Travis Cook

Dr. Cook’s research examines the environmental history of construction materials, infrastructure, and resource extraction in the United States, with particular attention to the American West. His work investigates how transitions in building materials created new sustainability challenges associated with concrete construction in modern cities and infrastructure during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By studying the political, economic, and environmental systems that organized concrete construction regimes, along with the aggregate extraction and distribution required to sustain them, his research highlights the material foundations of urban development and the environmental trade-offs associated with large-scale concrete construction.

His recent work explores how aggregate mining expanded within the environmental regulatory frameworks that emerged during the late twentieth century. In his article “The Portland Pit: Urban Aggregate Mining and Land Reclamation in the Modern American West, 1976–2001,” he examines mining at Ross Island in Portland, Oregon, showing how aggregate producers operated within regulated urban landscapes while framing extraction as compatible with environmental protection through reclamation and “second use” commitments. This research demonstrates how late-twentieth-century aggregate extraction regimes enabled intensive mining not despite environmental protections, but through them. Drawing on archival records, government documents, and industry sources, Dr. Cook’s broader research traces how the material systems that support modern urban life shape environmental change and inform contemporary sustainability debates.