Notes on the Los Angeles fires, higher education, and climate change

This month I’ve been working on a post about how the Earth just broke the 1.5 C global heating threshold, as part of my work on climate change and the future of higher education. I hope to publish that soon, but the enormous Los Angeles fires just happened – are still happening, in fact. I’ve been posted about this on social media and talking with reporters, so I wanted to share some observations based on my research.

In this post I’ll start with a look at the present, how this disaster is impacting colleges and universities in terms of climate change.  Next I’ll consider what the event might mean for higher education’s future.  This will be a fast and sketchy post, because the LA event is still developing, and because I’ve already written a lot about the broader topic.

To be clear, this post is not an analysis or summary of the fires per se. There’s plenty of reporting on the fires themselves and the Wikipedia page is, characteristically, quite rich. Instead the focus here is specifically on higher education in the crisis.  Additionally, and it should go without saying, my heart goes out to the hundreds of thousands of people directly impacted.

One more introductory point: I’m not arguing that climate change caused the LA fires.  I’m saying, in line with what I’ve seen from research, that global warming played a role in making these fires the way they are.  Generally, climate change worsens natural disasters like fires, spurring more of them and worsening their intensity.

1 Colleges and universities in the fires right now

As I write this the LA fires still rage, with added danger of high winds.  According to the official California fire website, the Hurst Fire is 97% contained, but the Ventura one is 47%, as the Eaton fire is similarly 45%.   Far worse, the Palisades fire is just 19% contained and has covered 23,713 acres.  Overall 40,660 acres have burned, or around 63.5 square miles.  At least 24 people have died and more than 12,300 structures have been destroyed.

As of January 15, 11:57 am ET.

Where are colleges and universities in this situation?  A quick Google Maps offers one view:

Google Maps helpfully included fire locations automatically. UCLA is the first red dot east of Palisades.

So we don’t campus universities literally on fire (so far), but this is close. Too close.

How are these institutions hit and what are they doing in response?

Right now I cannot find any accounts of students, staff, or faculty being hurt or killed, for which I am deeply grateful.  I have seen and heard anecdotes about academics forced to evacuate, and some of them have seen property damaged, including homes. People are warning about air quality damage to lungs – i.e., smoke and particulate inhalation – but I haven’t seen estimates of that among academics.

Pepperdine University and UCLA moved classes online this week.  Others closed when the fires broke out:

Santa Monica College, Pasadena City College, Ventura College and Glendale Community College closed their campuses through the rest of the week while California Institute of Technology, Occidental College and others either canceled classes or closed down Wednesday and Thursday.

Thankfully,”[m]ost of the colleges are still on winter break, so many students aren’t on campus.”  And Pasedena reopened.

Academically adjacent, a major public space research enterprise was hit, as summarized by Wikipedia:

On January 7, NASA closed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nearby La Cañada Flintridge, California, through at least January 13 due to high winds and the encroaching Eaton Fire, forcing the evacuation of all non-emergency personnel at the site. The operations of the NASA Deep Space Network were relocated from the main facility to an off-site location and all employees were instructed to work from home.  As of January 10, JPL director Laurie Leshin reported there has been minor wind damage and no wildfire damage at the site, but over 150 staff had lost their homes.

There are so many details and stories here.  Inside Higher Ed notes this terrifying problem averted:

At Pepperdine in Malibu, officials made the call to start the spring semester online in part because the gas company shut off the natural gas service to campus after the fires caused a few gas lines to rupture.

The same article sketched one college’s (Pasadena) response:

Volunteers and college staff worked over the weekend to prepare the campus for reopening. That effort included power washing campus spaces and cleaning the air in buildings. The college will have bottled water and masks on hand for faculty, students and staff and will provide free meals to the campus community.

Several years ago I came up with this model for understanding how higher education and climate change can intersect:

Let me apply it now.

Obviously the main challenge is to campus grounds, as we’ve seen, and to the population.  But the impacts go beyond that domain.  For example, in terms of community relations, we’re seeing some connections already occurring:  “UCLA and other colleges in the region are providing free meals to the community and housing evacuees. Pierce College in Woodland Hills is serving as a shelter for large animals.”  Are any campuses in the area, or nearby, hosting evacuees?

We can consider the teaching and research domains, and here I have only suppositions and questions, rather than evidence.  Some number of students will experience – are experiencing, have experienced – these fires, and will bring all of that to classes.  How prepared are faculty for handling PTSD?  For those who teach about climate change, and who might want to bring the LA fires into class as a current example, can they honor students’ experiences without retraumatizing them?

The research side shows one problem I’ve been mentioning for a while: climate damage to research materials.

“The Andrew McNally House, built by the co-founder of the Rand McNally publishing company”

More than two dozen historical architectural sites have been lost so far.  A theosophical center burned,

the world’s largest archive of Theosophical materials, including a library with 40.000 titles, the entire archive of the history of the TS, including ca. 10.000 unpublished letters, pertaining to HPB [Helena Blavatsky], the Mahatmas, W.Q. Judge, G.R.S. Mead, Katherine Tingley, and G. de Purucker, membership records since 1875, art objects, and countless other irreplaceable materials. The archives also contained works of Boehme, Gichtel, donations from the king of Siam including rare Buddhist scriptures, and so on.

A music publisher’s building was burned, including a lot of materials for the composer Arnold Schoenberg.

Back to the diagram and its bottom right box: how many affected faculty, staff, and students are taking their stories to the public?  One Jet Propulsion Lab/NASA climate scientist saw his house burned down, then wrote to a major news venue about it.

2 What this might mean for higher education’s future

Let’s pause for a moment to look ahead from this event, to think about what it might suggest for higher education’s future.

As I said earlier, these fires are signs of things to come.  We must expect more and worse such disasters, among many other effects of the climate crisis.  They will vary, of course, depending on location, regional systems, campus operations, and luck.  Each college and university needs to forecast its own exposure to climate-accelerated disasters and plan accordingly.

In terms of an institution’s physical plant – buildings, green spaces, transportation fleet, infrastructure, etc. – this becomes a question of proactive defense and harm reduction. How can we best preserve our campus for the age of climate crisis?  The LA fires point so far to some ideas.  Here’s a detailed look at how some houses survived the storms through their design.  Can you apply any of those elements, including passivhaus architecture, to a campus exposed to potential fire damage?

Consider academia’s research mission.  To what extent are our materials subject to this kind of destruction, or to other climate damages?  How can we best preserve them: hardening sites, digitization, relocation?

Back to teaching and learning. Most campuses learned a lot about emergency remote instruction during COVID; have they applied those lessons, including improving what didn’t go well? As more students experience climate trauma, are we prepared to support them? And what role do current and very recent climate disasters play in our classes?

Shifting domains again, to what extent are campus emergency plans integrated with those of the local community?  In Universities on Fire I wrote about one very fire-exposed institution, some of whose staff trained with local fire services.  Do we support our populations making such volunteer partnerships?  And how many campuses are ready to host evacuees from elsewhere?

One last and troubling point: for several years I’ve been quietly recommending academics reckon with academia’s role in making the climate crisis occur.  It shouldn’t be a surprising point, given how many students we’ve graduated into fields like finance and petroleum engineering, journalism and political science, where they helped worsen the crisis in various degrees.  Or consider rich institutions’ relying on fossil fuel company holdings in their endowments, or how some academic research furthered the CO2 boom. Or the people who sit on college and university boards while also serving on those of greenhouse gas emission leaders.

No, I’m not saying all academics are evil as a result, nor am I rendering invisible the climate action taken by faculty, staff, and students. I’m saying it’s clear that academia played its part in enabling the crisis. I don’t think anyone has held us to account yet, but people may well do so.

Perhaps people like the Campus Climate Network, who recently shared this:

Are we ready to have that conversation?  Can we applied lessons from the recent racial reckoning?  Are campuses ready for this level of critique and outrage?

Back to the present: my thoughts are with the people of Los Angeles, suffering an inferno.  I hope they recover swiftly and that higher education thinks hard about what just happened.

(thanks to bob stein, Karen Costa, and Steven Kaye for links; many thanks to Inside Higher Ed for reporting)