The ATLAS Institute // Firefighters and Climate Change

ATLAS Institute Today we are joined in the studio with Mark Gross of the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society institute at CU and Alicia Gibb Director of The Blow Things Up Lab, one of the spaces part of the ATLAS department.
ATLAS was formed in 1997 as a university wide initiative to integrate information technology into social endeavour.

ATLAS events: http://atlas.colorado.edu/wordpress/?page_id=99

BTU Lab: http://www.btulab.com/about

Firefighters and Climate Change Snowy frigid weather here in February may put wildfires way on the back burner for many of us here in Colorado. But as fire managers have been telling us, wildfire season has become a year-round phenomenon.

In the last decade or so wildfires have been getting more intense, and more dangerous, and more frequent.  No one knows this better than the firefighters themselves. Climate change—making the region hotter and drier—has a lot to do with it. But so does fire management—namely, fire suppression over recent decades. And humans living in houses in the so-called wildland-urban interface is another culprit. A new documentary that will be screened in Boulder this week documents the changes taking place with wildfires and the impact they’re having. The film is called “Unacceptable Risk: Firefighters on the Front Lines of Climate Change.” One of the film’s creators, journalist Dan Glick, joins us in the studio. Dan was also the science editor of the National Climate Assessment that came out last year. Our other guest is Don Whittemore, a long-time firefighter. He was incident commander on the massive Fourmile Canyon Fire of September 2010.

More about the film can be found at unacceptableriskfilm.org.

Hosts: Kendra Krueger and Susan Moran
Executive Producer, Producer and Engineer: Kendra Krueger
Additional Contributions: Beth Bennett and Jane Palmer

Listen here: