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Podcast: Commonwealth Club of California Podcast
Episode: Bruce Cain: Under Fire and Under Water in the American West
Description: Extreme weather in the wake of climate change, causing wildfires, drought and flooding, threatens to turn the American West into a region hostile to human habitation—a “Great American Desert” as early U.S. explorers once mislabeled it. Bruce Cain suggests that the unique complex of politics, technology and logistics that once won the West must be rethought and reconfigured to win it anew in the face of these accelerating threats.These challenges are complicated by the region’s history, the deliberate fractiousness of the American political system, and the idiosyncrasies of human behavior. Cain analyzes how, in spite...