The River Dnipro (formerly better known by the Russian name of Dnieper) is intimately linked to the history and identity of Ukraine. Cybriwsky discusses the history of the river, from when it was formed and its many uses and modifications by human agencies from ancient times to the present.

From key vantage points along the river’s course—its source in western Russia, through Belarus and Ukraine, to the Black Sea—interesting stories shed light on past and present life in Ukraine. Scenes set along the river from Russian and Ukrainian literature are evoked, as well as musical compositions and works of art. Topics include the legacy of the region’s cultural ancestors as the Kyivan Rus, the period of Cossack dominion, the epic battles for the river’s bridges in World War II, the building of dams and huge reservoirs by the Soviet Union, and the crisis of Chornobyl (Chernobyl). The author argues that the Dnipro and the farmlands along it are Ukraine’s chief natural resources, and that the country's future depends on putting both to good use.

Written without academic pretence in an informal style with dashes of humor, Along Ukraine's River is illustrated with original line drawings, maps, and photographs.

During the last decade, the South American continent has seen a strong push for transnational integration, initiated by the former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who (with the endorsement of eleven other nations) spearheaded the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), a comprehensive energy, transport, and communications network. The most aggressive transcontinental integration project ever planned for South America, the initiative systematically deploys ten east-west infrastructural corridors, enhancing economic development but raising important questions about the polarizing effect of pitting regional needs against the colossal processes of resource extraction. Providing much-needed historical contextualization to IIRSA’s agenda, Beyond the City ties together a series of spatial models and offers a survey of regional strategies in five case studies of often overlooked sites built outside the traditional South American urban constructs.

Implementing the term “resource extraction urbanism,” the architect and urbanist Felipe Correa takes us from Brazil’s nineteenth-century regional capital city of Belo Horizonte to the experimental, circular, “temporary” city of Vila Piloto in Três Lagoas. In Chile, he surveys the mining town of María Elena. In Venezuela, he explores petrochemical encampments at Judibana and El Tablazo, as well as new industrial frontiers at Ciudad Guayana. The result is both a cautionary tale, bringing to light a history of societies that were “inscribed” and administered, and a perceptive examination of the agency of architecture and urban planning in shaping South American lives.

Conflicts over subterranean resources, particularly tin, oil, and natural gas, have driven Bolivian politics for nearly a century. “Resource nationalism”—the conviction that resource wealth should be used for the benefit of the “nation”—has often united otherwise disparate groups, including mineworkers, urban workers, students, war veterans, and middle-class professionals, and propelled an indigenous union leader, Evo Morales, into the presidency in 2006. Blood of the Earth reexamines the Bolivian mobilization around resource nationalism that began in the 1920s, crystallized with the 1952 revolution, and continues into the twenty-first century.

Drawing on a wide array of Bolivian and US sources, Kevin A. Young reveals that Bolivia became a key site in a global battle among economic models, with grassroots coalitions demanding nationalist and egalitarian alternatives to market capitalism. While US-supported moderates within the revolutionary regime were able to defeat more radical forces, Young shows how the political culture of resource nationalism, though often comprising contradictory elements, constrained government actions and galvanized mobilizations against neoliberalism in later decades. His transnational and multilevel approach to the 1952 revolution illuminates the struggles among Bolivian popular sectors, government officials, and foreign powers, as well as the competing currents and visions within Bolivia’s popular political cultures. Offering a fresh appraisal of the Bolivian Revolution, resource nationalism, and the Cold War in Latin America, Blood of the Earth is an ideal case study for understanding the challenges shared by countries across the Global South.

2025 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, Association of American Geographers
2025 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award
2025 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes
2026 Hagley Prize in Business History, Hagley Museum and Library
2025 Honorable Mention, PROSE Award, Association of American Publishers (AAP)

California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional “city.” This city consisted of a far-reaching network of spaces, produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources and create human commodities from the region’s rich natural environment.

Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sources—including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs—to explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sites—a “City of Wood”—Buckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space.

Focuses on contemporary art and media to examine the role of visuals in environmental violence and war in Northern Kurdistan.

Extractivism—exploiting the earth for resources—has long driven racial capitalism and colonialism. And yet, how does extractivism operate in a world where ecological and humanitarian sensibilities are unprecedentedly widespread? Eray Çaylı argues it does so by mobilizing these sensibilities in new ways. Extractivism is no longer only about moving the earth—displacing peoples, fossils, minerals, and waters—but also leaving those who witness this violent displacement sentimentally moved.

Earthmoving conceptualizes this duality. Derived from Çaylı’s years-long work in Northern Kurdistan, home to the world’s largest stateless nation—rendered stateless by colonial policies since the nineteenth century—Earthmoving focuses on the 2010s, a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war. The decade saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. Together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows that images challenge extractivism both by making its harm visible and by fostering self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration that breaks with its valuation of the colonized and the racialized only in quantifiable and marketable terms.

Provides strategies and approaches for integrating natural capital into environmental statistics.

While the importance of natural resources and the contributions of the environment to welfare are apparent, traditional national income and wealth accounting practices do not measure or value environmental public goods. This volume examines the conceptual and empirical basis for integrating natural capital—forests, oceans, and air—into the economic and environmental statistics that inform public policy. It offers innovative approaches to valuing nonmarket environmental goods and services, including strategies for capturing heterogeneity in measurement across types of capital, geography, and individuals.

The chapters focus on measuring productivity with adjustments for pollution damage, developing a microdata infrastructure to advance our understanding of the distribution of environmental amenities and hazards, and estimating long-run sustainable development indicators. Case studies consider coastal assets, forests, and marine ecosystems, and develop strategies for implementing specific environmental-economic accounts such as environmental activity accounts and natural capital accounts for forests and the marine economy. As national income accounting standards are updated to incorporate expanded guidance on issues related to natural capital, this timely book will help inform decisions on the measurement and treatment of climate, air, water, and other public goods.

2024 Honorable Mention, Fernando Coronil Prize, Latin American Studies Association, Section on Venezuelan Studies

A study of the modes of predation used by and against the Sanema people of Venezuela.

Predation is central to the cosmology and lifeways of the Sanema-speaking Indigenous people of Venezuelan Amazonia, but it also marks their experience of modernity under the socialist “Bolivarian” regime and its immense oil wealth. Yet predation is not simply violence and plunder. For Sanema people, it means a great deal more: enticement, seduction, persuasion. It suggests an imminent threat but also opportunity and even sanctuary.

Amy Penfield spent two and a half years in the field, living with and learning from Sanema communities. She discovered that while predation is what we think it is—invading enemies, incursions by gold miners, and unscrupulous state interventions—Sanema are not merely prey. Predation, or appropriation without reciprocity, is essential to their own activities. They use predatory techniques of trickery in hunting and shamanism activities, while at the same time, they employ tactics of manipulation to obtain resources from neighbors and from the state. A richly detailed ethnography, Predatory Economies looks beyond well-worn tropes of activism and resistance to tell a new story of agency from an Indigenous perspective.

Explores ways that the tragedy of the commons can be avoided by people who use common-property resources

This book is a reprint of the original edited volume first published in 2004. In thirty-one chapters, the edited volume documents the exciting period of the emerging interdisciplinary field of society and natural resource scholarship from 1986 to 2004. It was published in part to commemorate the tenth International Symposium on Society and Resources Management (ISSRM) in Keystone, Colorado. ISSRM has brought together natural resource professionals, social science researchers, non-government agencies, private sector organizations, and students on a biennial basis since 1986. The book presents the most significant contributions to the symposia hosted by Pennsylvania State University, Colorado State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Texas A&M University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Oregon State University, University of Missouri at Columbia, Western Washington University, and Indiana University. The first International ISSRM was held in Belize, Australia, and Italy and started a fruitful cross-continental exchange on society and natural resources showcased in this book.

Contributors: Jim Absher, Kathleen Andereck, Jill Belsky, John Bergstrom, Carter Betz, Alan Bright, Perry J. Brown, Tommy Brown, Mark Brunson, Rabel Burdge, Fred Buttel, KristinCheek, Chia-Kuen Cheng, Tony Cheng, David Cole, H Ken Cordell, Terry Daniel, Steven Daniels, Dan Decker, Robert Ditton, John Dwyer, Alan Ewert, Don Field, Myron Floyd, R Bruce Gill, Alan  Graefe, Gary Green, Doug Jackson-Smith, Rebecca Johnson, Richard Knopf, Rick Krannich, Jessica Leahy, Xinran You Lehto, John Loomas, Al Luloff, Mike Manfredo, Robert Manning, Sarah McCaffrey, Stephen McCool, Yoon-Jung Oh, Joseph O'Leary, Carol Saunders, Steve Selin, Bruce Shindler, George Stankey, Bill Stewart, Vicky Sturtevant, Jonathan Taylor, Suzanne Taylor, Tara Teel, Brijesh Thapa, Gene Theodori, Carla Koons Trentelman, Jerry Vaske, Joanne Vining, Doug Whittaker, Dan Williams

In 1973–1974 soaring commodity prices and an oil embargo alerted Americans to the twin dangers of resource exhaustion and dependence on unreliable foreign materials suppliers. This period seemed to mark a watershed in history as the United States shifted from the era of relative resource abundance to relative materials scarcity.

Alfred E. Eckes’s comprehensive study shows that resource depletion and supply dislocations are not concerns unique to the 1970s. Since 1914, the quest for secure and stable supplies of industrial materials has been an important underlying theme of international relations and American diplomacy.

Although the United States has been blessed with a diversified materials base, it has pursued a minerals strategy designed to exploit low-cost, high-quality ores abroad. Eckes demonstrates how this policy has led to official protection for overseas private investments, involving a role for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some modern historians have neglected the importance of resources in shaping diplomacy and history. This book, based on a vast variety of unutilized archival collections and recently declassified government documents, helps to correct that imbalance. In the process it illuminates an important and still timely aspect of America’s global interests.