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Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Theses and Dissertations by Author "Childers, Michael, advisor"

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    Clouds over Fort Collins: settlement, urban expansion, and flooding along a layered landscape
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Purdy, Tristan, author; Childers, Michael, advisor; Orsi, Jared, advisor; Grigg, Neil, committee member
    Fort Collins, Colorado, home to over 150,000 people along the northern Front Range, is prone to flood. This natural disaster threat is not a recent development nor a strictly natural problem. Rather, flooding in Fort Collins is informed by the interaction of the local environment and the city's growth and development beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. This thesis explores the historical roots of Fort Collins's flood threat by considering the social, economic, and political factors that informed the physical shape of the city and how the city interacted with the watershed within which it sat. By tracing how the city's agrarian root's informed its location, and how a university, (usually) pleasant weather, and westward migration paved the way for urban and suburban expansion, this thesis displays flooding not as an exterior threat, but a natural process that has become enmeshed in Fort Collins's physical structure. Fort Collins is just one of many mid-sized American cities across the American West whose growth over the past century-and-a-half has created increasingly pressing environmental concerns. Addressing contemporary and future concerns over further growth and an increasingly unstable environment in Fort Collins and cities like it begins with understanding the historic interconnections between city growth and the environmental problem in question.
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    Spent a little time on the mountain: backcountry ski touring in Utah and Colorado
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2021) Miller, Alexander, author; Childers, Michael, advisor; Carr Childers, Leisl, committee member; Cheng, Tony, committee member
    Backcountry skiing has continually grown as a recreational activity since alpine skiers began leaving developed ski area boundaries in the late 1930s. Placing individuals in a less managed, sometimes hostile, winter landscape creates a significant management issue for the U.S. Forest Service. This thesis examines this issue by looking back to the sport's emergence as a popular winter recreation activity. It asks how ski tourers from the 1960s through the 1980s understood the way they used land. To answer this question, it examines the development of avalanche research and growing avalanche awareness in the Mountain West, the experience backcountry skiers sought and the mentality that created, and how that mentality established an advocacy framework aimed at protecting access to the backcountry—the area outside ski resorts and away from signs of the "works of man." Through this investigation, it highlights how the U.S. Forest Service facilitated this new form of land use, what exactly it is backcountry skiers are using, and how this use informed environmental politics. Finally, it argues that through understanding how the growing backcountry skiing community used mountain landscapes in the past, skiers, land management agencies, and the broader outdoor recreation community, can begin to come to terms with the impacts of this use and how to mitigate them.
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    Wealth over health: Superior, Arizona and the Magma mine 1910-1982
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Doucette, Hailey Rae, author; Childers, Michael, advisor; Orsi, Jared, committee member; Martinez, Doreen, committee member
    The Magma mine in Superior, Arizona quickly became one of Arizona's most productive underground copper mines in the twentieth century. But the wealth of the company came at the cost of the lives of workers, not only through death but also illness, injury, and in its later years, unfair pay. This thesis traces the history of the Magma mine and its environmental history. As the mine rapidly expanded, it cost miners their livelihood. Chapter one looks at the growth of Superior alongside the Magma mine starting in the 1920s. Chapter two analyzes the events that led to the Magma mine's unionization in 1957 and the strikes that followed. Lastly, chapter three examines the events that led to the closure of the Magma mine in 1982.