Dr. Dustin Mulvaney - The Big Fire in the Big Basin: The long history and short memory of wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains

Dr. Dustin Mulvaney, Professor in School of Planning, Policy, and Environmental Studies, San Jose State University

The Big Fire in the Big Basin: The long history and short memory of wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains

This talk examines the post-colonial wildfire history of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Spanish dispossession disrupted Indigenous fire regimes, while landscape-scale changes driven by deforestation during American occupation set in motion an active period of wildfire across the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These fires spurred efforts to protect the region’s redwood forests through the formation of the Sempervirens Fund and the founding of Big Basin State Park, but they also helped entrench practices of wildfire suppression. Large wildfires were common from the late 1800s through the 1920s. Subsequent efforts by labor camps and the Civilian Conservation Corps to build fire towers and fuel breaks coincided with a period of relatively low fire activity that lasted until 1948, when Santa Cruz County experienced its largest wildfire until the CZU Lightning Complex of 2020. A civil grand jury later described the CZU fire as the most significant in county history, implying the greatest extent on record. The historical analysis presented here, however, identifies several post-colonial fires that exceeded the CZU Lightning Complex in size and argues that this longer fire history was forgotten because generations passed between major fires in the county.

About the Speaker

Dustin Mulvaney is a Professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Environmental Studies at San José State University (SJSU). He is a Fellow with the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines, and Fellow with the Climate + Community Institute. His research focuses on just transitions, solar energy commodity chains, natural resource development, and the circular economy.  He is author of Solar Power: Innovation, Sustainability, Environmental Justice published by the University California Press in 2019 and Sustainable Energy Transitions: Socio-Ecological Dimensions of Decarbonization with Palgrave-MacMillan in 2020, and Energy, Society, and the Environment: A Critical Perspective, soon out with Wiley-Blackwell in 2026. His areas of expertise and research are on land use change, life cycle assessment, recycling & waste, and the environmental justice impacts of energy technologies, supply chains, and infrastructures, with extensive emphasis on the life cycle impacts of solar photovoltaics and lithium-ion batteries. He is also writing a book that examines the intertwined histories of postcolonial resource extraction and wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Tuesday, May 5, 2026

3:30 - 4 PM Reception

4 - 5 PM Lecture & Q&A

All events in the JRBP ('O'O) Lecture Series are free and open to the public.

Recordings of events are available by speaker agreement and as funds allow.