California Wildfires Signal the Arrival of a Planetary Fire Age

By Stephen Pyne, The Conversation

Another autumn, more fires, more refugees and incinerated homes. For California, flames have become the colors of fall. Free-burning fire is the proximate provocation for the havoc, since its ember storms are engulfing landscapes. But in the hands of humans, combustion is also the deeper cause. Modern societies are burning lithic landscapes - once-living biomass now fossilized into coal, gas and oil - which is aggravating the burning of living landscapes.

Finding Home after Paradise Burned

By Nick Buxton, The Davis Vanguard

Carol’s experience a year on from the Paradise fires speaks to the challenges of rebuilding and recovering in a time of climate change. It also attests to the profound difference between house and home. Rebuilding a house is hard enough – especially if you aren’t wealthy or aren’t insured – but it is far more challenging to rebuild a sense of home, given how homes are tied to memories, to a community, to a time and place.

When Wildfires Sweep through California, Who Gets Left Behind?

By Zoya Teirstein, Grist

The wildfire crisis, one that is expected to get worse in the Golden State in the coming years as the full effects of climate change kick in, illuminates a glaring disparity. When fires rip through a community, its most vulnerable members — the old and sick, domestic workers, construction workers, and incarcerated folks — get left behind.

Harvard and TIAA’s Farmland Grab in Brazil Goes Up in Smoke

By Farmlandgrab.org Staff, Farmlandgrab.org

It may come as a shock to Harvard students, faculty, and alumni, as well as the millions of educators and others in the United States whose pensions are managed by TIAA, to learn that these two institutions are deeply and directly invested in this destructive expansion of agribusiness. Over the past twelve years, TIAA and Harvard University have collectively spent over $1 billion on Brazilian farmland, making them two of the largest owners of farmland in the Cerrado.

Has the Climate Crisis made California too Dangerous to Live In?

By Bill McKibben, The Guardian blog

Three years in a row feels like – well, it starts to feel like the new, and impossible, normal. That’s what the local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, implied this morning when, in the middle of its account of the inferno, it included the following sentence: the fires had “intensified fears that parts of California had become almost too dangerous to inhabit”.

Life in Flames

By Elizabeth Peredo Beltrán, Uneven Earth

These days I am immersed in rage, pain and despair. The Amazon is in flames, the Chiquitanía region is gravely wounded and beneath the fires, many of our hopes for Bolivia and the world are turned to ashes.

California wildfires, electricity shutoffs and our troubled energy future

By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights

Most of the news surrounding the electricity shutoffs in California—done to avert the ignition of additional wildfires by aging electrical infrastructure—has focused on two things: climate change and the greedy, incompetent management of Pacific Gas & Electric. Missing in this discussion is the broad neglect of the complex infrastructure of the United States and possibly other wealthy nations.

Saving the Amazon: What You Can Do

By Mark Heley, Esperanza Project

The Indigenous peoples of Amazonia have lived in a symbiotic way with the rainforest for millenia. They are the keepers of deep knowledge about the ecosystems they live within and are indispensable to its effective protection. Protecting the rights of indigenous people and their land claims in the Amazon can be one of the most effective ways of halting deforestation.

Bolivia is on Fire, Too — And You’re Part of the Problem

By Kayla Mi-Kyung Vandervort, Esperanza Project

Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro isn’t the only culprit behind the fires currently raging across the Amazon at a rate of a football field per minute. With the high demand for meat, soy, and petroleum in developed countries, we are directly fuelling these fires in the Amazon basin. There is much that we can do to help turn this crisis around.

The Open Amazon and its Enemies: a Call for Action and Optimism

By Francesc Badia I Dalmases, Open Democracy

The Amazon is so key to the future of our planet that it has become a hot issue of geopolitics. And, we are not only talking about the physical environment. We are talking about the future of the people- those who live there and us.