Harvard Science Book Talk: Alastair McGee and Dani Anguiano, "Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy"

Date: 

Monday, April 19, 2021, 5:00pm

Where Online: https://www.harvard.com/event/virtual_event_dani_anguiano_and_alastair_gee/
When April 19, 2021 @5:00PM
Organization/Sponsor Harvard Division of Science, Harvard Library, and Harvard Book Store
Speaker(s) Alastair McGee and Dani Anguiano
Cost free
Contact Info science_lectures@fas.harvard.edu

There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. The catastrophe seared the American imagination, taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee crisis that continues to unfold.

Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy is the story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift—of a remarkable landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling. It is also the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable. It is, finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never witnessed before and barely know how to handle. What happened in Paradise was unprecedented in America. Yet, according to climate scientists and fire experts, it will surely happen again.

_____________________________________________________________________

Dani Anguiano writes for the Guardian and was a reporter for the Chico Enterprise-Record. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Alastair Gee is an award-winning editor and reporter at the Guardian who has also written for The New Yorker online, the New York Times, and the Economist.

photo of Alastair McGee and Dani Anguiano, book cover

For more information and videos of Harvard Science Book Talks, see https://science.fas.harvard.edu/book-talks