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