Join the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment for a discussion with Bruce Cain, author of Under Fire and Under Water: Extreme Weather, the West, and the Fight to Shape America’s Future. 

Bruce E. Cain is the author of Under Fire and Under Water: Extreme Weather, the West, and the Fight to Shape America’s Future, a timely examination of how climate-driven wildfires, droughts, and flooding are reshaping the American West. Cain, a professor of political science at Stanford University and Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, is a leading scholar of U.S. politics and widely recognized for his expertise in political regulation, representation, and state politics, with a particular emphasis on California and the American West.

Drawing on decades of scholarship in U.S. politics, environmental regulations, and stakeholder engagement, Cain analyzes why communities continue to settle and rebuild in high-risk areas and how fragmented governance, infrastructure legacies, and political incentives slow meaningful climate adaptation. In this talk, he and Woods faculty director Chris Field will explore how understanding the political and behavioral roots of inaction is essential to developing durable solutions for living sustainably in a warming world. 

For more information, contact: woods-events@stanford.edu

Zoom link: https://stanford.zoom.us/j/91464522006?pwd=ilvbnmcskh18ZCYVCBzhXSc7u8HNpP.1

Speakers:

Bruce Cain, Charles Louis Ducommun Professor, Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences; Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment; the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research; the Precourt Institute for Energy; Professor of Environmental Social Sciences.

Chris Field, Perry L. McCarty Director, Woods Institute for the Environment; Melvin and Joan Lane Professor of Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Biology; and Professor of Earth System Science, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability