On the Border

This collection of eleven essays, edited by Char Miller, examines the environmental history of San Antonio, drawing upon an interdisciplinary array of authors and insights to highlight the evolving relationship between the city's residents and the South Texas landscape, showing the citizens and the environment have shaped each other.

The essays trace the city’s environmental history over the last 300 years, from the Spanish explorers to the present. Many of the essays discuss issues that challenge San Antonio today--urban sprawl, water rights, and unchecked economic development--and show the events that led to their complexity.

The border of the title refers to San Antonio’s location at the edge of the Great Plains on the north and the coastal plain on the South, at the intersection of the eastern half of the country with the western half. It also refers, as Andrew Hurley writes, to the city’s social landscape.

The book looks beyond the natural environment to assess the city’s social ecology, chronicling the history of the city’s parks, water and sewer systems, and other infrastructures and concluding that San Antonio’s power brokers "did not conceive of the community as a community."