The following projects are in various stages of development. I will update them as time and progress allow. The largest projects are listed first, followed by smaller pieces in no particular order.

Wildland-Urban Interface. I have begun a project that explores the historical development of the wildland-urban interface. Today, this interface is a key environmental issue to both natural resource managers and urban planners and residents. To investigate this problem, I am analyzing what are sometimes called urban national forests, defined as national forests within fifty miles of urban centers with more than a million people. The relationship between cities such as Seattle, Los Angeles, or Denver and their wild hinterlands forms critical ecological, political, economic, and cultural components to the landscape. The history of both these forests and these cities constitute unique historical experiences that have remained largely unexamined. Different and more intense pressures on urban development and resource management make these places atypical, and the diverse constituencies involved mark these locales as places of heightened environmental conflict. Usually told as separate stories, my study will merge the story of these places where land-use practices experience a dramatic change in a small geographic space with strong mutual influences. Based on preliminary research supported by the University of Idaho's Seed Grant program and the Forest History Society's Alfred D. Bell Travel Grant, I have some hypotheses to test about how urban power dominates its wild hinterlands only to be periodically thwarted by ecological exigencies (e.g., fires and floods). This project builds on important themes in environmental history, including public lands and urbanization, the dynamic borderland between city and country, and the expanding polity of environmental management.

Natural Resources, Ecology, and State Power: I am interested in the relationship between state power, science, and natural resource economies like agriculture and forestry. By questioning how state power asserts its priorities on scientific research and resource management, I hope to uncover ways in which state programs shape land use and respond to environmental changes, which in turn drives further scientific inquiry. What will be revealed, I expect, is the powerful ways state priorities affects science and land, water, and animal resources. To explore state power, it will be most useful to identify landscapes that cross boundaries. To date, I have begun researching this matrix on the Columbia Plateau of the Inland Northwest, which crosses multiple state borders and the international boundary into British Columbia. This research has been supported by a grant from the John Calhoun Smith Memorial Fund at the University of Idaho. I am open to other study areas, as well. This project grows out of a number of interests. First, it builds on my long-standing interest in the environmental consequences of managing resources, a central element of contemporary environmental historiography. Second, it develops my evolving interest in the history of science, a direction I expect future research to focus on. Finally, this project grows out of my experience working at a public land-grant institution where I have witnessed the power of state priorities to shape academic investigation. All of these elements coalesce in my project to make it a promising avenue to explore the intersection of ecology and power. I expect this to be an extensive, on-going project that examines various state agencies, resource economies, and scientific traditions across time and space. I am as likely to develop a series of case studies as I am one coherent study in this area. Furthermore, I expect elements of this project may well be pursued in collaboration with graduate students and faculty in other disciplines.

Reclamation Culture in the Pacific Northwest: In the mid-twentieth century as the federal government pursued dam-building across the Pacific Northwest with great energy, Northwestern writers produced a number of novels extolling the virtues of dams and reclamation. This fiction, such as Margaret Thompson's Space for Living, represented a latest version of boosterism and constitutes a valuable primary source into mid-century thinking about nature and technology.

James J. Hill and Conservation: James J. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railroad, thought and wrote much about conservation at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, he was one of the few non-politicians invited by President Theodore Roosevelt to the 1908 Governor's Conference on Conservation. This project, supported by a Hill Research Grant from the James. J. Hill Reference Library, seeks to understand how a prominent business leader conceptualized, implemented, and promoted a conservation vision.

Smokejumping and Oral History: A terrific collection of oral histories of smokejumpers have been conducted and collected by the Idaho Historical Society. As a former student of Steve Pyne, I have long had an interest in the history of fire. Also, since oral histories have not been used widely in environmental history, I posed the question, "What can environmental historians learn from oral histories?" My preliminary answer was a complicated and qualified "not much." I gave a paper on the topic at the 2007 American Society for Environmental History meeting, and I hope to return to the topic to add some greater sophistication to the analysis.