Events

This talk offers an on-the-ground perspective from a record-breaking fire season on a California hotshot crew, tracing the sociological, historical, and economic forces that fuel today’s megafires. For wildland firefighters, navigating the escalating impacts of climate change is a matter of life and death. These fires are not natural disasters, but the result of political choices. Understanding where they come from—and how firefighters survive on their edges—is essential to imagining a more just and equitable ...

How can we revitalize minority politics while making the fight against discrimination beneficial for all? Bruno Perreau proposes thinking about minority experiences relationally. How one person is governed has a direct impact on how another is. Legal provisions that protect gender can be used to protect race; those that protect disability can protect age, sexual orientation, or class, and so on. This is what Perreau calls intrasectionality, a new concept and an innovative legal strategy ...

Keepers of the Flame is an initiative rooted in relationships—between cultural fire practitioners and students/faculty, and between people, plants, and fire. In a context of settler colonial environmental policy and increasing risk of catastrophic fire, Keepers centers respect for Indigenous fire practitioners, recognition of fire as part of the landscape, and personal, place-based understandings with fire. With attention to the environmental injustices of land theft and fire suppression and the inequitable impacts of catastrophic fire, ...

In recent years, unprecedented wildfires ravaged multiple continents. The fires grow ever larger, more destructive, and more ubiquitous as our changing climate plunges us further into the Pyrocene. Despite the scale of the devastation, small moments of optimism can be found in elemental ecological reflexes. Fires have motivated similar bursts of creative response from human cultural networks as well, inspiring – perhaps necessitating – new ways to conceive of ourselves in relation to our landscapes. ...

This year's wildfires in L.A. turned a spotlight on a corner of the insurance world that typically exists in the shadows: the California FAIR plan, the state's insurer of last resort. Though it is now synonymous with wildfire risk, the FAIR plan is the byproduct of a very different conflagration: the Watts uprising of 1965. The strange career of the FAIR plan illustrates the links between the urban crisis of the late twentieth century and ...