Doug Specht, Senior Lecturer and Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Media and Communication, wrote an article for The Conversation about how a gender reveal party got the blame for the California wildfires, but shouldn’t have.
Discussing the cause of the California wildfires, Specht said: “California is not on fire because of a single gender-reveal party, of course. The El Dorado fire consumed just 10,000 of the 2.3 million acres presently alight. The West Coast is ablaze because of a range of climactic changes. California has been baking in record temperatures for weeks, hitting a record 49 degrees Celsius in early September.”
Talking about the blame being put on the gender-reveal party, he added: “In many ways, blaming a single human event makes sense. Historically, the majority of fires in California have been started by them.
“But blaming one person, one party, one poor decision, or one freak accident avoids the necessary reckoning with collective responsibility. It moves blame to individuals, giving the most powerful perpetrators of global heating – a roomful of chief executives and their corporate empires – a free ride. It also erodes the sense of urgency that’s vital for tackling climate change.”
Read the full article on The Conversation’s website.
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