Leisl Carr Childers | Colorado State University (original) (raw)

Books by Leisl Carr Childers

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015

The Great Basin, a stark and beautiful desert filled with sagebrush deserts and mountain ranges, ... more The Great Basin, a stark and beautiful desert filled with sagebrush deserts and mountain ranges, is the epicenter for public lands conflicts. Arising out of the multiple, often incompatible uses created throughout the twentieth century, these struggles reveal the tension inherent within the multiple use concept, a management philosophy that promises equitable access to the region’s resources and economic gain to those who live there.

Multiple use was originally conceived as a way to legitimize the historical use of public lands for grazing without precluding future uses, such as outdoor recreation, weapons development, and wildlife management. It was applied to the Great Basin to bring the region, once seen as worthless, into the national economic fold. Land managers, ranchers, mining interests, wilderness and wildlife advocates, outdoor recreationists, and even the military adopted this ideology to accommodate, promote, and sanction a multitude of activities on public lands, particularly those overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. Some of these uses are locally driven and others are nationally mandated, but all have exacted a cost from the region’s human and natural environment.

Available at University of Oklahoma Press https://www.oupress.com/9780806149271/the-size-of-the-risk/.

Chapter Essays by Leisl Carr Childers

Media Education for a Digital Generation. Julie Frechette and Rob Williams, editors. New York: Routledge, 2015

As the very title of this book suggests, we are awash with new technology and digital content, an... more As the very title of this book suggests, we are awash with new technology and digital content, and the result is a number of new literacies that are changing the face of education and the way young people learn. Consequently, there is a growing consensus in our educational discourse that our society demands an increase in “digility” (a word we coined within our Interactive Digital Studies program at the University of Northern Iowa), which means an extreme agility with digital technology to innovate, create, plan, and produce digital experiences of all types. Available at Routledge press https://www.routledge.com/Media-Education-for-a-Digital-Generation/Frechette-Williams/p/book/9780815386414.

Proving Grounds: Militarized Landscapes, Weapons Testing, and the Environmental Impact of U.S. Bases. Edwin A. Martini, editor. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015

Proving Grounds brings together a wide range of scholars across disciplines and geographical bord... more Proving Grounds brings together a wide range of scholars across disciplines and geographical borders to deepen our understanding of the environmental impact that the U.S. military presence has had at home and abroad. The essays in this collection survey the environmental damage caused by weapons testing and military bases to local residents, animal populations, and landscapes, and they examine the military’s efforts to close and repurpose bases—often as wildlife reserves. Together they present a complex and nuanced view that embraces the ironies, contradictions, and unintended consequences of U.S. militarism around the world. In complicating our understanding of the American military’s worldwide presence, the essayists also reveal the rare cases when the military is actually ahead of the curve on environmental regulation compared to the private sector. The result is the most comprehensive examination to date of the U.S. military’s environmental footprint—for better or worse—across the globe. Available at University of Washington Press https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295741710/proving-grounds/.

Journal Articles by Leisl Carr Childers

Environmental History 18 (3), 2013

The images that popularized the issue of cruelty in wild horse roundups have a long history. This... more The images that popularized the issue of cruelty in wild horse roundups have a long history. This article traces the transformation of the photographs of mustangers at work taken by artist Gus Bundy into the most publicized images of the plight of wild horses in the American West. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/24690495.

Utah Historical Quarterly 88 (3), 2020

Papers by Leisl Carr Childers

International Grassland Conference Proceedings, 2021

Rapid social and ecological changes on global rangelands amplify the challenges to achieving biod... more Rapid social and ecological changes on global rangelands amplify the challenges to achieving biodiversity conservation, rural economic viability and social well-being, and rangeland sustainability. These dynamics create a need for transdisciplinary science that is inclusive of ecological, sociological, and participatory approaches in order to rebuild meaningful working relationships between scientists, ranchers and managers, and other rangeland stakeholders. In real application, however, transdisciplinary science faces numerous social, ethical, and logistical challenges, including the question of how the work might benefit rangeland stakeholders. Our objective is to advance rangeland researchers' toolbox for meaningful engaged research by describing three lessons from transdisciplinary projects in the rangeland contexts of the United States. These include the need for 1) ranch-scale, long-term participatory management experiments; 2) folklore and oral history methods and 3) community-supported social-ecological research that creates credible science that can be communicated out to non-ranching decision-makers. These examples illustrate the nuances of transdisciplinary research, reciprocity, and useable knowledge creation in complex rangeland socialecological contexts. Available at https://uknowledge.uky.edu/igc/24/6/23.

Book Reviews by Leisl Carr Childers

Environmental History (January 2013) 18 (1) pp. 227-229.

Utah Historical Quarterly (Fall 2022) 90 (4): 341-342.

Oregon Historical Quarterly (Summer 2022) 123 (2): 215-216.

Western Historical Quarterly (Fall 2010) 41 (3) pp. 389-390. , 2010

The Western Historical Quarterly, 2014

Environmental History, 2015

The Public Historian, 2015

In sharp contrast to the spate of recent publications on modern Kurdish politics and history that... more In sharp contrast to the spate of recent publications on modern Kurdish politics and history that largely covers only events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this work is an accessible presentation of earlier Kurdish history. "The purpose of this book," writes the author, "is to examine Kurdish distinctiveness and identity from the rise of Islam to the first development of the modern Kurdish national movement after World War I" (3). As such, Michael Eppel presents readers with a background that will enable them to know the earlier historical basics and understand how present realities came to be. As the author notes, because the Kurds had no state of their own that could promote the writing of a national history, and because the prevailing conditions in Kurdistan and Kurdish society hindered the development of a modern educated class, the history of the Kurds has not in fact really been written-a deficiency that this book hopes in some small measure to redress. (13) The relatively short text is based on a large variety of sources dating from such ancient Greek authors such as Xenophon; Arabic ones such as al-Baladhuri and al-Tabari, the famous Sharafnama or History of the Kurdish Nation, published by the Kurdish scholar Sharaf Khan al-Bitlisi in 1595; the Seyahatname, or Book of Travels, published by the Ottoman traveler Evliya Chelebi; to more modern ones, all capably listed in the thorough notes and bibliography. Wadie Jwaideh and David McDowall are two recent authors who cover similar ground. In his wide-ranging introduction, the author tells readers that "in the histories written by the surrounding states and cultures, the Kurds have been perceived as peripheral, tribal, anarchical, and possessed of a savage culture" and problematically that "the word kurd, or kord, originally meant 'shepherd,' so that it had a social significance as well as a vague socioethnic connotation" (1, 7). However, "eventually the signifier kurd acquired the connotation of 'robber'" (20). Heuristically, he adds that "the absence of a Kurdish alphabet appropriate to the sounds of the Kurdish language limited the possibilities for a cohesive literary Kurdish language" (17). Despite the Kurdish national epic Mem u Zin written in Kurdish in 1695 by Ahmad-i Khani, "the absence of a written high Kurdish V C 2018 Phi Alpha Theta language. .. as well as the dominance of the Arabic-speaking state, relegated local Kurdish dialects to a position of inferiority" (44). Michael Eppel then quickly surveys Kurdish distinctiveness under Arab, Persian, and Turkish dominance in the early Muslim centuries; the era of Ottoman and Iranian rule; the demise in the nineteenth century of the Kurdish emirates or principalities, which possessed many of the characteristics of a state; the seeds of Kurdish nationalism in the declining Ottoman Empire; the beginnings of modern Kurdish politics; the Kurds and Kurdistan during World War I; and the Kurds and the new Middle East after the Ottomans. Russia and Great Britain began to play a large role in the nineteenth century, although the rise of Kurdish nationalism was largely a reaction to Turkish and Iranian nationalism. He observes, "It was the emphasis placed by the Young Turks on the Turkish identity of the Ottoman state in 1912-1913 that accelerated the consciousness of Kurdish distinctiveness, in contrast to Turkish nationalism" (92). There is, of course, a lot more that space does not permit mention. Eppel's short volume concludes with two medieval maps, another map of the main Kurdish emirates from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and a fourth map of Kurdistan according to the Treaty of Sevres in 1920. The notes, bibliography, and index are thorough, accurate, and thus very useful. This is a good, readable analysis that will be valuable for scholars, practitioners, and the intelligent lay public.

The American Historical Review, 2016