Topham’s dissertation studies several key episodes in conservation and environmental politics as they played out in Parowan, Utah – a small Mormon community located in southwestern Utah’s Iron County – to illuminate the processes of resistance, acceptance, and compromise over federal public lands policy. It examines the arrival of state conservation in the form of federal agencies, particularly the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Grazing Service; the rise of post-World War II environmentalism and the wilderness movement; and the rise of anti-environmentalism in the form of the Sagebrush Rebellion and opposition to the creation of Wilderness Areas. Responding to recent scholarship that often depicts state conservation as a monolithic force that steamrolled over locals and their interests, and emphasizes its costs, Topham argues that the relationship between locals and state conservation was often much more complicated and tangled than this scholarship suggests. His study shows that the coming of state conservation often pitted federal land management agencies against each other, and produced the same dynamic among the locals. Some residents fought the implementation of government land-use restrictions, while others welcomed them openly, recognizing the value of conservation measures in the preservation of their livelihoods.

Taking a longue durée approach, Topham further seeks to account for how environmental politics in the West has changed over time. His dissertation illustrates that, though townspeople generally came to accept materialist conservation measures, they balked at the post-World War II romantic, preservationist form of state conservation. Over time, a strong anti-environmental movement formed in the region. Topham also addresses the role of religion in environmental practices and politics. Residents of southwestern Utah, most of whom were members of the Mormon Church, dealt not only with the federal government’s hierarchical structure but also that of their church and its leaders, who, in the decades following settlement in what became Utah, were heavily involved in land and resource management. By taking into account the multiple nodes of power from which ecological policy emanated, his study offers a more complex, layered analysis than have other scholars.