Eve Darian-Smith, UCI professor and chair of global and international studies and professor of law, has been named the 2022 Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award recipient. The honor, awarded by the Association for Humanist Sociology, recognizes Darian-Smith’s newest work, Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis (Stanford University Press 2022) in which she draws stark connections between extractive capitalism, ultranationalism and catastrophic wildfires that have scorched three countries on three different continents. The resulting devastation and on-going contributions to climate change, she argues, are a global crisis that calls for a new political, economic and moral framework that prioritizes people over profits and a global view that blurs boundaries between lands, seas and atmospheres.

--> Read more online or watch and listen below as Darian-Smith explains the need to view this issue with a global lens, beginning with the way we think about and through wildfires.

Darian-Smith received her bachelor’s and law degrees at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She spent three years working as a corporate lawyer before earning her master’s in anthropology at Harvard and her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. She joined the UCI faculty in 2017 following a 22-year appointment on the faculty at UC Santa Barbara which included two years of leave taken to chair the legal studies department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Global Burning is her sixth book, and the McClung Lee Award marks her fourth major book award.

Darian-Smith will be among those honored at AHS's annual meeting to be held November 3-6 in Mexico City, Mexico.