The Environment in Modern North America places the environment at the center of the historical conversation. From histories of place to explorations of current environmental issues, problems, and policies, volumes in this series will reflect innovative examinations of a wide range of topics and environmental trends. Works in this series will chronicle the stories of people and the places in which they live, and the ways in which they have engaged with and affected the environments around them. Focused primarily, but not exclusively, on the 20th century, this new series looks to environmental history to put the natural world in conversation with human endeavors. Immersing readers in both the landscape and the stories of places and people, we seek topics that touch readers where they live and work.

Leisl Carr Childers is the author of The Size of the Risk: Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Contemporary Nonfiction. Her research focuses on public lands management in the American West and has been featured on the Bundyville Season 1 podcast (Longreads/Oregon Public Radio, 2018), on PBS Frontline ("American Patriot," 2017), and in High Country News. She is currently Assistant Professor of History at Colorado State University (CSU), where she works with the Public Lands History Center, CSU Extension, and colleagues in Ethnic Studies, Forest and Rangelands Stewardship, and Geosciences.

Michael W. Childers is Assistant Professor of History at Colorado State University (CSU), where he focuses on the issues of recreational tourism, public lands, and water in the America West. A council member of the CSU History Department’s Public Lands History Center, Childers works with a wide range of public lands management agencies on projects ranging from Parks as Portals to Learning with Rocky Mountain National Park, to coauthoring an administrative history on the US Forest Service from 1960 to present. His book, Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement, won the International Ski History Association’s Ullr Award and was named a finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award.