Join us for the premiere public screening of Van Alen Sessions Season Five: Fireproofing the Future in California, a project of Van Alen Institute produced in partnership with The New Yorker.
This short documentary video points to the urgent issue of the “wildland-urban interface,” areas where homes are built near or among undeveloped lands. While demand for this type of housing grows across the Western U.S., more intense and frequent wildfires in these areas are destroying lives, homes, and forests at record levels. Heartbreaking footage and stories from experts and those living and working in the fire zones of California illustrate the choices we must make to build safer homes and communities in the era of climate change.
Meet us at SVA Theatre, where we’ll project the video and host a panel discussion afterward with the filmmaker, Merete Mueller, along with Mark Johnson, FASLA, president of Civitas landscape architecture and a member of Van Alen Institute’s board of trustees and Climate Council; Robert Field, a climate scientist and drought expert at Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; and Bob Williams, president of Pine Creek Forestry, New Jersey. Carolyn Kormann, staff writer at The New Yorker, will moderate the discussion.
Presented in partnership with SVA MA Design Research, Writing & Criticism, the screening is free and open to the public.
This season of Van Alen Sessions is supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fledgling Fund.
