Guadalupe Mountains National Park: An Environmental History of the Southwest Borderlands

Abstract

The story of American national parks has long consisted of layered histories of ecological changes, social collisions, forceful dispossessions, and persistent controversies over conservation and preservation. Many historians have carved out helpful environmental and public history narratives of parklands in the West. Scholars have recently moved beyond these approaches to consider parks as regional and global borderlands to understand new relationships and conflicts between the ecological, the political, and the personal. Jeffrey P. Shepherd joins this effort with Guadalupe Mountains National Park by tracing the ways many of these factors intersect in national park mountain lands that have long been borderlands for environmental, social, and political relationships. Shepherd argues that the history of the Guadalupe Mountains National Park helps us better understand the ways “people interact with their natural environments: how they perceive and misperceive them, try to control and transform them, and in this case, how they ultimately decide to live with and in them” (p. vii).