Professor McSweeney studies the relationship between people and nature, with a focus on forested environments in Central and South America. She uses a combination of methods, including long-term ethnographic research, to explore the ways that indigenous peoples manage forests to build their resilience to climate change and to defend their ancestral homelands. Most recently, she has revealed how the global regime of drug prohibition—aka the ‘war on drugs’—is shaping the future of indigenous lands and forests across the tropics. She and her collaborators’ work is published in Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. To reach wider audiences, she has written for the Washington Post and regularly speaks to policymakers, including at the UN. Her work has been funded by the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations. She received her PhD from McGill University in Montreal. At Ohio State, she regularly teaches courses on environment-society geography and fieldwork.