Lucas Bessire

Lucas Bessire is a writer, anthropologist, and co-director of the Center for Ethnography at the Colorado School of Mines. He is the author of Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains, a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction and winner of several prizes, including the 2022 George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society of Environmental History, as well as Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life, recipient of the 2015 Gregory Bateson Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology. Additional writings have appeared in venues that range from local newspapers and academic journals to High Country News and The Atlantic. 

His work has been supported by fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. Bessire’s current book project (under contract with Doubleday) blends memoir, environmental history, and ethnographic analysis to craft a wider reckoning with the conjoined challenges of masculinity, climate change, and perception on the High Plains. Working against reductive stereotypes on all sides, this project is a search to reclaim a shared reality and an inhabitable future on the Plains. 

This bio reflects the fellow’s work and affiliations as of their fellowship year.

• Colorado’s Arkansas Valley water confronts contamination, climate change and political drama: A feature article for High Country News examining the water crisis facing Colorado’s Arkansas Valley, where contamination, climate change, and political disputes threaten access to clean water.
• The Next Disaster Coming to the Great Plains: A feature article for The Atlantic exploring the depletion of the region’s underground aquifers and the potential consequences for agriculture, communities, and the nation’s food supply.