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UID:Indybay-18884018
SEQUENCE:19060578
CREATED:20260211T205100Z
DESCRIPTION:Unexpected Returns: The Historic Entanglements of Fire, Settlement, and 
 Stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains\n\nWildfires are an increasing 
 feature of contemporary life in California. Media and scientific accounts 
 tell us that we are in a new age of “megafires”. What combination of 
 human settlement, land use and climate change propels these fires? What 
 drives people to make their homes in increasingly flammable landscapes, and 
 with what effect? In this event Miriam Greenberg and Andrew Matthews 
 present the findings of UCSC researchers who have spent three years 
 studying the ecological, social, and political economic processes that have 
 set the stage for contemporary wildfires, in what has become known as the 
 “Wildland Urban Interface” (WUI). \n\nCome and learn about the deeper 
 histories of indigenous burning, settler ranching, fire suppression, 
 extractive industries and urbanization that have produced fire prone 
 landscapes in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We will share new maps of 
 logging-fueled 19th century megafires; historical photographs of early 
 twentieth century orchards and vineyards planted in the burn scar; and oral 
 accounts of how fire and ranching cleared the land for subsequent waves of 
 rural homebuilding and population growth. Further we explore how today, in 
 the context of climate change, and as WUI growth draws more people into the 
 beauty of rural living and possibility of affordable housing, it builds 
 upon these land use legacies to spark the return and increasing 
 destructiveness of megafire.  Yet, we also are learning from these 
 histories, and the recent experience of the 2020 CZU Fire, to reshape our 
 relationship with fire, plants, land, and housing.\n\nMiriam Greenberg is 
 Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz, and 
 co-director of the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies. She 
 holds a PhD in Sociology from the City University of New York Graduate 
 Center, and is the author of Branding New York:  How a City in Crisis was 
 Sold to the World (Routledge, 2008); Crisis Cities: Disaster and 
 Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (Oxford, 2014), co-authored with 
 Kevin Fox Gotham; and The City is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial 
 Tactics in an Urban Age, co-edited with Penny Lewis (Cornell, 2017).  She 
 has also undertaken engaged, public-facing research projects exploring 
 urban and environmental justice issues in California, including the 
 Critical Sustainabilities project, which can be found at: 
 https://critical-sustainabilities.ucsc.edu/, and (with Steve McKay) the 
 project No Place Like Home, on the experience of the affordable housing 
 crisis in Santa Cruz County, which can be found at: 
 http://noplacelikehomeucsc.org/.\n\nShe is currently P.I. on the project 
 WUI Research for Resilience:  Addressing California’s Climate, 
 Conservation, and Housing Crisis, which is part of the UCOP Climate Action 
 Research Initiative.  A recent publication in PNAS lays out the conceptual 
 framework for this project: “Relational geographies of urban 
 unsustainability: The entanglement of California’s housing crisis with 
 WUI growth and climate change.”(2024).\n\nAndrew Mathews is Professor of 
 Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds a joint 
 Ph.D. in forestry and anthropology from Yale University. He has studied 
 relationships between people, plants, and landscape in Mexico, Italy, and 
 California. His interests range from ethnoecology, STS, political ecology, 
 and environmental history, in publications on Indigenous forest management 
 in Mexico (Instituting Nature, MIT Press, 2011), to environmental 
 humanities, human plant relations, historical ecology, and landscape 
 ethnography, in Italian landscapes (Trees are Shape Shifters Yale, 2022). 
 He is now studing the relationship between fire, grazing, and the political 
 geomorphology of landscapes in California and in Italy. \n\nThis event is 
 presented as part of An Aesthetics of Resilience, a collaborative research 
 initiative of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Friedlaender 
 Lab at UC Santa Cruz. The project brings scientists, artists, humanists, 
 and activists together to examine multiple experiences of vulnerability in 
 the face of climate change and is supported by a University of California 
 Office of the President California Climate Action Seed Grant, with 
 additional support from the Coha Nowark Art + Science Fund.\n\nImage by 
 Raty Syka.\n\nFree\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2026/02/11/18884018.php
SUMMARY:Intersections of Climate Change: Fire, Settlements, and Stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains
LOCATION:Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Avenue, Santa Cruz
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2026/02/11/18884018.php
DTSTART:20260305T020000Z
DTEND:20260305T033000Z
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