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Paper short abstract

This paper follows the wind's movement in Colorado Front Range hazardscape. Tracing the wind visualizes the varying and invisible multi-temporal hazards that extend from landscape and atmosphere to the body. Raising questions for resilience, this work unsettles and re-maps boundaries of local risk.

Paper long abstract

Resilience demands recognizing and communicating about layered and multi-temporal dangers. In the Colorado Front Range in western North America, hazards extend from the wildfire smoke and particulate matter that circulate in the atmosphere to the radioactive materials and other toxins that will long remain in the soil. Local contaminants are activated by the wind's force—where they are swept up and carried by the wind and inhaled through human breath—which expands the boundaries of the hazardscape from the environment to the body. This paper first traces the events surrounding the 2021 Marshall Fire, a wind-fueled grass fire that burned through a Front Range suburb with hours of wind gusts that at times exceeded 100 miles per hour. The Marshall Fire is noteworthy for how it entangled potential impacts of the fire itself and the region's other hazards across time, which include the lasting effects of the local mining, fracking, and nuclear industries. This paper will then contrast what I term the geographical performativity of local warning signs, designed to demarcate risk in place, with the boundary breaking work of the "wind's animacies"(Engelmann 2024). Following the movement of the wind visualizes the varying and typically invisible multi-temporal hazards that extend from landscape and atmosphere to the body raising questions for the narratives used to communicate danger. Crossing the borders of risk containment typically represented by warning signs, this paper employs the wind to unsettle and re-map the boundaries of local risk, opening-up alternative ways for understanding resilience in the hazardscape.