3 posts tagged “natural”
Come this Wednesday night to UCSD for a roundtable of local urban planners, activists and lawyers who will give presentations on the unequal treatment of immigrants during the fire and misleading explanations for the causes of the fire. All the information for this is located on the roundtable wiki.
Presenters:
Andrea Guerrero - ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)
Pedro Rios - American Friends Service Committee
Rick Brady - City of Santee (UCSD Urban Studies Planning alumni)
Enrique Morones - Border Angels
A Roundtable follow up to the 2008 Culture Conference:
Crisis, Emergency, Global Processes
Sponsored by the UCSD Sociology Department
disaster," instead of a case of mismanaged urban planning, ill-led concepts of fire "prevention." Therefore the causes fell on to nature, instead of socio-political reasons.
For many around the world who watched the news coverage of our local crisis, it appeared that only middle- to upper-class, Caucasian home-owners were affected by this disaster. Newscasters biasedly compared the state-of emergency disaster to New Orleans's Hurricane Katrina in a fashion that portrayed San Diegans as wealthy, coordinated, charitable and peaceful in contrast to New Orleaneans who were portrayed as poor, disorganized, and violent. Essentially, San Diego "citizens" were framed as united, while New Orleans "refugees" were portrayed as lacking in unity. Just like Hurricane Katrina, the media coverage and the treatment of the San Diego fires were embedded in long-standing issues of class, race and ethnicity.
This roundtable aims to bring out many the socio-political reasons that contributed to the fire and the politics of who's stories were represented in the media and which ones remained untold. For example, many of the fires’ human victims were migrant workers living in canyons who, largely because of their extreme marginalization, were not able to be reached and informed about the fires. In stark contrast to the mainstream coverage of property owners (like the TV reporter standing outside his own house for hours of coverage). The human toll of the fires was largely ignored, or even blamed on these victims for consuming UCSD Regional Burn Center resources for instance.
Please forward this invite to your networks!
it was only today - Day #4 of the San Diego fires - did my friends on the East Coast start calling me to make sure I was not on fire and that my house was not burning down. This map demonstrates how truly catastrophic this 1 fire (of 8 other large fires) is- not because it shows how big this 1 fire is is, but because it shows how it compares to the city of Manhattan. Oh my NYC-Centric friends - the world doesn't make sense unless it is put into the context of your world? (I am not being 100% sarcastic, I am one of those NYC-centric people)
The stupid media has only been focusing on LA's celebrities up until today - and then they realized - wow the Malibu fire is sooo miniscule compared to the fact that the ENTIRE COUNTY OF SAN DIEGO IS BURNING DOWN!
Even my friend Roger in Sweden knew about San Diego's fires before my friends on the East Coast. That's horrible! He said the video he watched of the SD fires on Day #2, Monday - reported that the SD fires were worse than the LA fires. This is SWEDEN!!!!!! Can you believe that?
What's worse - I and many other bloggers in SD have been posting about what we are going through - so it's not like we've been silent. This clearly shows a need for more sophisticated and different levels of information reporting - if I and many others have been flickring and voxing about this for days and the large media conglomerates failed to pick up on the seriousness of this - it is clear something is wrong with how certain news is highlighted while some are ignored - and this also shows that we need a different outlet that focuses on first-hand accounts from bloggers and etc.
This happens all the time around the world - bloggers were posting about the recent Myamar/Burma killings of civilians - but it took a while for "official" news outlets to pick on it. This happens all the time in Africa and China. Just because people are writing about it online does not mean their information will get picked up. We need a new kind of media outlet that will be good at doing just that - specializing in first-hand online accounts. There is nothing democratic about the internet. hmm this sounds like just the kind of service Kenyatta has been talking about creating!
You can read my other thoughts about the distortion of wildfires here, emphasis of LA over SD here, and what a Sociologist would do during a fire here.
this was photo overlay was created by tim
Natural wildfires regenerate the soil with nutrients and burn away potentially super-dangerous brush. Some tress, like pines, depend on fires to spread their seeds in their cones! Stephen J. Pyne, an ex-firefighter and Prof. of Ecological History - is a specialist on the social mis-management of fires in the US. He has written extensively about different societies over time have used actively used controlled fires to develop the land or to practice cultural rituals. From national geographic:
"Today's fires can grow unusually fierce because Smokey Bear went overboard. For decades, the well-meaning policy of suppressing all forest fires allowed too much fuel—dead wood, underbrush, small trees—to build up on public lands, especially in the fire-prone West. What might have once been a minor grass fire now turns cataclysmic, like last year's Hayman Fire in Colorado."
This is also a chance for us to think about how much control we have over nature - people build homes right in the middle of forests and lands that are prone to fires. Is there anything logical to that? When we don't let natural fire happen, suburban homes on the edges become the unnatural barrier. I hope these San Diego fires get people to think more about ongoing fire management than fire suppression.
I took this picture this morning of the fire at UCSD - 8am and it's fire sky already. In the meantime - I am safe from the fires. The air is just horrific though - my eyes, nasal passages and throat burns. I worry about those who have asthma.
You can read my other thoughts about the racial class politics of San Diego fires here, National news coverage of SD fires here, distortion of wildfires here, emphasis of LA over SD here, and what a Sociologist would do during a fire here. this was photo overlay was created by tim
