadelphia, all the way down into Florida and over to Louisiana, and spends about four years doing it right at the heart, of the American Revolution. Goes through the southern colonies at a time when there are battles taking place. The guy is so fascinated with nature.

He never mentions the American Revolution one time. He doesn't even pays no attention to it because there are mockingbirds out there and there are possums and there are alligators. And yeah, he's so wrapped up in the natural world that he simply pays no attention to the revolution that creates the United States.

So I sort of tracked through much of the book doing that. I mean, another one I talk about is John James Ottomans, the Birds of America, of course, which, was considered in its time the greatest tribute to nature that anyone had ever made. I mean, this is a guy who commits himself fairly early in his life.

To portraying every bird species of America, and he ends up doing 485 of 'em. He doesn't get all of them because we discover subsequent birds after his death, but he gets 485 birds. And he not only gets 485 North American birds, he portrays them life size in his book so that you have this gigantic book that is about five feet across.

Because the only way you can get great blue herons and bald eagles and whooping cranes and things on a single page is to have a gigantic book. And you also have to give them strange sort of postures in position so that, the great blue herons and neck doesn't extend off into space. But yeah, there, I think there are, you know, a great many really wonderful books in the American story.

And, I mean, I went to college reading them. I had people read them in my classes, and I wanted to make sure that in a book like Wild New World that, readers were exposed to some of these. Real classics of American Nature study.

Tripp Collins: Definitely. And since you mentioned Audubon, I have to tell you this story.

I wa I was in the, public library in New York City. My son and my brother were just checking out the exhibitions, and then we go into, I think it was like just a cafe or something, and there's a, like the biggest book you've ever seen laid out, opened up. And, there are these green parrots on there and they, they're about to fly off the page.

It seemed to me. And I title was Carolina Parakeet. And I thought, well, what the heck is a Carolina parakeet? I, I'm from the Carolinas. I've never heard of one. And, and of course it's because they went extinct and they, the early 20th century. To me that was very. Impactful moment. 'cause it, it made me think, I will never see a Carolina parakeet.

My son will never see a Carolina parakeet. And I just felt like robbed of that experience. the Carolina parakeet is a story that you tell in the book, and it's largely one of, I think we can say pretty definitively that humans were the cause in terms of disrupting their natural habitat. they were easy to kill essentially.

I didn't come across that bird again for many years. And it was in the pages of your book. And that's, you know, unfortunately that's where a lot of these creatures live now. and I think that's part of why a book like this is so powerful is 'cause we can experience these creatures.

Dan Flores: Yeah, indeed.

That's when we lost.

Tripp Collins: Do you have any advice you would give, an aspiring writer of a science book?

Dan Flores: Read Good writers? yeah. I mean, every time I hit a snag or the words won't come, you know, I. Turn to someone, whose work I admire and spend 30 minutes reading. And that usually loosens me up.

And I think that's the way you start probably in every art field. you start by reading other people and by standing on their shoulders and learning how they do it. And so, yeah, that's my advice for somebody who wants to do that. Read good writers.

Tripp Collins: Heck yeah. What are you excited about right now? I know you mentioned your, your podcast, which recently launched. So is, are there any other projects you wanna mention

Dan Flores: Well, the podcast is the current one. it's different from most podcasts because, although I suppose you could call me as you did earlier, the host.

What it is, is I'm doing about a 35 or 40 minute reading from some of my work about the American West, which is kind of distinctive. I've written about parts of the American West that other people don't write about primarily.

Wildlife, wild animals and native people in the Western landscapes. And so both published and unpublished works make up the, the script that I read for the first 40 minutes or so. And then, a couple of good friends of mine who in fact took classes with me, at the University of Montana and, our really top minds sit there for 20 minutes or so with me and we talk about what I had just.

Discussed and read. And, and so it's a about a 20 minute discussion that ends those. And so the primary discussions are with Steven Ella, who's, you know, a very famous figure, in American, sort of outdoor. media, and Randall Williams, who was, the last PhD student who finished up under me before I retired at the University of Montana, and he's working with, with Steven and Steven's Empire.

Uh, and so those guys, uh, are really pretty terrific as conversationalists about this stuff. So that's what's going on at the moment. But I will say I sold a, a new book earlier in the year to, the publisher of, wild New World, which was WW Norton, New York Publishing House. This particular one, is gonna be a little bit different approach for me.

It's called homestead, building a green lifestyle in the modern American countryside. And what it's about, really is about my attempts to acquire pieces of land, which I alluded to earlier in our discussion. one in West Texas, one in, Montana's Bitterroot Valley, and now in Santa Fe County, south of Santa Fe.

And what I've tried to do is, the book is sort of powered by, what I refer to as reverse homesteading. What homesteading was about in American history was taking, raw land, usually land that had been managed by native people for thousands of years, and trying to convert it into being a moneymaking project in the, global economy so that you'd take a.

Piece of ground, 160 acres and you'd build a house and you'd fence it and you'd put cattle on it and you'd put sheep and goats on it, and you'd try to grow a crop and you would do all those things that made it into a kind of an economic enterprise. In the modern world, what I've done with my places is to take three pieces of ground where that had been done to them in the past, and I've tried to take them back in the other direction so that I'm ecologically restoring them, or as the term of art these days is rewilding them.

Tripp Collins: Mm-hmm.

Dan Flores: To get these pieces of ground back into a condition they were in when native people were managing them. So that's the next book. It's it'll be out, I think in about 2029.

Tripp Collins: All right. I'll put it on the calendar. No, I'm very much looking forward to it. That seems like an idea for the times. You know, something that people should be paying attention to.

If people wanna find out about you and and support your work, where should they go?

Dan Flores: Well, you can Google me. I'm in a lot of places, but, I don't do, social media. I don't do it in part because I just feel like it consumes too much time that I'm invested in in doing other things. It's how I manage to get the kinds of work, out that I do.

So you can go to Amazon, of course, and very quickly see, the 11 books that I've got out along with pieces that I've written for other people's books. There are a few other places you can go, but you can find them on Google.

Tripp Collins: So yeah, there's so much packed into this book. It's epic, it's dense, yet it's fun to read. Um, it's award-winning. Remember, check out Dan's other books in his podcast. It's called The American West. This has been Dan Flores and we've been talking about his book, wild New World, the Epic Story of People and Animals in America.

Dan, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you.

Dan Flores: Oh, thanks, trip. It's been enjoyable.