Coexisting with urban wildfires in BC
Hosted by UBC Faculty of Forestry, the Sustainability Hub and alumni UBC.
Thursday, April 3 | 6PM – 8PM
Centre for Interactive Research in Sustainability
2260 West Mall [map]
Join us for a public talk on the new wildfire reality facing urban BC with best selling author and writer John Vaillant, Koerner Chair for the Centre for Wildfire Coexistence and UBC Faculty of Forestry Professor Lori Daniels. The conversation will be moderated by UBC Faculty of Forestry Professor Suzanne Simard.
John VAILLANT
Fire Weather
Best selling author and writer for The New Yorker and National Geographic
Lori DANIELS
Koerner Chair, Centre for Wildfire Coexistence
Professor of Forest Ecology, UBC Faculty of Forestry
Moderated by
Suzanne SIMARD
Finding the Mother Tree
Professor of Forest Ecology, UBC Faculty of Forestry
How to Attend
REGISTER NOW
IN-PERSON LIVE at UBC Vancouver | Tickets $10
Students and other priority groups: FREE (Get Promo Code)
Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability
2260 West Mall [map]
IN-PERSON LIVESTREAM at UBC Okanagan | Free
TBC
ZOOM WEBINAR | Free
Speakers
JOHN VAILLANT
John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer based in Vancouver, BC whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Guardian, among others. His journalism, fiction, and non-fiction, explores collisions between human ambition and the natural world.
His latest book is the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in General Nonfiction, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, a stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind. In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon.
Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
LORI DANIELS
Dr. Daniels is the Koerner Chair in Wildfire Coexistence at the Centre for Wildfire Coexistence, and a Professor of Forest Ecology at the UBC Faculty of Forestry, where she directs the Tree-Ring Lab at UBC. She is an internationally recognized expert in forest ecology and the impacts of humans and climate change on wildfires. Dr. Daniels is familiar with BC’s diverse ecosystems and has a proven track record of Indigenous and community partnerships. As the co-director of the Centre for Wildfire Coexistence, Dr. Daniels will be positioned as a go-to expert in wildfire.
Awarded the 2023 Association of Fire Ecology Distinguished Leader in Research Award and 2020 Killam Teaching Prize in Forestry, she is a proven public educator, having given over 250 presentations, workshops and field tours to forest professionals and community and school groups. Since 2015, she has conducted close to 300 media interviews as a specialist. In 2022, Dr. Daniels was a panelist on the “Expert Roundtable on Wildfire and Forest Resilience” held in conjunction with the UN General Assembly (UNGA77) release of their report on climate.
SUZANNE SIMARD (Moderator)
Dr. Suzanne Simard is a Professor of Forest Ecology at the UBC, and leader of The Mother Tree Project and Mother Tree Network. Her research focuses on the complexity and interconnectedness of nature and is guided by her deep connection to the land and her time spent amongst the trees. She is known worldwide for her work on how trees interact with one another and communicate using below-ground fungal networks.
Dr. Simard and her colleagues have established the Mother Tree Project, an innovative experiment crossing a 900-km climate gradient that is investigating how retention of old trees helps protect biodiversity, carbon storage and forest regeneration as climate changes. The Mother Tree Project serves as the foundation for the Mother Tree Network, a circle of collaborators and Indigenous partners Dr. Simard and her colleagues have formalized. The Network serves to protect forests and accelerate an ecological transition from an extractive economy to one that is regenerative.
She is an advocate for science communication and empowers people with science-based knowledge to help manage and heal forests from human impacts, including climate change. She has communicated her work to a global audience through interviews, documentary films and her TED Talk How trees talk to one another which, to date, has accumulated more than 5.4 million views and has been translated into dozens of different languages. Her award-winning book Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, was published in May 2021 by Penguin Random House.
Hosted by UBC Faculty of Forestry, the Sustainability Hub and alumni UBC, with support from the UBC Centre for Wildfire Coexistence, UBC Campus & Community Planning, and the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS)
