Five Foundational Conservation Books That Shaped How I See the West

**Ed Roberson** (0:11)
This is the Mountain and Prairie Podcast. I'm Ed Roberson. This is a special book focused episode, but before we get started, I wanted to thank all of our supporters. Mountain and Prairie is listener supported via Patreon. You can go to mountainandprairie.com/patreon to learn about that. And it's also supported by a number of values aligned organizations who helped me keep this whole thing going. So I want to thank the Freeflow Institute, the Nature Conservancy in Colorado, and the Well-Done Foundation for their support of the podcast. Hope you enjoy it.
Hey everybody, I'm excited to do another book-focused episode. This one focused on some of the most foundational conservation books that I've read. As some of you know, who've listened to podcasts for quite a while, I used to work full-time in the conservation world, and before that I was in the real estate world. I really do credit reading and reading a lot of books about conservation and the history of conservation as kind of getting me started and getting the momentum going in the right direction. So I eventually walked away from the real estate business and went all in on conservation. And then this podcast definitely has a conservation focus. It's crazy, but the thing has been named the number one conservation podcast both in 2025 and 2026, for whatever that's worth. And so I thought I would take a minute or take this episode to talk about some of the most foundational books that I've read that have really helped shape my thoughts about conservation and really helped open the door for me to go learn new things about conservation and the history of the West.
I've done a number of these book focused episodes over the years on the main channel here. Most recently, I did one with Mark Kenyon a few months back from... Mark Kenyon is the Director of Conservation at MeatEater and he's a voracious reader. He reads more than I do.
We got together and talked about our favorite adventure books. We've also talked about some of our favorite books about the American West. We do those every so often.
Those things are very well received when I put them out. Then when I do Patreon exclusive episodes for the Patreon supporters, the most recent one I did was about my favorite biographies.
People seem to enjoy a brief explanation of some of the books that I recommend. For those who are not familiar with it, I have a book recommendations email list that goes out. I've been sending that thing out now for over 10 years, coming up on 11 years.
It's just a quick email that comes out every other month that some of the books that I read, and some of them are about the West, some are about conservation, but they're all over the place. A lot of biographies, a lot of adventure books. But anyway, I wanted to just run through this list real quick in the hopes that maybe you'll find a few that you have not read that have meant a lot to me and helped me understand this place called the West and the conservation world. So I'm just going to get right into it. Most of these books have a direct connection to the podcast in one way or the other, so anytime there are episodes that are related to these books, I will mention that and there will be links in the episode notes.
All right, let's go. The number one book, and these are not in any particular order, but I do think that this book should be, if you haven't read it, is required reading to give you a great overview of the West and the environmental and conservation movement in the West. And that book is called Losing Eden by Dr. Sarah Dant. And Sarah has been on the podcast twice. Both times we were talking about this book. When I first met Sarah many, many, many years ago at the Aspen Institute, actually, we were both doing things there for an event they had about the history of the American West. I met Sarah and she is just so awesome. She was a professor at Weber State in Utah, and she retired a year or two ago.
And you've probably seen her if you watch the Ken Burns documentary about Buffalo. She was one of the historians that they interviewed and that was offering a lot of her expertise on Buffalo and history in the West. She's just a very, very, very smart, very charismatic, very fun person who is able to explain history in a way that even somebody like me, who's not academic by any means, but who enjoys reading, enjoys learning, she's able to write in a way that is super engaging and you learn a lot. And so this book, Losing Eden, she initially published it many years ago with a small publisher. And it really gained a cult following. People really, really loved it. So years later, maybe two or three, two years ago, maybe she republished it with a new publisher and University of Nebraska Press, which is bigger, and redid the book, rewrote parts of it, put in a lot of graphics and maps and put it back out into the world. And so our second podcast, we talk a bit about that process. But really, overall, this book is a wide, sweeping history of the West from when the in the first chapter, she talks about when the first humans came over across the Bering Strait and down into North America.