Research Interests
My primary research interests explore the intersection between social change, state-building, and the non-human world. While conservation may seem a conventional topic for environmental history, I am fascinated by the unexpected implications of how, when, and who participates in the practice of setting aside certain places for official protection. It is clear that the ideas and practices underwriting conservation leave indelible imprints across multiple social, spatial, and temporal scales contributing pleasure and pain to people's lives.
For instance, by 1940, Mexico had more national parks than any country in the world. My book, Revolutionary Parks: Conservation, Social Justice, and Mexico’s National Parks, 1910-1940 is the first to analyze how the revolutionary Mexican government seized control of natural resources out of a commitment to the public good during a time of social upheaval and rebuilding. I argue that rather than separate processes, enacting institutions to support social justice and nature protection went hand in hand.
I am now developing two new research projects. The first grows out of my desire to place Mexican environmental history in a larger Latin American context. The project, “Comparative Histories of Conservation: Nature, Science, and Society in Patagonian and Amazonian South America,” analyzes the evolution of scientifically informed conservation and its influence on people and environments using the transnational regions of Patagonia and Amazonia as points of entry. My second new project takes up the role of climate change as an influential factor on the organization of public works in the basin of Mexico City throughout the nineteenth century.
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1964
My primary research interests explore the intersection between social change, state-building, and the non-human world. While conservation may seem a conventional topic for environmental history, I am fascinated by the unexpected implications of how, when, and who participates in the practice of setting aside certain places for official protection. It is clear that the ideas and practices underwriting conservation leave indelible imprints across multiple social, spatial, and temporal scales contributing pleasure and pain to people's lives.
For instance, by 1940, Mexico had more national parks than any country in the world. My book, Revolutionary Parks: Conservation, Social Justice, and Mexico’s National Parks, 1910-1940 is the first to analyze how the revolutionary Mexican government seized control of natural resources out of a commitment to the public good during a time of social upheaval and rebuilding. I argue that rather than separate processes, enacting institutions to support social justice and nature protection went hand in hand.
I am now developing two new research projects. The first grows out of my desire to place Mexican environmental history in a larger Latin American context. The project, “Comparative Histories of Conservation: Nature, Science, and Society in Patagonian and Amazonian South America,” analyzes the evolution of scientifically informed conservation and its influence on people and environments using the transnational regions of Patagonia and Amazonia as points of entry. My second new project takes up the role of climate change as an influential factor on the organization of public works in the basin of Mexico City throughout the nineteenth century.
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1964