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Book Cover for: On the Edge: Water, Immigration, and Politics in the Southwest, Char Miller

On the Edge: Water, Immigration, and Politics in the Southwest

Char Miller

Paperback
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On the Edge grew out of a lifetime spent living and traveling across the American Southwest, from San Antonio to Los Angeles. Char Miller examines this borderland region through a native's eyes and contemplates its considerable conflicts. Internal to the various US states and Mexico's northern tier, there are struggles over water, debates over undocumented immigrants, the criminalizing of the border, and the region's evolution into a no-man's land.

The book investigates how we live on this contested land --how we make our place in its oft-arid terrain; an ecosystem that burns easily and floods often and defies our efforts to nestle in its foothills, canyons, and washes.

Exploring the challenges in the Southwest of learning how to live within this complex natural system while grasping its historical and environmental frameworks. Understanding these framing devices is critical to reaching the political accommodations necessary to build a more generous society, a more habitable landscape, and a more just community, whatever our documented status or species.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Trinity University Press
  • Publish Date: Feb 26th, 2013
  • Pages: 272
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.93in - 5.06in - 0.71in - 0.61lb
  • EAN: 9781595341471
  • Categories: • Essays• Public Policy - Environmental Policy• Environmental Science (see also Chemistry - Environmental)

About the Author

Miller, Char: - Char Miller, who grew up in Darien, CT, received his BA from Pitzer College, and his MA and Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. For 26 wonderful years, he taught U. S. history and urban studies at Trinity University in San Antonio. Now he directs the Environmental Analysis Program at Pomona College (Claremont CA), where he is the W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis. Miller has served as a Contributing Writer for the Texas Observer, and as Associate Editor of Environmental History and the Journal of Forestry. He is a Senior Fellow at the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, and writes a column for KCET (Los Angeles), entitled Golden Green, which focuses on environmental issues in California and the west.

Praise for this book

"One of the environmental history profession's most thoughtful and astute observers (not to mention most graceful writers) shares with us his accumulated wisdom about the pasts and presents of places her has come to know deeply....Wise, witty, and intriguing."--Environmental History

"Miller's advocacy of protecting the environment and creating livable cities has inspired public officials to invest in the central city and enhance our natural world."-- Nelson Wolff, Bexar Country Judge

"A timely, thought-provoking collection of essays about the unique blend of history, politics, and culture that can only be found in the American Southwest."-- San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro

"The essays are, in a way, meditations on how people live in their surroundings. They also seem like stories designed to relay concrete, thought-provoking insights to consider regarding the environment and creating livable cities along with cultural, political, and historical perspectives unique to the Southwest."-- Book News

"Former Trinity University history professor Char Miller's taut, insightful essays focus on 'the American Southwest, a region I have known, loved and misunderstood.'"-- Dallas Morning News

"Char Miller weaves local history and current issues into broader imperatives about how we live in places, with (or against) nature and each other."-- Vera Norwood, author of Made from This Earth

"On the Edge is a book that above all invites the reader to engage in something desperately lacking in contemporary political discourse: an intelligent conversation about the places we make our homes."-- San Antonio Express-News