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Wildfire is a complex problem because of the diverse mix of actors and landowners involved, uncertainty about outcomes and future conditions, and unavoidable trade-offs that require ongoing negotiation. In this perspective, we argue that addressing the complex challenge of wildfire requires governance approaches designed to fit the nature of the wildfire problem. For instance, while wildfire is often described as a cross-boundary problem, understanding wildfire risk as transboundary highlights important political and institutional challenges that complicate collaboration across jurisdictions and shared stewardship. Transboundary risk requires collaborative governance that attends to the distribution of power, authority, and capacity across the range of actors relevant to particular fire-prone landscapes. Wildfire is also changing in unprecedented ways and multiple, interacting uncertainties make predicting future wildfires difficult. Anticipatory governance can build our capacity to integrate uncertainty into wildfire decision-making and manage risk in proactive ways. Finally, competing interests and values mean that trade-offs are inherent to the wildfire problem. Risk governance links science and society through deliberative, participatory processes that explicitly navigate tradeoffs and build legitimacy for actions to address wildfire risk. Governance approaches that better target the nature of the wildfire problem will improve our ability to coexist with fire today and in the future.

This article employs a historical analysis of the religious composition of the pro-life movement to explain why the partisan identity of the movement shifted from the left to the right between the late 1960s and the 1980s. Many of the Catholics who formed the first anti-abortion organizations in the late 1960s were liberal Democrats who viewed their campaign to save the unborn as a rights-based movement that was fully in keeping with the principles of New Deal and Great Society liberalism, but when evangelical Protestants joined the movement in the late 1970s, they reframed the pro-life cause as a politically conservative campaign linked not to the ideology of human rights but to the politics of moral order and “family values.” This article explains why the Catholic effort to build a pro-life coalition of liberal Democrats failed after Roe v. Wade, why evangelicals became interested in the antiabortion movement, and why the evangelicals succeeded in their effort to rebrand the pro-life campaign as a conservative cause.

The ASTER Volcanic Ash Library (AVAL) is presented, developed using quantitative laboratory thermal infrared (TIR) emission spectroscopic methods, spanning the 2000−400 cm−1 (5−25 μm wavelength) range, including the Earth’s TIR atmospheric window (8−12 μm). Each spectral suite is unique owing to the chemical composition and proportion of glass to crystals per sample and is divided into six size fractions. AVAL, used with an appropriate spectral mixture model applied to orbital multispectral TIR data, provides a unique ability to study active volcanic ash plumes. We present the first example of this application to an ash plume produced by the Sakurajima Volcano in Japan. The emissivity variations measured in ash plumes using an ever-expanding ash spectral library will provide future quantitative inputs for both atmospheric models, where the ash composition is unknown or estimated, as well as compositional probes into ongoing eruptions.