Trevor Egerton: ‘Hidden Hybridity’

By Katelyn Landry

Trevor Egerton: ‘Hidden Hybridity’

Trevor Egerton (Sid Richardson College 20) grew up exploring some of America’s many state and national parks, but only after taking a course on American environmental history taught by history professor Randal Hall in his junior fall semester did that long held interest in America’s public lands resurface. The topics explored in Hall’s course were so engaging that Egerton was inspired not only to pursue environmental history for hishonors thesis but to switch from a pre-med track to a pre-grad track.

“One of the things I became really interested in talking about is how we engage as a society and how we decide what land is important to save,” Egerton says. “Why we choose to save and protect these lands over others is just a question that really provokes a lot of thoughts and more questions in my mind what we value as beautiful and natural and how we define those terms.”

With Hall as his thesis advisor, Egerton traveled to Caddo Lake State Park in eastern Texas in June 2019 to begin his year-long research on the complex environmental history of the area’s sprawling maze of bayous. In his award-winning thesis titled “Hidden Hybridity: The Natural and Unnatural Environmental History of Caddo Lake from 1924 to the Present,” Egerton chronicled how control of the swampy marsh had been fractured and traded among federal, state and local authorities numerous times over the past century, and how these entities’ decisions have impacted the physical environment as well as the social, cultural and economic landscapes of the surrounding Texas and Louisiana communities.

As we know from environmental studies, local stories and global stories are always tangled up together so it's wonderful to see really rich environmental history going on at the local level,” says Joseph Campana, the Alan Dugald McKillop Professor of English and director of the Center for Environmental Studies.

Hall nominated Egerton’s thesis for the Greene Prize, just one of many accolades Egerton earned for his extensive research on Caddo Lake. The 100-page thesis was also awarded the Ira and Patricia Gruber Award for Best Honors Thesis in the history department and earned Egerton Distinction in Research and Creative Works upon his graduation.

After his gap year, Egerton hopes to attend graduate school where he will continue studying the environmental history of America's public lands and its intersections with race and culture.

How we as a society decide what is important to protect and who gets to benefit from those protections is one of the important things that environmental history can seek to answer.”