The image above is one of the hosts' favorite rodents, the Abert's squirrel. They can be found across the four corners region of the Mountain West. The image comes from a wonderful Abert's squirrel resource written by the National Park Service - taken by Sally King.

Episode 9 Synopsis - In this episode, Emily and Michelle take the listeners on a wild exploration of the urban morethanhuman and ask that we become aware of the importance of cities to the "nature" of the region.

Postscript. Click here to listen to our Postscript on the sources that most inspired the stories we share in this episode. Coming soon!

meme via: San Jose State University Writing center

Links and Citations for Learning MORE THAN you already know!

"It used to be that rodents made the menu." Here is the menu from the Drake Hotel Thanksgiving Menu from 1886 that Emily discusses.

From Peter Matthiessen's original Wildlife in America, 1959.

Denver City Park was created to become a more friendly space for the morethan. School children planted trees. Lakes were added to the once dry plains space. Today, the park is full of urban wildlife. To read a short history of the park, click here.

For an interesting look at urban wildlife in Los Angels, watch this PBS excerpt. And think back to Episode 7! Also check out E11 where Rux Guidi discusses P22 as example of her hope for all of the West. All of our episodes, like the ecosystem they are meant to mimic, connect.

This is a deer in Denver's City Park behind a fence enclosure close to the zoo. From the Denver Public Library digital archives.

Some of the best sources for historians are newspapers. Thanks to the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities, many states have digitized historic newspapers and made them available to the public. Michelle has been part of a grant that the University of Arizona has received for several years to digitize Arizona newspapers. Idaho has had a similar grant. These become part of the "Chronicling America" site that Emily used to access the Idaho Statesman to learn about those pesky people-biting squirrels. The Lincoln County Times in Idaho had a local taxidermist in 1917 who would pay kids 5 cents for squirrel pelts that hadn't been damaged by the poisoning campaign happening in the area (see lower right part of the far right column).

American Heritage Center archives.

Archives might be a kind of accidental ecosystem much like cities.

Archives are changing. Importantly efforts are being made at collecting oral histories for populations whose experiences were not valued by institutions in the past. Many of these oral histories are also being put online. An excellent example of an online oral history archive is Archive Tucson.

Might the usefulness of the idea of wilderness have run its course? This question was asked by historian William Cronon in 1995. You can read his article here.

"...[we need to] abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial—completely fallen and unnatural—and the tree in the wilderness as natural—completely pristine and wild. Both trees in some ultimate sense are wild; both in a practical sense now depend on our management and care. We are responsible for both, even though we can claim credit for neither. Our challenge is to stop thinking of such things according to set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others..."

You can read the Wilderness Act (you can read nearly every law passed in the United States) online.

The historical relationship of humans and the more-than-human urban wildlife is fraught with violence and desperate attempts at control. Rodenticide and other kinds of poisoning offer us an interesting avenue to think about how humans and animals are fundamentally connected. They also teach us that we can learn from our unquestioning application of technoscience and shift our approach to living with wildlife.

And of course, in the Mountain West, the intersections of history, cities, and animals all begin and end with cows.

Image of cattle being drive to Frontier Park to begin Cheyenne Frontier days, 2013. Photo: FE Warren Air Force Base.

Join us for the next episode of More Than in which Michelle and Emily take listeners on a journey from dark skies to monarch butterflies. Episode 10 is Travelers and is the penultimate episode.