The Public Square
Community Commons
Explore and share ideas with the global Anthropalooza community
The Commons
The Commons is an open place for reading, exploration, conversation, and work — where anthropologists, students, and enthusiasts share ideas, post reflections, circulate articles, and spark conversations across all subfields of anthropology. It's the public square of Anthropalooza: a gathering place where knowledge, curiosity, and collaboration come together.
"Culture consists of the knowledge that people employ to interpret and act in the world, knowledge that is learned and shared. Such knowledge is distributed in society, never identical for all individuals, but sufficiently congruent to permit communication and interaction."
— Fredrik Barth - An Anthropology of Knowledge
Public discourse surrounding the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), and the Middle East more broadly, i…
When I wrote my (2024) article for Kurdistan Chronicle, I was responding to a recurring frustration voiced by Kurdish friends and interlocutors: that Kurds are so often reduced to a “question”—of statehood, recognition, or legitimacy—rather than understood as a people shaped by complex histories, internal diversity, and ongoing political projects. Kurds are not simply a stateless group suspended in permanent crisis. They are linguistically, religiously, culturally, and politically diverse, and they actively negotiate identity, belonging, and future-making both within Kurdistan and across the diaspora. That insight matters deeply when we look at the present moment in the KRI. Despite regional instability, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has continued to invest in long-term systems that rarely make headlines: water and sanitation infrastructure, electricity reliability, transportation networks, agricultural support, and educational expansion. These efforts are not symbolic. They are the material foundations of governance, public trust, and social continuity. Taken together, Kurdish identity negotiation and Kurdish governance should be understood as part of the same story. The same people who navigate fractured histories, displacement, and diaspora are also participating, directly or indirectly, in building institutions, maintaining social cohesion, and imagining futures that extend beyond survival. This is what is often missed when Kurdish life is framed only through loss or absence. My article argues that to understand “the Kurdish question,” we must move beyond asking whether Kurds deserve statehood and begin asking how Kurds live, adapt, govern, and persist under constraint. The ongoing work of the KRG—quiet, technical, and often overlooked—demonstrates that Kurdish political life is not frozen in aspiration. It is already being practiced. I would welcome thoughtful engagement from scholars, practitioners, and those with lived experience in or connected to Kurdistan and/or the Middle East on how we might shift public discourse away from perpetual crisis and toward a fuller understanding of culture, society, governance, and identity.
Stephen FoxFounder
At the Edge of Division: An Anthropological Reflection on Political Identity in America
Political division in the United States is often described as rupture, polarization, extremism, or breakdown. Anthropology invites a different view. What feels sudden is often the sharpening of older cultural patterns, long embedded in systems of meaning that organize belonging and difference. The words that now separate Americans—Democrat, Republican, Conservative, Liberal—do more than signal political preference. They operate as identity markers, shaped through family histories, religious inheritances, regional loyalties, and moral visions of the world. In this sense, contemporary political conflict is not merely ideological. It is cultural at its core. Anthropologists have long treated identity as relational and symbolic rather than fixed. One hears echoes of Pierre Bourdieu here, in the way political labels function like symbolic capital—signs of legitimacy and moral standing within particular social fields. To name oneself politically is often to inherit an entire moral narrative about who one is, where one belongs, and what one owes to others. Leaving that narrative can feel less like changing an opinion and more like risking estrangement from kin, congregation, or community memory. The fear of alienation becomes a quiet but powerful force that stabilizes ideological boundaries. Fredrik Barth once reminded us that groups endure not because of internal sameness but because of the boundaries they maintain. In the United States today, political categories increasingly serve this boundary-making function. They shape media worlds, friendship networks, moral vocabularies, and even perceptions of reality itself. Difference hardens into opposition, and opposition into moral distance. The other side becomes not simply mistaken, but unintelligible. What feels especially altered in the present moment is the thinning of shared social space. Earlier periods of American political life were never free of injustice or exclusion, yet political rivals often moved within overlapping worlds, arguing fiercely in public while sustaining forms of personal regard in private. Victor Turner’s writing on communitas helps illuminate what seems diminished now: that fleeting but essential sense of shared humanity capable of surfacing even within structured conflict. When communitas recedes, structure grows rigid. Opponents become enemies. Disagreement begins to feel like threat. Does the emotional atmosphere surrounding contemporary politics: anger, dread, anticipation of rupture, resemble what anthropologists describe as a liminal condition? Liminality names those historical intervals when established structures lose coherence while new ones remain unformed. Such moments are unstable and sometimes dangerous, yet they are also profoundly generative. They hold open the possibility that societies might reimagine belonging, authority, and moral community in new ways. Turner saw liminality not only as crisis, but as threshold. If division is cultural, reconciliation must be cultural as well. Anthropology rarely offers prescriptions, yet it does preserve certain disciplined practices of rehumanization. Ethnographic listeningso central to the work of figures from Malinowski to Geertz, requires suspending immediate judgment long enough to grasp how another world of meaning holds together from within. Studies of ritual, from Durkheim forward, remind us that shared symbols and collective experiences can repair bonds that argument alone cannot. Work in the anthropology of conflict and peacebuilding shows that coexistence seldom begins in agreement. It begins in the quieter recognition of mutual personhood. The deeper question, then, is not simply how partisan conflict in the United States might be resolved, but whether Americans can rediscover relationships that precede ideology. Every society must decide whether difference will be organized through exclusion or through negotiated coexistence. Liminal periods can collapse into fragmentation, yet they can also give rise to unexpected solidarities, new imaginings of a collective “we” that were previously unthinkable. Anthropology does not tell us where this moment will lead. It does insist, however, on a difficult clarity: political opponents are never only political. They are kin and neighbors, parents and workers, believers and skeptics, participants in the same fragile social world. Any path beyond division must begin there, in the slow and uncertain work of seeing one another again as human. What are your thoughts?
Stephen FoxFounder
Anthropologically Speaking: Immigration, Culture, and the Human Story
Few issues generate as much discussion today as immigration. Across the United States and Europe, many people express concern about cultural change. Some fear the loss of traditions, languages, values, or ways of life that they associate with their communities and national identities. Others emphasize the opportunities, diversity, and innovation that migration can bring. Anthropology approaches these concerns from a different angle. For most of human history, people have moved. Migration is not an exception to the human story. It is one of its defining features. Languages, religions, technologies, foods, and ideas have traveled alongside people for thousands of years. The societies we know today are often the result of countless migrations, exchanges, conflicts, adaptations, and integrations that occurred over generations. This does not mean that cultural change is always easy. Communities often experience uncertainty when familiar social patterns shift. New populations may bring different languages, customs, or religious traditions. At the same time, newcomers often face their own challenges as they adapt to unfamiliar laws, institutions, and cultural expectations. Anthropologists have long observed that culture is neither fixed nor fragile. It is dynamic. Cultures preserve some traditions, modify others, and create entirely new forms through interaction. The foods we eat, the languages we speak, the music we enjoy, and even the traditions we consider ancient often reflect centuries of cultural exchange. The question, then, may not be whether cultures change. History suggests they always have. The more interesting questions are how communities manage change, how people negotiate belonging, and how societies balance continuity with adaptation. What examples of cultural change, migration, or identity negotiation have you observed in your own community? We invite thoughtful discussion from multiple perspectives.
Stephen FoxFounder
Anthropologically Speaking: The World Cup | Sports & Politics
Around the world, the World Cup is offering a vivid reminder that patriotism is not only American, and it is not only political. We see people draped in flags, singing anthems, painting their faces, wearing national colors, gathering in homes, cafés, stadiums, and public squares. Through sport, people perform belonging. They celebrate history, kinship, language, place, memory, and shared identity. Anthropology reminds us that patriotism is far more complex than loyalty to a government. It is woven from ritual, symbols, stories, songs, landscapes, family histories, and the communities that teach us who “we” are. Nations are not only legal entities. They are imagined and practiced communities, sustained through everyday acts of meaning. This is why patriotism can feel joyful, painful, conflicted, or deeply complicated. A person may love their country while criticizing its leaders. They may cherish a national culture while questioning the actions of the state. They may feel pride, grief, hope, and disappointment all at once. Perhaps patriotism is not simply a belief. Perhaps it is a relationship. A relationship with people, place, memory, history, and possibility. As fans around the world celebrate their nations through sport, we are reminded that patriotism is not only something people declare. It is something people do. What does patriotism mean to you? Can love, criticism, pride, and disappointment coexist within the same sense of belonging?
Stephen FoxFounder
Anthropologically Speaking: When Political Parties Become Identities
I have been thinking about democratic elections, and especially about what happens when political affiliation becomes more than a choice on a ballot. The United States is not the only country that holds elections, and it is certainly not the only nation experiencing political division. Still, I cannot remember another period in my lifetime when the distance between Republicans and Democrats felt this personal, this moral, or this complete. I find myself wondering whether we are still talking about political parties at all. A party is supposed to represent a collection of ideas, policies, and priorities. A person looks at those ideas, decides which ones most closely reflect their own, and casts a vote. At least, that is how the process is often imagined. But that does not seem to describe what is happening now. Republican and Democrat have become identity markers. They tell us something about where a person lives, what kind of community they belong to, what media they consume, what institutions they trust, what they fear, and what they believe America is supposed to be. In many families and communities, political identity is inherited before it is examined. People learn that “we are Republicans” or “we are Democrats” in much the same way they learn other forms of belonging. The affiliation becomes connected to region, religion, class, education, race, profession, family history, and tradition. Pierre Bourdieu might help us understand this through habitus. We acquire ways of seeing and interpreting the world through the places and relationships that form us. Political loyalty may feel like a carefully reasoned choice, but it can also be something much deeper. It can feel natural, familiar, almost bodily. This may explain why political disagreement is so often experienced as a personal rejection. When someone questions our party, perhaps it does not feel as though they are questioning a policy. It may feel as though they are questioning our family, our community, our intelligence, our morality, or our place in the nation. Clifford Geertz also comes to mind. Geertz wrote about ideology as a cultural system. He was interested in how people use symbols and stories to make a complicated world intelligible. The more I think about it, the more American political parties appear to function in this way. Each side has its own stories about the past, its own heroes and villains, its own memories of betrayal, and its own promises of national renewal. Each side believes something precious is being lost. Each side believes something dangerous is approaching. Each side also possesses symbols that carry far more meaning than the objects themselves. A flag, a slogan, a hat, a protest sign, or even a word can immediately reveal political belonging. These things are not merely campaign decorations. They are cultural symbols. They allow people to recognize one another and to decide, often almost instantly, who is trustworthy and who is not. That recognition can happen before a conversation begins. Perhaps this is part of what troubles me most. We seem increasingly able to dismiss one another without listening. The political label arrives first, and the human being comes second. Sometimes the human being never arrives at all. The Republican becomes the ignorant reactionary, the religious authoritarian, or the angry nationalist. The Democrat becomes the contemptuous elitist, the godless radical, or the corrupt bureaucrat. Millions of people are compressed into a handful of familiar characters. Michel Foucault helps us think about what language is doing here. Political language does not simply describe the world. It helps construct the categories through which we understand it: the forgotten worker, the dangerous immigrant, the corrupt elite, the radical leftist, the fascist, the patriot, the traitor, the real American. Once these categories become familiar, we begin fitting people into them. We may no longer ask what someone believes or why. We believe we already know. And once we believe we know who the other person is, rational debate becomes almost impossible. Evidence itself becomes partisan. A fact offered by the opposing side may be dismissed before it is considered, not because it has been disproven, but because it came from the wrong person, the wrong institution, or the wrong political tribe. Researchers call part of this affective polarization. We are not simply disagreeing with one another. We are increasingly distrusting, disliking, and morally condemning one another. This feels important because both sides now seem to experience politics as a moral emergency. One side may believe it is defending constitutional government, religious liberty, national sovereignty, public order, and traditional institutions. The other may believe it is defending democracy, civil rights, bodily autonomy, pluralism, vulnerable communities, and environmental protections. These are not identical political projects. They do not carry identical consequences, and anthropology does not require us to pretend that every claim is equally factual or harmless. Understanding is not the same as agreement. Still, I keep returning to the structure of the experience. Both sides believe the nation is at risk. Both sides believe defeat may cause irreversible damage. Both sides believe compromise may be a form of surrender. That is a dangerous condition for a democracy. When both political camps believe they are facing an existential threat, the opposing voter is no longer simply wrong. They become dangerous. And dangerous people do not need to be heard. They need to be defeated, silenced, removed from influence, perhaps even excluded from the political community altogether. This is where political opponents begin to become enemies. I have also been thinking about the two-party system itself. We often speak as though Republicans and Democrats simply reflect a naturally divided population. Yet the United States contains extraordinary cultural, regional, religious, economic, and ideological diversity. How did all of that complexity become compressed into two labels? Bourdieu’s idea of the political field is useful here. Political choices do not emerge in an empty space. They are shaped by institutions, election laws, media organizations, donors, consultants, campaign structures, and access to money and power. The Republican and Democratic parties do not merely respond to division. They also organize it. Third-party candidates occasionally appear, and many Americans say they want another option. But those candidates enter a system already designed around two dominant parties. They face ballot restrictions, limited funding, reduced media attention, and the assumption that voting for them is pointless. Their failure then appears to prove that Americans do not want a third party, even though the structure has made third-party success nearly impossible. There is something deeply circular about that. The two parties remain dominant because alternatives are considered unviable, and alternatives remain unviable because the two parties are dominant. Meanwhile, many eligible citizens do not vote at all. This leaves me wondering how fully either party represents the public, even while both claim to speak for the nation. I do not believe disagreement is the problem. Democracy requires disagreement. Some of the most important changes in American history came from people who refused to compromise with injustice. The problem begins when disagreement destroys recognition. A democracy becomes fragile when we can no longer see political opponents as legitimate participants in a shared world. It becomes fragile when elections are respected only when our side wins, when compromise is understood as collaboration with evil, and when people begin to believe that fellow citizens should not merely lose an argument, but lose their voice. An election is supposed to provide temporary authority to govern. It does not grant permanent ownership of the country. And yet, political language increasingly asks us to decide who the nation truly belongs to. Who are the real Americans? Who represents the people? Who has betrayed the country? Who must be defeated for the nation to survive? These are not only political questions. They are anthropological questions about identity, belonging, classification, legitimacy, and power. I suppose this is where anthropology continues to challenge me. Anthropology asks us to take human beings seriously, even when we disagree with them. It asks us to understand how ideas become meaningful, how loyalties become embodied, how symbols become sacred, and how fear becomes persuasive. It asks us to resist caricature. That does not mean abandoning moral judgment. It does not mean pretending that harmful ideas are harmless. It does not mean that every political position deserves equal respect. It means that critique should be grounded in understanding rather than contempt. To listen is not to surrender. To understand is not to endorse. To recognize another person’s humanity is not to excuse the harm they may support. But perhaps a democracy cannot survive if we lose the ability to make those distinctions. The United States may continue to hold elections. What concerns me is whether we are slowly losing the cultural conditions that allow elections to mean anything beyond victory and defeat. A democracy depends upon more than ballots. It depends upon the willingness to remain in a shared political world with people we may never fully understand and may never persuade. I am no longer certain that we remember how to do that.
Stephen FoxFounder
Anthropologically Speaking: Wildfires
When most of us look at a wildfire, our attention is understandably drawn to the flames. We see burning forests, destroyed homes, exhausted firefighters, frightened animals, and long lines of people attempting to evacuate. Those are the most immediate and dramatic images. As anthropologists, however, we must also look beyond the fire itself. We ask what happens to the people who live in its path, how risk is distributed, who receives protection, who can afford to rebuild, and what it means when a community begins to wonder whether it can continue to exist in the same place. That is what I would like us to consider here. Wildfires are environmental events, but they are also profoundly human events. They alter relationships to land, disrupt communities, reshape housing and insurance markets, threaten livelihoods, and sometimes compel people to move. In that sense, a wildfire does more than burn across a physical landscape. It changes the human map. Let us begin with the scale of the current emergency. As of July 26, 2026, the United States had recorded 42,157 wildfires that burned approximately 4.07 million acres. The number of fires stood at 128 percent of the ten-year average for that date, while the acreage burned stood at 121 percent. Ninety large fires remained uncontained, with 25,310 firefighters and support personnel assigned to active incidents. The United States had reached National Preparedness Level 5, the highest level in the national system (National Interagency Fire Center 2026a, 2026b). Canada has been confronting hundreds of fires at the same time. By July 20, approximately 5.9 million acres had burned across the country. Ontario alone reported 190 active fires, with approximately 1,800 people evacuated from threatened communities. Smoke from these fires moved southward and produced unhealthy air in parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan (Reuters 2026a, 2026b). This is an important anthropological point in itself. The fire may begin within a particular province, state, or country, but smoke does not recognize political borders. The consequences of an environmental event can cross territories much more easily than the people affected by it. Europe is facing a similarly destructive emergency. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre reported that 254,388 hectares had burned within the European Union by July 22. Although this was slightly below the area burned by the same point in the record-setting 2025 season, it was already above the twenty-year average. The European Forest Fire Information System had detected 1,254 fires, more than twice the long-term average of 569 for the same point in the year (European Commission Joint Research Centre 2026). Conditions deteriorated further during the following days. By July 26, approximately 220,000 people had been evacuated in France and another 75,000 in Spain. More than 150,000 hectares had burned in Spain, approximately six times the area recorded by the same point in 2025 (Reuters 2026c). In southwestern France, fires approaching Bordeaux had burned approximately 42,000 hectares and forced roughly a quarter of a million people from their homes by July 26 (Associated Press 2026). The totals reported by news organizations changed throughout the day as additional evacuation orders were issued. That is why dates matter when we use disaster statistics. These figures are snapshots of a rapidly developing emergency rather than final totals. Hectares and acres can be measured. A destroyed relationship to place is much harder to calculate. Climate Change and the Conditions of Fire There are people who remain skeptical about climate change or about the degree to which human activity is responsible for it. We should acknowledge that disagreement without pretending that the evidence itself is evenly divided. We also need to be careful about what climate science does and does not tell us. It would be too simplistic to say that climate change ignited every wildfire. Fires begin for many reasons, including lightning, damaged electrical equipment, machinery, accidents, negligence, and deliberate acts. Climate change usually operates at a different level. It changes the environmental conditions into which those sparks fall. Higher temperatures, warmer nights, earlier snowmelt, reduced summer precipitation, prolonged drought, and drier vegetation can make it easier for an ignition to become a fast-moving and destructive fire. Historical fire-suppression policies have also allowed fuels to accumulate in some forests. Wildfire severity therefore cannot be explained by climate alone. It develops through an interaction among climate, weather, vegetation, land management, settlement patterns, and ignition sources (NASA n.d.). NASA reports that fire seasons are beginning earlier in the spring and extending later into the autumn. In parts of the western United States, Mexico, Brazil, and East Africa, fire seasons are now more than a month longer than they were thirty-five years ago. NASA also reports that global carbon emissions from forest fires increased by approximately 60 percent between 2001 and 2023. Emissions from boreal forest fires in Eurasia and North America nearly tripled during the same period, driven by warmer and drier conditions (NASA n.d.). The United Nations Environment Programme projects that climate change and land-use change could increase extreme wildfires globally by as much as 14 percent by 2030, 30 percent by 2050, and 50 percent by the end of the century (United Nations Environment Programme 2022). We can therefore distinguish between two different claims. Climate change does not necessarily provide the spark that begins an individual fire. It does, however, contribute to the hotter, drier, and longer fire conditions that allow some fires to become more severe. This is why the traditional idea of a short, predictable “fire season” is becoming less useful in many regions. Wildfire as a Cause of Migration Now we can turn to the question that is especially important for anthropology: When do people decide that remaining in a place is no longer possible? One of the best-known approaches to this question is the push-pull framework of migration. It is most closely associated with sociologist Everett S. Lee, who formalized the model in his 1966 article “A Theory of Migration.” Lee described four broad elements involved in migration: conditions at the place of origin, conditions at the destination, obstacles between the two, and the personal circumstances of the potential migrant (Lee 1966). His work developed ideas with earlier roots in geographer Ernst Georg Ravenstein’s nineteenth-century “laws of migration” (Ravenstein 1885). Using Lee’s framework, we can identify several potential wildfire-related push factors: immediate physical danger, smoke exposure, repeated evacuations, housing loss, disrupted employment, damaged infrastructure, and rising insurance costs. Pull factors might include safer environmental conditions, affordable housing, employment, medical care, functioning public services, or proximity to relatives and social networks. Insurance is particularly important because it can begin to affect migration before a home is actually destroyed. A 2026 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that moving from a medium to a high level of wildfire risk was associated with an 8 percent increase in homeowners’ insurance premiums. The report also concluded that increasing disaster risk can reduce the availability of insurance altogether (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2026). Imagine what that means for an ordinary family. The house may still be standing, but insurance premiums are rising. Coverage may be reduced or cancelled. Smoke may return every summer. Schools may close periodically, and family members with asthma may become ill. Eventually, the decision to leave may occur not because the flames have reached the front door, but because remaining has become economically, physically, or emotionally unsustainable. The Limits of Push and Pull Lee’s framework helps us organize these pressures, but anthropology asks us to go further. People do not simply place the advantages and disadvantages of two locations on a scale and select whichever one appears safer. A home is not only a financial asset. It may contain family history, cultural memory, livelihood, identity, and a sense of belonging. A forest can be an ecosystem, a workplace, a hunting territory, a sacred landscape, a source of medicinal knowledge, and an ancestral home at the same time. When fire transforms that landscape, the loss cannot be calculated only through property values. This is especially important when considering Indigenous communities. Land may be inseparable from collective identity, oral history, subsistence practices, ceremony, and relationships with previous and future generations. Relocation might protect people physically while simultaneously endangering cultural continuity. Nor does everyone have the same ability to move. A wealthy household may have insurance, transportation, savings, flexible employment, and somewhere else to stay. A poorer family may recognize the danger just as clearly but have no realistic means of leaving. Older adults and people with disabilities may depend upon local support systems that cannot easily be recreated elsewhere. People with insecure immigration status can face additional barriers. Research conducted with undocumented Latino and Indigenous immigrants affected by California wildfires found that economic marginalization, limited access to linguistically appropriate information, exclusion from some forms of assistance, and fear of deportation increased disaster vulnerability (Méndez, Flores-Haro, and Zucker 2020). Federal Emergency Management Agency guidance states that crisis counseling and some emergency services are available regardless of immigration status, but eligibility for certain forms of individual financial assistance is limited to U.S. citizens, noncitizen nationals, and qualified noncitizens (Federal Emergency Management Agency 2026). Mobility, then, is unequal. Some people can choose where and when to move. Others are driven out suddenly. Still others become trapped because they lack the resources either to remain safely or to leave. Wildfire within a Larger Geography of Displacement Wildfire is only one part of a much larger global geography of human displacement. War, political instability, drought, flooding, declining agricultural productivity, coastal erosion, and sea-level rise often interact rather than operate separately. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre recorded 32.3 million new or repeated displacement movements associated with conflict and violence during 2025. Disasters produced another 29.9 million movements. These figures count movements rather than necessarily representing separate individuals, because one person may be displaced multiple times. At the end of 2025, approximately 82.2 million people were living in internal displacement. Of that population, 68.6 million had been displaced by conflict and violence and 13.6 million by disasters (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre 2026). Drought provides an important example of the relationship among environmental pressure, livelihood, and migration. Across the Sahel, severe droughts and cyclical flooding have affected agriculture, water access, human mobility, and political stability. These environmental pressures interact with poverty, armed conflict, weak institutions, and competition over productive land. Climate change should not be described as the sole cause of conflict or migration in the region. It is better understood as one factor that can intensify existing economic and political vulnerabilities (International Organization for Migration 2024a). Similar patterns are visible in Central America’s Dry Corridor, where increasingly unreliable rainfall and declining agricultural productivity affect rural and Indigenous communities. Migration may become one means of adapting to environmental uncertainty, but it is rarely caused by the climate alone. Household debt, employment, violence, family connections, land ownership, and immigration policy also shape who moves and where they go (International Organization for Migration 2024b). Sea-level rise and coastal erosion raise comparable questions. In the United States, Newtok, Alaska, and Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, have undertaken relocation efforts because erosion, thawing permafrost, storm surges, and land loss threaten their continued habitability (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2020). These cases remind us that relocating buildings is not the same as relocating a community. A government can construct new houses, roads, and water systems, but it cannot automatically reproduce the relationships, histories, and meanings that made the original place a home. The World Bank has estimated that changes in water availability, agricultural productivity, and sea level could produce as many as 216 million internal climate migrants across six world regions by 2050. That number is a modeled upper-range projection, not a predetermined future. The same study concluded that coordinated climate and development policies could reduce the projected scale of internal climate migration by as much as 80 percent (World Bank 2021). The Anthropological Question If I were discussing this with a class, I would ask everyone to resist seeing migration as a single moment when someone packs a suitcase and leaves. Displacement often begins much earlier. It can begin when insurance becomes unaffordable. It can begin when smoke repeatedly keeps children indoors. It can begin when a farmer no longer knows when the rains will come, when employment disappears after a disaster, or when rebuilding means accepting that the next fire may arrive within a few years. The physical move may come last, after a much longer process of uncertainty and loss. This is why wildfire must be examined through class, race, age, health, citizenship, political power, and historical relationships to land. The same fire does not create the same experience for everyone. The most important question is therefore not simply how many acres will burn or how many people will move. We must ask who will be able to move safely, who will be expected to absorb repeated losses, and who will be left behind. We must ask what happens to cultural identity when people lose the landscape through which they have understood themselves. Anthropologically speaking, the wildfire crisis is already changing the human map. Our responsibility is to determine whether those changes will be managed through preparation, equity, and meaningful consultation with affected communities, or imposed upon them through repeated catastrophe. References Associated Press. 2026. “Wildfires in France Drive 250,000 People from Their Homes and Creep toward Wine City of Bordeaux.” July 26, 2026. European Commission Joint Research Centre. 2026. “Current Wildfire Situation in Europe.” Updated July 22, 2026. Federal Emergency Management Agency. 2026. “Citizenship and Immigration Status Requirements.” Updated June 26, 2026. Accessed July 26, 2026. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. 2026. Global Report on Internal Displacement 2026. Geneva: Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. International Organization for Migration. 2024a. “Joint Pilot Initiative Aims to Strengthen Resilience to Climate Change in Six Sahelian States.” July 12, 2024. International Organization for Migration. 2024b. “Indigenous Youth’s Climate Displacement in Central America’s Dry Corridor.” June 5, 2024. Lee, Everett S. 1966. “A Theory of Migration.” Demography 3 (1): 47–57. Méndez, Michael, Genevieve Flores-Haro, and Lucas Zucker. 2020. “The (In)visible Victims of Disaster: Understanding the Vulnerability of Undocumented Latino/a and Indigenous Immigrants.” Geoforum 116: 50–62. NASA. n.d. “Wildfires and Climate Change.” NASA Science. Accessed July 26, 2026. National Interagency Fire Center. 2026a. “Incident Management Situation Report.” July 26, 2026. National Interagency Fire Center. 2026b. “National Fire News.” July 26, 2026. Ravenstein, E. G. 1885. “The Laws of Migration.” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 48 (2): 167–227. Reuters. 2026a. “Ontario Wildfires Expand as Smoke Lingers in Parts of the US.” July 20, 2026. Reuters. 2026b. “Trump Says He Told Carney That Canada Must Get Wildfires under Control.” July 20, 2026. Reuters. 2026c. “Wildfires Threaten Bordeaux as France, Spain Battle Blazes.” July 26, 2026. United Nations Environment Programme. 2022. Spreading Like Wildfire: The Rising Threat of Extraordinary Landscape Fires. Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme. U.S. Government Accountability Office. 2020. Climate Change: A Climate Migration Pilot Program Could Enhance the Nation’s Resilience and Reduce Federal Fiscal Exposure. GAO-20-488. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office. U.S. Government Accountability Office. 2026. Homeowners Insurance: Premiums Generally Tracked Inflation but Rose More in Disaster-Prone Areas. GAO-26-107867. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Accountability Office. World Bank. 2021. Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Stephen FoxFounder