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Rubber is one of those things that goes unnoticed most days, even though our modern lives depend on it for building supplies, medical and industrial equipment, and so many things that help us get around. Despite its tendency to fade into the background, the story of rubber, particularly U.S. rubber, is one worth noticing. In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world\\u2019s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world\\u2019s rubber. At the same time, global demand for rubber skyrocketed as the automobile industry took off. But only a tiny amount of rubber was produced on U.S. soil, and there just wasn\\u2019t enough to meet demand. How to ease the rubber bottleneck?

In his new book,\\xa0Empire of Rubber, Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman described the largely unknown story of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, the tiny West African nation of Liberia, and its transformation into America\\u2019s rubber empire. Empire of Rubber\\xa0claimed that Firestone reaped fortunes from stolen land and the labor of the Liberian people and contributed to instability and inequality that eventually led to civil war. Drawn from extensive research, Mitman weaved a narrative through the deeply intertwined realms of ecology, science, commerce, and racial politics \\u2014 a story that offers both lessons and warnings as we consider the human costs of supply and demand.

Gregg Mitman\\xa0is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin\\u2013Madison. He is the founding director of the Nelson Institute\\u2019s Center for Culture, History, and Environment\\xa0(CHE) and is also past president of the\\xa0American Society for Environmental History. He is the coproducer and codirector of two films,\\xa0In the Shadow of Ebola, an intimate portrait of the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, and\\xa0The Land Beneath Our Feet, a documentary on history, memory, and land rights in Liberia. Mitman is also the author and editor of several books, including\\xa0Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes, Future Remains, Thinking with Animals,\\xa0and several others.

Kerri Arsenault\\xa0is a book critic, teacher, book editor at Orion magazine, and nonfiction editor at\\xa0the Franco-American journal,\\xa0R\\xe9sonance.\\xa0Kerri\\u2019s work has appeared in\\xa0Freeman\\u2019s, the\\xa0Boston Globe,\\xa0Down East, the\\xa0Paris Review Daily, the\\xa0New York Review of Books, the\\xa0Washington Post, and many more.\\xa0Kerri is also\\xa0the author of the best-selling book,\\xa0Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains,\\xa0which won the\\xa0Maine Literary Award\\xa0for nonfiction and the\\xa0Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award\\xa0from the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Buy the Book: Empire of Rubber: Firestone\'s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia (Hardcover)\\xa0from Third Place Books

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