Environment and Society

The intensifying warming of the planet over the past several decades is a manifestation of centuries of uneven and inequitable extractive economies. This warming is well known to be the main force driving shifts in climatological conditions and extreme weather events leading to increasingly severe impacts on planetary systems. Every year, more locations on earth are experiencing heat waves, intense droughts, longer and larger fire seasons, increased tropical storm intensity, and sea level rise at rates that would have been unthinkable a generation ago while near daily news reports document the increasing toll that this changing climate plays in exacerbating social and ecological vulnerabilities. Just this year, at the start of the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2023, a massive tropical cyclone has killed over 145 people in Bangladesh and Myanmar, western Canada has already seen as much forest burned in a few days as it does in an entire summer, drastically diminishing air quality over half a continent, the Po River Valley in Italy has been ravaged by floods after experiencing two years of extreme drought, and California has experienced deadly and pervasive atmospheric rivers after years of record-setting fire seasons and water shortages. In this special issue, rather than prioritizing benign and depoliticized notions of adaptive capacity and resilience, as is far too common within mainstream discussions of climate change, we highlight the theme of flood and fire to examine these events as compounding contemporary crises and responses to phenomena that are devastating, transforming, and reformulating communities, ecologies, and governing processes around the planet.

As intensifying floods and other climate extremes proliferate, narratives of unidirectional climate migration have become ubiquitous in media coverage and policy debates. This article reviews new scholarship that attends to an underreported dimension of climate change impact exposure. Emerging conversations in Indigenous climate justice research, mobility studies, and critical urban adaptation scholarship seek to understand why so many marginalized communities find themselves immobilized in the face of climate extremes. I argue that these scholars are building a concept of forced emplacement to politicize and historicize the uneven distribution of climate harms. Drawing on this scholarship and brief ethnographic sketches from my work in Peru and the Maldives, I follow forced emplacement across diverse case studies that root devastating immobilizations from flooding in local histories of colonial confinement, unevenly policed mobility, and varied efforts to control marginalized populations. I also illuminate how climate-exposed communities contest adaptation projects that reproduce their immobilization.

This article explores the anthropological and social scientific literature on sea level rise and coastal erosion, examining questions of time, the human dimensions of seawalls, tensions over relocation and retreat, and the politics of finance. This includes insights from the author's research in Baja California Sur, Mexico, and along the California coast in the United States, where locally based experiences illustrate not only the challenges of rising seas and erosion, but also the importance of addressing these issues, sooner rather than later, through the critical lenses of anthropology. Overall, this article explores how anthropologists and other social scientists have critically examined the issues, processes, and tensions that shape global coastal responses, and points to directions for future research and engagement with sea level rise, eroding coasts, and humanity's future along the edge of the sea.

Around the world, governments, industry, and other actors are creating plans to save coasts from environmental crisis. Louisiana is one prominent example: levees and other measures protect oil and gas infrastructure from inundation as the wetlands buffer rapidly erodes—in large part due to that same industry. The state's primary answer to land loss is a $50 billion Coastal Master Plan. To illuminate such responses in Louisiana and globally, this article reviews emerging literature and frames an anthropology of coastal planning around three themes: (1) novel orientations toward time and space, (2) the reproduction of power and capital in the name of protection and restoration, and (3) the elision of other forms of land loss and defense by reductive above-ground/underwater planning paradigms.

Precipitation has increased across most of the United States over the last century. The Northeast region has seen the largest increase of ∼15 percent, predominantly from an increase in the frequency of extreme events, and these trends will continue. Commercial diversified fruit and vegetable (F&V) growers in the Northeast are among the most vulnerable to the flooding that can result from this trend. These growers, as part of broader social networks, can also be part of the process of adaptation and transformation of the regional landscape. Here, I review literature on expected precipitation changes, farmer experimentation and decision-making, the effects of flooding on agriculture and F&V systems, and the adaptation options available to and in use by growers. I draw on two case studies and highlight how these growers’ experiences complement the literature, and add context on advising needs, the challenge of prioritization, and the emotions that accompany changing rainfall patterns.

Pyrosociality is a framework for theorizing the simultaneous production of forests and fires while discerning who is powerful and who is vulnerable in multispecies encounters mediated by fire. This article reviews literature about fire science and situates academic dialogue about the ecological consequences of social processes within real-world goings-on in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Pyrosocial theory draws from posthumanism, science and technology studies, and feminist anthropology to assess fire management. Qualitative data from properties managed by the Nantahala- Pisgah National Forests, North Carolina Forest Service, and South Carolina Forestry Commission ground pyrosocial theory in shifting ideas and practices related to excluding, suppressing, fostering, and igniting fires. When centering fire, what facts, truths, complexities, and subtleties come to light? The pyrosocial approach reveals pyropower, or individual variabilities and structural hierarchies related to controlling or influencing more-than-human communities. Focusing on power and vulnerability within habitats co-constructed by multispecies agents and biophysical forces accentuates meaningful relationships.

This review article puts recent social science research on the politics of landscape fire into conversation with scholarship on territory. It argues that contemporary efforts to regulate and suppress fire are fundamentally territorial in that they represent strategies to shape production and accumulation within politically bounded spaces. Reading literature on fire governance through the lens of territory demonstrates the role that a particular disposition toward fire played in the emergence of modern, territorial states. It also helps to illuminate the relationship between state policies to regulate burning and efforts to control labor and resource access. Recent work on the uses of remote sensing technology in the detection and depiction of fire activity shows how territory is reproduced as a modality of rule that justifies hierarchical models of environmental governance. The article concludes with a brief discussion of efforts to implement pluralistic forms of fire management and the obstacles they face.

Experiences of fires are mediated by energy infrastructures and refracted through social inequality and difference. In California, a state marked by increasingly intense and frequent wildfires, the grid is a source of fire risk, with historically marginalized groups bearing the brunt of exposures to wildfire smoke. Drawing on research conducted by one of the co-authors in collaboration with California's Karuk Tribe and Blue Lake Rancheria Tribes, this empirically grounded review article expands our understanding of grids. Extant scholarship presents the grid as a networked infrastructure mediating access to energy and one's relationship to a collective and the state. We extend this analysis by highlighting the diverse and unevenly distributed forms of risk entangled with the electric grid, focusing on those related to fire and smoke. We conclude by considering alternative infrastructural arrangements entailing different relationships to the grid with potential for more just futures in the context of climate change.

Dominant causal explanations of the wildfire threat in California include anthropogenic climate change, fire suppression, industrial logging, and the expansion of residential settlements, which are all products of settler colonial property regimes and structures of resource extraction. Settler colonialism is grounded in Indigenous erasure and dispossession through militarism and incarceration, which are prominent tools in California's fire industrial complex. To challenge settler colonial frameworks within fire management, Indigenous peoples are organizing to expand Indigenous cultural controlled burning, fire stewardship, and sovereignty. These initiatives emphasize reciprocal human-fire relations and uphold Indigenous knowledge systems and livelihoods. Concurrently, Indigenous fire sovereignty is threatened by knowledge appropriation and superficial collaborations. In this article, we review contemporary research on Indigenous burning in order to highlight the strategies that Indigenous communities and scholars employ to subvert colonial power relations within wildfire management and actualize regenerative Indigenous futures.

Chao, Sophie, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey, eds. 2022. The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 284 pp. ISBN 978-1478018896.

Ranganathan, Malini, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi. 2023. Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 294 pp. ISBN: 978-1501768750.

Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 196 pp. ISBN: 978-1478014133.

Hoag, Colin. 2022. The Fluvial Imagination on Lesotho's Water-Export Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520386358 ebook.

King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 284 pp. ISBN 978-1478005681.

Ameli, Katharina. 2022. Multispecies Ethnography: Methodology of a Holistic Research Approach of Humans, Animals, Nature and Culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 149 pp. ISBN 978-1666911923.

Zee, Jerry C. 2021. Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System. Oakland, California: University of California Press. 311 pp. ISBN 9780520384088.

Ferdinand, Malcolm. 2021. Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. 300 pp. ISBN: 978-1-509-54624-4.

Ogden, Laura. 2021. Loss and Wonder at the World's End. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 200 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1456-0.

Hathaway, Michael J. 2022. What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 270 pp. ISBN 978-0691225883.

Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2019. From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Stoetzer, Bettina. 2022. Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Nature in Berlin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 328 pp. ISBN 9781478018605.

Turner, James Morton, 2022. Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 234 pp. ISBN 9780295750248.