A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press Intersections Series

Mining in North America has long been criticized for its impact on the natural environment. Mica Jorgenson’s The Weight of Gold explores the history of Ontario, Canada’s rise to prominence in the gold mining industry, while detailing a series of environmental crises related to extraction activities. In Ontario in 1909, the discovery of exceptionally rich hard rock gold deposits in the Abitibi region in the north precipitated industrial development modeled on precedents in Australia, South Africa, and the United States. By the late 1920s, Ontario’s mines had reached their maturity, and in 1928, Minister of Mines Charles McRae called Canada “the mineral treasure house to [the] world.”

Mining companies increasingly depended upon their ability to redistribute the burdens of mining onto surrounding communities—a strategy they continue to use today—both at home and abroad. Jorgenson connects Canadian gold mining to its international context, revealing that Ontario’s gold mines informed extractive knowledge which would go on to shape Canada’s mining industry over the next century.

"Sustainable development is the Holy Grail of governments and leaders but has remained elusive and undefined. Wellbeing of Nations provides the diagnostics to turn sustainability into reality. This is the ultimate travel guide to a sustainable future." --Jose Maria Figueres, former President of Costa Rica, World Economic Forum "At long last, a real metric for measuring sustainability and wellbeing. It provides a way to chart a better future. The cornerstone of any working library on environment, development, and quality of life. A volume without peer." --Thomas E. Lovejoy, Chief Biodiversity Advisor, The World Ban.The use of indicators to gauge human progress is common and well understood; Gross Domestic Product and the Index of Leading Economic Indicators are two well-known examples. Yet most of the widely cited indicators focus exclusively on economic activity, and even the most progressive of indicators fail to account for key issues of sustainability. The Wellbeing of Nations addresses that shortcoming by combining indicators of human well-being with those of environmental stability to generate a more comprehensive picture of the state of our world.The author combines 39 indicators of health, population, wealth, education, communication, freedom, peace, crime, and equity into a Human Wellbeing Index, and 39 indicators of land health, protected areas, water quality, water supply, global atmosphere, air quality, species diversity, energy use, and resource pressures into an Ecosystem Wellbeing Index. The two indexes are then combined into a Wellbeing/Stress Index that measures how much human wellbeing each country obtains for the amount of stress it places on the environment. Seventy color-coded geopolitical maps vividly portray the performance of each of the 180 nations for all indexes, and the main indicators that go into them. In addition, all data are given in 160 pages of tables, and the highly accessible methodology is described in appendices so that readers can undertake their own assessments.Produced in collaboration with the leading international organizations involved with sustainable development, The Wellbeing of Nations is a one-of-a-kind reference for development and environmental policy professionals, as well as for students and scholars in environmental studies, international studies, and international development.

In the dense, shady rain forest, it's easy for a little guy to get lost from his mother. When a young okapi wanders away from his mom, he discovers the world of people and learns that he is a very special animal, different from all the rest. But still he misses his mother and their home in the forest. How can he get back?

This heartwarming tale with a happy ending introduces children from ages three to eight to the okapi, a graceful, elusive animal native to the Ituri Forest of Congo-Zaire. Based on the true story of an okapi calf that escaped from captivity, it is sure to delight young animal lovers, while teaching them basic facts about the family life of the okapi. A brief afterword provides more information for parents and older children.

The environmental imagination does not stop short at the edge of the woods. Nor should our understanding of it, as Lawrence Buell makes powerfully clear in his new book that aims to reshape the field of literature and environmental studies. Emphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, his book thus provides the theoretical underpinnings for an ecocriticism now reaching full power, and does so in remarkably clear and concrete ways.

Writing for an Endangered World offers a conception of the physical environment--whether built or natural--as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, his book reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape.