American Serengeti Quotes

“We stood by and allowed what happened to the Great Plains a century ago, the destruction of one of the ecological wonders of the world. In modern America, we need to see this with clear eyes, and soberly, so that we understand well that the flyover country of our own time derives much of its forgettability from being a slate wiped almost clean of its original figures.”
― Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

“Why did we so consistently look at the West through the sights of a rifle?”
― Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

“This place was deja-vu for me not from some past life, but from the minds of others, who had made me know what a magical world the Great Plains once had been. The poetry of the plains was considerably fainter in my time on earth, but this particular morning on the Missouri I was hearing enough of the passages to realize that despite all, we had not entirely lost the American Serengeti. Not yet.”
― Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

“The contrast between the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains in Lewis and Clark's day was clear in the party's longing to escape the wild-life poor mountains and return to the Plains.
In our time, following two centuries of history we have accomplish an entire reversal: the federally managed Rockies are now home to most of the West's wildlife, while the privately owned Great Plains has become a monument to the American sacrifice of nature.”
― Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains