Lucas Bessire

Lucas Bessire is an American anthropologist who is known for his 2021 book ''Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains'' which documents the author's return to his ancestral homeland in western Kansas (where five generations of his family had worked as farmers and ranchers) to document the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer. The aquifer, as with other natural aquifers throughout the world, had become almost completely depleted after less than a century of intensive industrial farming. Bessire travels accross Kansas with his father, interviewing local farmers and members of Kansas State's water board, describing how local laws and lobbying from agribusiness has put the fate of the aquifer in jeopardy. The book was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Kirkus described the work as "less a polemic than a moving, melancholy, environment-focused memoir." The ''New York Times'' stated that "the book bursts with passages that linger after reading".

Bessire's anthropological fieldwork included living among and documenting the lives of the recently contacted Ayoreo indigenous peoples of the Gran Chaco region of Bolivia and Paraguay. Bessire spent 56 months with the Ayoreo people and authored the 2014 book ''Behold the Black Caiman: a Chronicle of Ayoreo Life'' about his research and experiences. His ethnographic research of the Ayoreo peoples included teaching them filmmaking, a project which came to be known as the Ayoreo Video Project. The project, funded by a University of Oklahoma arts and humanities fellowship and assistance from the Brazilian indigenous peoples filmmakers collective Video Nas Aldeias, culminated in the release of the first four films ever made by Ayoreo peoples in 2017.

Bessire studied anthropology and Spanish at Kansas State University where his advisor was Harald Prins. Bessire was a professor at The University of Oklahoma and is currently a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. In 2023, Bessire was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the study of anthropology. Provided by Wikipedia