Oil and Nation places petroleum at the center of Bolivia’s contentious twentieth-century history. Bolivia’s oil, Cote argues, instigated the largest war in Latin America in the 1900s, provoked the first nationalization of a major foreign company by a Latin American state, and shaped both the course and the consequences of Bolivia’s transformative National Revolution of 1952. Oil and natural gas continue to steer the country under the government of Evo Morales, who renationalized hydrocarbons in 2006 and has used revenues from the sector to reduce poverty and increase infrastructure development in South America’s poorest country. The book advances chronologically from Bolivia’s earliest petroleum pioneers in the nineteenth century until the present, inserting oil into historical debates about Bolivian ethnic, racial, and environmental issues, and within development strategies by different administrations. While Bolivia is best known for its tin mining, Oil and Nation makes the case that nationalist reformers viewed hydrocarbons and the state oil company as a way to modernize the country away from the tin monoculture and its powerful backers and toward an oil-powered future.  

Product Description: The Man Who Thought He Owned Water is author Tershia d’Elgin’s fresh take on the gravest challenge of our time—how to support urbanization without killing ourselves in the process. The gritty story of her family’s experience with water rights on its Colorado farm provides essential background about American farms, food, and water administration in the West in the context of growing cities and climate change...read more

Product Description: The Costs and Benefits of Environmental Regulation presents a thorough investigation into environmental regulation, its economic and financial effects and the associated costs and benefits. A variety of issues, pertaining to regulation in general and environmental regulation in particular, are examined...read more

Product Description: Peter Gleick knows water. A world-renowned scientist and freshwater expert, Gleick is a MacArthur Foundation "genius," and according to the BBC, an environmental visionary. And he drinks from the tap. Why don't the rest of us? Bottled & Sold shows how water went from being a free natural resource to one of the most successful commercial products of the last 100 years—and why we are poorer for it...read more

Product Description: In her bestselling books Blue Gold and Blue Covenant, world-renowned water activist Maude Barlow exposed the battle for ownership of our dwindling water supply and the emergence of an international, grassroots-led movement to reclaim water as a public good...read more

Product Description: The natural endowment of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in the form of land, minerals, and forests, is unparalleled. The right mix of policies has the potential to unleash incentives that could transform the economy. However, transport infrastructure in the DRC is among the sparsest and most dilapidated in the world, and this lack of infrastructure is likely a significant constraint to growth...read more

Product Description: Environmental Materials and Waste: Resource Recovery and Pollution Prevention contains the latest information on environmental sustainability as a wide variety of natural resources are increasingly being exploited to meet the demands of a worldwide growing population and economy...read more

Product Description: This 1841 work by the American landscape designer and writer Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-52), reissued here in its 1849 fourth edition, was the first such book published in the United States. Downing, the son of a nurseryman, saw that a 'taste for rural improvements of every description is advancing silently, but with great rapidity in this country', and he aims to provide the prosperous east-coast dweller with a guide to beautifying his surroundings...read more

Product Description: What is nature worth? The answer to this question―which traditionally has been framed in environmental terms―is revolutionizing the way we do business. In Nature’s Fortune, Mark Tercek, CEO of The Nature Conservancy and former investment banker, and science writer Jonathan Adams argue that nature is not only the foundation of human well-being, but also the smartest commercial investment any business or government can make...read more

Product Description: Gleaming and perfect, gold has beguiled humankind for many millennia, attracting treasure hunters, adorning the living and the dead, and symbolizing wealth, power, divinity, and eternity. This book offers a lively, critical look at the cultural history of this most regal metal, examining its importance across many cultures and time periods and the many places where it has been central, from religious ceremonies to colonial expeditions to modern science...read more

Product Description: Imported water has transformed the Golden State’s environment and quality of life. Land ownership patterns and real estate boosterism dramatically altered both urban and rural communities across the entire state. The key has been redirecting water from the Eastern Sierra, the Colorado River, and Northern California rivers...read more

Product Description: As the owner of one of the world's most elaborate sea glass collections, Mary Beth Beuke gets to talk about these prized ocean gems on a daily basis. Unfortunately, with each passing day, sea glass becomes more and more difficult to find, making the hunt more of a challenge to the seeker—especially one with limited experience in sea glass hunting...read more