Events

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 ...