Subject Area
History
Abstract
This dissertation approaches the environmental history of the Permian Basin of southeastern New Mexico and West Texas through a “geo-regional” framework. In doing so, it contends that key aspects of the region’s social, political, and economic development are directly tied to its mineral resources and the geological processes that deposited them. In contrast to traditional environmental analyses of the Permian Basin, which typically focus on the area’s prodigious hydrocarbon reserves, the present study instead highlights a more common—but no less important—mineral: salt. Organized in three parts, it traces the evolving functions of this mundane resource through the annals of deep time. In addition to outlining each of the project’s chapters, the Introduction offers a meditation on the cultural characteristics of the Permian Basin. Part I, “Deposition,” explores the intellectual construction of the expanded geologic timescale (which allowed for human understandings of earth’s antiquity), establishes the historiographical and methodological underpinnings of “geo-regionalism,” and briefly chronicles the Permian Basin’s geological and archaeological pasts. Part II, “Extraction,” narrates the twentieth-century discovery of potash in the salt beds of southeastern New Mexico and the influx of mining companies that transformed Carlsbad, New Mexico from a sleepy agricultural village into a blue-collar, industrial city of national significance—as well as the oft-overlooked role organized labor played in that dramatic metamorphosis. Part III, “Insertion,” examines the collapse of the potash industry’s monopoly on the mineral commodity’s North American market, which led the local community to embrace novel utilizations of the salt deposits—initially as a subterranean testing medium for atomic explosives research and eventually as a controversial permanent geologic repository for transuranic nuclear waste. The Epilogue spotlights current threats to the environmental and economic health of this “geo-region” and propels the study to the other end of the chronological spectrum, detailing long-range plans for warning markers intended to communicate the facility’s hazardous nature 10,000 years into the deep future.
Degree Date
Summer 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
History
Advisor
Andrew R. Graybill
Number of Pages
311
Format
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Miller, Austin, "Salt & Sand: Deep History in the Permian Basin" (2024). History Theses and Dissertations. 22.
https://scholar.smu.edu/hum_sci_history_etds/22
Included in
Labor History Commons, Other History Commons, Political History Commons, United States History Commons
