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The Return of Uncertainty: Public Lands in an Increasingly Unpredictable World
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WAT T
In October 2019, my campus at Sonoma State University experienced an epidemic of uncertainty. Repeating cycles of fire weather—high winds, low humidity, and warmer than usual temperature—triggered two massive public safety shutdowns of electricity across much of California, timed about two weeks apart. Both outages lasted for several days for most customers, and for some as long as a week or more. During the second shutdown, a wildfire already broken out in northern Sonoma County drove evacuations of nearly two hundred thousand residents, fearing a repeat of October 2017’s destructive Nuns and Tubbs fires or November 2018’s Camp fire that destroyed the town of Paradise in the Sierra foothills. Faculty, staff, and students from Sonoma State were among those who scrambled to get out of the potential fire’s path, ending up as farflung as San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Once the huge mobilization of firefighters from across the state got a handle on the Kincade blaze and our utility company PG&E began “reactivating” neighborhoods, we slowly returned to our homes and, as the anxiety levels subsided, resumed the fall semester. Many classes had missed at least two weeks of meeting times, and the disruption of repeatedly stopping and starting instruction so abruptly meant the loss of even more valuable in-class time; instructors found themselves needing to cut up to a quarter of the semester’s material from their syllabi, as well as to find ways of bringing their rattled students’ attention back to the course, all while maintaining academic integrity and rigor. And this was not the first time; for three years in a row now, October and November have brought campus closures due to wildfire and poor air quality from smoke. Looking forward, Sonoma State faculty and students are now reluctant to plan any conferences or special events during these months and are looking for strategies for adapting our syllabi to the “new normal” of not only a volatile and heightened fire danger in autumn, but also the new strategy of preemptive power blackouts to address that risk. With classes structured increasingly around online learning management systems and assigning pdfs to read instead of actual books, any power outage brings instruction to a screeching halt, often for days on end.
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