"Having a conversation about wildfires may be an unusual way to help educate people about climate change in our oceans. But for Northern California-based marine scientist and AAAS Fellow Tessa Hill, Ph.D., both topics are urgent and closely related. Deadly, fast-moving wildfires have touched nearly everyone in the region. And the fires’ link to climate change provides a non-threatening way for her to engage with her community about heat waves, both on land and in the oceans. 

We at Public Scholarship and Engagement are grappling with the anger, sadness, and trauma associated with the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other victims of anti-Black violence. We stand in solidarity with people coming together in streets around the world to protest these deaths and the ongoing violent racism so prevalent in our societies.

This is a time like no other, a global health pandemic and the escalation of public unrest in the face of yet another killing of a Black man at the hands of police officers. George Floyd, like numerous other men, women, and trans persons of color before and after him, died because of persistent and endemic racialized realities in the U.S. that plague Black communities simultaneously with over policing and economic and social exclusion.