Michael Childers (NHC Fellow, 2024–25)

Michael Childers is an associate professor of history at Colorado State University (CSU). He is the author of the award-winning book Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement as well as several articles and book chapters on the history of public lands and tourism in the American West. A member of CSU’s Public and Environmental History Center Board, Childers coedits the University of Nebraska Press series Environment and Region in the American West with Dr. Leisl Carr Childers. He is currently writing his second book The Mountains are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park, under contract with the University of Nebraska Press’s Bison Books and is cowriting the administrative history of the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service from 1960 to 2020.

Selected Publications

• Childers, Michael. ”Returning to the Best Idea We Ever Had.” In Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country: Ruin, Realism, and Possibility in the American West, edited by Mark Fiege, Michael Lansing, and Leisl Carr Childers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024.
• Childers, Michael. “Rothman’s West: The Education of a Western Public Intellectual.” In Western Lands, Western Voices: The American West Center’s 50th Anniversary Essay Collection, edited by Greg Smoak, 41–56. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. 2021.
• Childers, Michael. “Erring on the Side of Public Use: James Watt and the National Parks.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 23, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 41–65.
• Childers, Michael. “Remaking Sun Valley: Condominiums and Sprawl in the Mountains of the West.” Forest History Today 25, no. 1 & 2 (Spring/Fall 2019): 4–15.
• Childers, Michael. “For Public Use, Resort, and Recreation: The Struggle Over Appropriate Recreation in Yosemite.” George Wright Forum 35, no. 2 (November 2018): 304–11.
• Childers, Michael. Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012.