Regional Regulatory Regimes and the Political Ecology of Critical Mining Development in the Rural American West

Jeffrey Jenkins 
PhD Student, Environmental Studies, 
University of California, Santa Cruz 

Jeffrey Jenkins, who earned his Master’s Degree at CSU, Chico, is writing his doctoral dissertation on the subject of this presentation. He begins by providing background about economic restructuring and the mining legacy in the Western United States. He goes on to put this in the current context of the political-economic drivers of critical minerals classification: policy, innovation, and geopolitics. Jenkins then provides theoretical frameworks for this issue. He finishes with comparative studies for currently proposed mines on United States Forest Service lands. 

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Recorded: November 21, 2013