After the Fires: Intersectional Approaches to Wildfire Resilience

Lauren Bon is an environmental artist from Los Angeles. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include: Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in Downtown L.A. into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Her studio’s current work, Bending the River, aims to utilize L.A.’s first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the L.A. River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of Downtown.

Dr. Edith de Guzman (she/her) is an interdisciplinary researcher, practitioner, educator, and curator working with diverse audiences to understand and address the impacts of climate change in under-represented communities. She is a University of California Cooperative Extension specialist with the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, where her work investigates best practices for the sustainable transformation of urban areas related to climate adaptation, shade equity, water management, and wildfire resilience. She was previously director of research at TreePeople. Edith co-founded the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative, the Los Angeles Urban Forest Equity Collective, and ShadeLA – each a multisectoral partnership working to make LA livable in a warming climate.

Ursula K. Heise is Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, and a co-founder of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). Her research and teaching focus on the environmental humanities; contemporary environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Germany, Japan, Spain, and Vietnam; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory.  Her books include, among others, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam (2024), and Unsettling Extinction (2026). She co-edits the series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave Macmillan She is also producer and writer of Urban Ark Los Angeles, a short documentary about urban parrots. The first episode of Grand Theft Eco, a series of "machinima" animated videos about the environmental futures of Los Angeles based on the storyworld and game engine of the videogame Grand Theft Auto V, was launched in 2025.  In 2024, Heise was awarded the Biophilia Award for Environmental Humanities by Spain's BBVA Foundation. In 2026, she was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Zion Rodriguez-Aceves (Nawa - Tlehuixco, Morelos) is an alumnus of Anahuacalmecac and a UC Berkeley graduate in Global Studies, with an emphasis in Latin American Peace and Conflict. Born and raised in East Los Angeles, with family roots in Nawatl-speaking pueblos in Morelos, he now serves as a land tender and youth programming coordinator at Chief Ya’anna Regenerative Learning Village. Zion supports and coordinates the Semillas Adoberos council, Masewaltlalpixkayotl Fire Resilience Youth Corps and the Landback Learning K-12 program, while preparing for law school to work at the intersection of federal Indian law, international law, and environmental protection. He also enjoys making adobe bricks and learning traditional adobe building techniques from elders.

Joelene Tamm is the Natural Resources Director for the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians and a member of the Squaxin Island Tribe. Her work focuses on implementing culturally centered environmental management frameworks by integrating contemporary scientific methodologies with traditional ecological knowledge. Tamm currently administers a CalFire Tribal Wildfire Resilience Grant and a U.S. Forest Service Wood Products Infrastructure Grant, targeting fuel hazard reduction, economic stream development, and year-round departmental capacity building. She also serves as the Chair-Elect of the California Forest Pest Council Southern California Committee. Tamm holds a B.S. in Biology from California Baptist University and an Associate's degree in Computer Science and Information Systems. She is currently completing an M.S. in Entomology at the University of California, Riverside, where her research investigates cultural burning as a landscape-level management tool to mitigate Quercus tree mortality induced by the goldspotted oak borer (Agrilus auroguttatus).