Over the course of the past week, deadly wildfires rapidly spread through Los Angeles, destroying thousands of structures and upending everyday life across the second largest city in the United States. The Palisades Fire has already been named the most destructive wildfire in Los Angeles County history—shocking but not unsurprising given the exponential uptick in wildfires across the Pacific coast in recent years.
In a cruel twist of irony, firefighters are running short of water, the result of an overtaxed water infrastructure that is unsustainable even in the best of times. As the chief executive and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power explained:
“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades. We pushed the system to the extreme,” Quiñones said Wednesday morning. “Four times the normal demand was seen for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”
With over half the city’s water coming from the Colorado River, a river that has been rapidly running dry in recent decades, the Los Angeles fires are only adding to a water crisis produced not simply by climate change, but by more than a century of overuse by megacities like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Los Vegas.
These converging crises of fire and water issue a powerful message: the colonial and capitalist systems that built the world we’ve inherited may have promised abundance, but they have delivered a world of chaos unknown to past generations. Colonial land management policies and capitalist techno-solutions have always been the stuff of utopian fantasy, completely incompatible with the land, the water, and the communities they sustain.
This observation has been at the heart of “Natural History for a World in Crisis,” a virtual event series we kick-started last year. Organized by the NHM’s Red Natural History Fellows, this series has brought together dozens of activist-scientists, scholar, organizers, and community members who are not only clarifying the stakes of the environmental emergencies we face today, but also developing resources for people to intervene in these emergencies as one united front.
As we enter a new year, we share a round-up of 2024 highlights from the Red Natural History Fellows, including event recordings, essays, and interviews.
Below you can find links to a new interview with Rosalyn LaPier exploring how contemporary Native communities are responding to the history of genocide and intergenerational loss, as well as a roundup of 2024 highlights from the Red Natural History Fellows.
Red is a Sacred Color: Video and Interview
Watch this new interview with Blackfeet/Métis historian and ethnobotanist Rosalyn LaPier outlining the lasting impacts of the US government’s centuries-long effort to exterminate the culture, language, and religion of her ancestors, as well as the role that she and other Indigenous knowledge-keepers are playing in response.
This is the sixth episode of our “What is Red Natural History?” series. Check out the full series.
Year in Review: Red Natural History Fellows    Â
Ashley Dawson
Last fall, Ashley Dawson was promoted to Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, an achievement that testifies to the strength and urgency of his critical work on the intersecting social, political, and environmental crises we face today.
→ Check out Ashley’s latest review on “Building a Public Energy Commons” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as his text “The University Infantida,” which gives context to recent student-led solidarity campaigns for a free Palestine.
→ Learn about the Public Power Observatory, a new organization Ashley has co-founded to support grassroots struggles for a just energy transition.
Rosalyn LaPier (Blackfeet/MĂ©tis)Â
Rosalyn LaPier has been contributing insights on a wide range of issues related to Indigenous histories and futures, publishing important texts in The Conversation, as well as in the catalogue for the Field Museum’s landmark Native Truths exhibition.
→Explore Rosalyn’s moving account of the horrors of the Native American Boarding Schools, and why President Biden’s historic apology does not go far enough.
→ Read her Native Truths essay “The Slow Violence of Natural History” which was commissioned for our edited dossier on “Red Natural History.”Â
Andrew Curley (DinĂ©)Â
Andrew Curley, who inaugurated our “Natural History for a World in Crisis” series with a pivotal conversation on the colonial history of the Colorado River, has been critically intervening in crucial debates within the disciplines of geography and the environmental sciences, offering perspectives that shift our relation to time, history, and the land.Â
→ Read Andrew’s co-authored texts on “The work of repair” and the challenge of “centering Indigenous and black futurities.”Â
→ Check out “Colonial Becoming: An Unfolding Story of the Colorado River,” released today in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers.
Kai Bosworth
Geographer Kai Bosworth has spent the past year delving into the earth’s subsurfaces, working with community groups in Louisiana and Minnesota to examine how the underground is being transformed by the extractive industries—from aquifer breaches in pipeline construction to the environmental hazards of new carbon capture and sequestration technologies.
→ Watch the recording from “Aquifer Defenders,” a workshop and roundtable featuring Kai and members of Waadookawaad Amikwag, a group of water protectors who are asking how Indigenous knowledge and Western science can be mobilized to halt the destruction caused by pipelines.
→ If you have library access, take a look at some of Kai’s recent work on the subsurface, including a recent survey of “new geographies of the subsurface” and an investigation into the social world of “caving.”Â
Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes)Â
Dina Gilio-Whitaker has been wrapping up a major new book project tracing the rise of the so-called “Pretendian.” Titled Who Gets to be Indian: Ethnic Fraud and Other Difficult Conversations about Native American Identity, the book asks how Native American identity became a commodity, exploring histories of cultural appropriation, ethnic fraud and the crisis of tribal disenrollment.
→ Read an excerpt from this forthcoming book, which is slated to come out in 2025.
Natchee Blu Barnd
In 2024, Natchee Blu Barnd made a big move from Oregon State University to University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is actively advancing Red Natural History’s vision of institutional transformation. In addition to his role as Professor in History of Art & Architecture and Editor of Ethnic Studies Review, he is working with faculty across the institution to develop the UCSB’s first Native Studies curriculum.Â
→ Read Natchee’s essay “Already Presumed Dead,” which offers a bold vision for Ethnic Studies within the project of Red Natural History.
Billy Fleming
In addition to his innovative Landscape Architecture design studios, where he challenges students to mobilize their work in support of local climate, housing, and racial justice leaders, Billy Fleming released a new special issue of the Journal of Architectural Education on “Worlding. Energy. Transitions,” featuring more than a dozen contributions by leading environmental thinkers, activists, filmmakers and scholars on the question of the global energy transition.
→ Read more about Billy’s design studios in his essay for our “Red Natural History” dossier, and check out excerpts from his co-edited special issue on “Worlding. Energy. Transitions” in the Journal of Architectural Education.
