In 1992, I sent a letter to the New York Times Book Review that quoted the "Voices out of Utah" section of Mark Twain's "The Dervish and the Offensive Stranger" to argue that he addressed the issues of ecological and multicultural conflict in the West that were being highlighted in the early 1990s by what were called "new" or "revisionist" historians. See: Don't Fence Them In http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CEFDA1431F93BA2 5753C1A964958260 His writings about environmental issues were not limited to descriptions of scenery. For example, chapter 19 of Following the Equator includes this discussion of the dingo: "In that garden I also saw the wild Australian dog -- the dingo. He was a beautiful creature -- shapely, graceful, a little wolfish in some of his aspects, but with a most friendly eye and sociable disposition. The dingo is not an importation; he was present in great force when the whites first came to the continent. It may be that he is the oldest dog in the universe; his origin, his descent, the place where his ancestors first appeared, are as unknown and as untraceable as are the camel's. He is the most precious dog in the world, for he does not bark. But in an evil hour he got to raiding the sheep-runs to appease his hunger, and that sealed his doom. He is hunted, now, just as if he were a wolf. He has been sentenced to extermination, and the sentence will be carried out. This is all right, and not objectionable. The world was made for man -- the white man." Dan Beard's illustration for this passage, "The White Man's World," shows a white soldier standing amid dead animals and people. Twain's writings on the environmental impact of imperialism can be traced back to his 1866 trip to Hawaii which resulted in his first commentaries on the "disease of civilization." Jim Zwick