Last year's wildfires in L.A. turned a spotlight on a corner of the insurance world that typically exists in the shadows: the California FAIR plan, the state's insurer of last resort. Though it is now synonymous with wildfire risk, the FAIR plan is the byproduct of a very different conflagration: the Watts uprising of 1965. The strange career of the FAIR plan illustrates the links between the urban crisis of the late twentieth century and ...

In recent years, unprecedented wildfires ravaged multiple continents. The fires grow ever larger, more destructive, and more ubiquitous as our changing climate plunges us further into the Pyrocene. Despite the scale of the devastation, small moments of optimism can be found in elemental ecological reflexes. Fires have motivated similar bursts of creative response from human cultural networks as well, inspiring – perhaps necessitating – new ways to conceive of ourselves in relation to our landscapes. ...