Range Wars
The Environmental Contest for White Sands Missile Range
-
- 189,00 kr
-
- 189,00 kr
Udgiverens beskrivelse
Established in south-central New Mexico at the end of World War II, White Sands Missile Range is the largest overland military reserve in the western hemisphere. It was the site of the first nuclear explosion, the birthplace of the American space program, and the primary site for testing U.S. missile capabilities.
In this environmental history of White Sands Missile Range, Ryan H. Edgington traces the uneasy relationships between the military, the federal government, local ranchers, environmentalists, state game and fish personnel, biologists and ecologists, state and federal political figures, hunters, and tourists after World War II—as they all struggled to define and productively use the militarized western landscape. Environmentalists, ranchers, tourists, and other groups joined together to transform the meaning and uses of this region, challenging the authority of the national security state to dictate the environmental and cultural value of a rural American landscape. As a result, White Sands became a locus of competing geographies informed not only by the far-reaching intellectual, economic, and environmental changes wrought by the cold war but also by regional history, culture, and traditions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Macalester College history professor Edgington takes a scholarly look at New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range, examining "the methodological crossroads between environmental history, the history of the American West and U.S. Mexico borderlands, and the history of science and technology." He begins with the area's history up until the first years of the missile range and concludes with the fight to introduce the endangered Mexican gray wolf. This discussion of the wolf is only one of two chapters that hew to the stated environmental theme, the other being a discussion of the similarly ill-considered introduction of the African oryx to White Sands. Other chapters dwell on the political and legal "range wars" between the military and ranchers who lost both private property and access to grazing on federal lands. While Edgington devotes a chapter to the first atomic tests, his discussion centers around the interest to create a memorial attraction at the site rather than any effect the fallout may have had on local flora and fauna. Edgington's work will be of interest to select scholars of the specialized fields he addresses.