She received a J.D. from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago. She is the author of numerous articles and the book Uniting Mountain and Plain: Urbanization, Law, and Environmental Change along the Front Range and coeditor of a collection of essays, City Dreams, Country Schemes: Community and Identity in the Twentieth-Century American West . She has served on the editorial boards of Environmental History, Western Historical Quarterly , and the Journal of Urban History and has also served on the executive committee of the American Society for Environmental History.