Dan Flores

speaker

4,468 appearances 23 recordings 4 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 18 Aug

Dan Flores’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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Gunfighters · Ep. 40: Becoming Natives of Place in the American West | The American West · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

And since then, I have been an inhabitant first and foremost of the Galisteo Valley bioregion. voice-verified

In modern form, this way of thinking about the places you occupy dates to the 1970s. voice-verified

But in the West, it's actually a much older idea. voice-verified

In 1878, explorer and Ur-Western bureaucrat John Wesley Powell laid before Congress a complete rethinking of Western settlement he titled the Lands of the Arid Region. voice-verified

It was the first time Powell proposed tossing aside the cadastral or grid system of survey in a West that he found to be so unlike the East. voice-verified

But it wasn't the last. voice-verified

In 1890, Powell passed out to members of Congress voice-verified

A remarkable colored map of the West, mapping out 24 major natural provinces, subdivided into 140 candidates he proposed as commonwealths, based on watercourses and topographical cohesion. voice-verified

Facing a chilly reception in Washington, Powell tried his best to persuade the territorial legislature in Montana to adopt his commonwealths for governing the soon-to-be state. voice-verified

But by then, America had been using the survey grids of range, township, and section for more than a century. voice-verified

However inappropriate imposing a grid on diverse western ecologies, tradition and momentum were just too strong. voice-verified

For designating Western bioregional places, Powell's Commonwealth's map was brilliant. voice-verified

Today, it's just the pretty signposts of a road not taken. voice-verified

But however faded the sign or dim the road, a few decades back, there were Westerners who found that Powell Trail and took it. voice-verified

Before Google, before the World Wide Web, voice-verified

there was the Whole Earth Catalog. voice-verified

Half the size of a coffee table, the Whole Earth Catalog was the brainchild of a Californian named Stuart Brand. voice-verified

Interviewed recently in the New York Times, Brand explained his famous book this way. voice-verified

For various reasons, a whole lot of people in college in the early 60s and on through into the early 70s thought they needed to reinvent civilizations. voice-verified

So sometimes, as I would put it, in communes, sometimes occupying abandoned mining towns, sometimes buying small acreages to homestead on, they relocated to rural America, including many places in the West. voice-verified

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