Noons for Now: Sociology on Fire: North American Wildland Fires, Past, Present and Future with Mark Hudson from University of Manitoba. Oct. 5, 12-1PM (Zoom)
The wildland fires of 2023 have blown the roof off the record books in Canada. Is this what we can expect from now on? How did we build such combustible landscapes? The new fire regimes we are seeing emerge so “suddenly” are at least a century in the making. Fossil fuels and the associated climate change are a part of the story, but so are other aspects of capitalist settler colonialism that have profoundly changed the way that sparks interact with fuels. Avoiding a future of catastrophic fire means radically reducing “fossil fire,” but also radically increasing the intentional application of fire to the landscape.
The Carleton Climate Commons invites you to participate in a new initiative: Teach-In’s for climate action called “Noons for Now.” As the name suggests, we’re taking our lead from the model of the school strike introduced by Greta Thunberg. Starting in September 2018, Thunberg sat on the steps of Swedish parliament each Friday at noon to strike for climate action. Sometimes she was alone. Sometimes one or two classmates were with her. But slowly this small action created a movement. We take heart from this action and the possibility we all have to effect change in response to the climate crisis. The Teach-In action we’ve chosen speaks to our role as faculty and students at a university. Each week we will bring together one to three speakers, in addition to a moderator, to discuss some facet of the climate crisis. Sometimes it might be just this small group. Sometimes more people might attend. Whatever the case, we invite you to join us anytime, to participate in the conversation or only to listen, to come for part of the hour or the entire thing, to come with friends or on your own. At first this event will likely be somewhat improvisational but we always welcome suggestions, feedback, and participation. The goal is to hold space for climate conversation, ideas, and action on a weekly basis until our country—and, we hope, others too—meets the climate crisis with policy and action commensurate to its urgency.
“In order to set our institutions firmly on the path of future knowledges, we need to reinvent a classroom without walls in which we are all co-learners; a university that is capable of convening various publics in new forms of assemblies that becomes points of convergence of and platforms for the redistribution of different forms of knowledges.” – Achille Mbembe