Dan Flores

And of course, no amount of doubling down or tripling down, inventing a whole host of new poisons to kill coyotes, none of it ended up working.

All it essentially did, as biologists finally figured out, was to trigger these adaptive responses that coyotes had long ago evolved because they were harassed by wolves.

As humans harassed them, they called on these adaptations to keep their populations alive, and it also triggered their expansion.

And so, as I said, it's this kind of really fun story because it's like the movie Avatar where

you don't expect that the blue people in the end are going to win, but they do.

And so in this case, it's the coyotes who win, and that's pretty fun.

Yeah, it is.

And the truth is, if you have a bookcase of...

American presidents and you're looking for the people who are most interested in the natural world, you have like Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt on one end.

And on the other end of those least interested, Richard Nixon is one of those who is going to appear as the other bookend.

But in this particular instance, Nixon, of course, is a consummate politician, and his idea is the ecology movement is in full swing.

We've just had the first Earth Day.

The public, after Silent Spring, is really alarmed at the use of poisons.

I'm going to get on top of this because it's going to be a political surge on my behalf.

It doesn't work out that way.

But, I mean, he's essentially attempting to take advantage of a movement that he perceives he might be able to surf.

Yeah, always calculating.

Always calculating, yeah.

Oh, Randall, great fun.

As indicated by the work of painters and photographers, nostalgia and honesty about the West dueled with one another as the frontier ended and the modern West began.