What role are economic decisions and partisan politics playing in the mounting global climate crisis? In Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis, UCI global and international studies professor and chair Eve Darian-Smith draws stark connections between extractive capitalism, ultranationalism and catastrophic wildfires that have scorched three countries on three different continents. The resulting devastation and on-going contributions to climate change, she argues, are a global crisis that calls for a new political, economic and moral framework that prioritizes people over profits and a global view that blurs boundaries between lands, seas and atmospheres. In the video below, Darian-Smith explains the need to view this issue with a global lens, beginning with the way we think about and through wildfires.
