Cleo Aster Woelfle-Hazard

As a new Fire Advisor for Humboldt and Del Norte counties, I am excited to support residents, landowners, planners, land managers, tribes, and Native fire practitioners in making North Coast communities more resilient in the face of intensifying wildfires.

My research and extension programs focus on climate resilience, cultural burning, fire-water relations, and training a diverse fire workforce.

I conduct collaborative research in partnership with Native nations, agencies, citizen scientists, and local community members. In an ongoing collaboration with the Karuk Department of Natural Resources, my partners and I are exploring future fire scenarios in the Klamath Basin, and how streamflow would change under a “maximum prescribed fire” scenario, compared to current management policies. We are working with climate modelers to We are also exploring how fire and flooding can be renewed in order to revitalize habitat for ecocultural species such as willow, grape, salmon, elk, and eel. Past projects include community-directed contaminant sampling in Seattle’s Duwamish River, river erosion impacts assessment with Yupi’it communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, and mapping temperature refugia for salmonids in collaboration with the Stillaguamish Tribe.

As a scholar of institutions and political processes, I use approaches from feminist science studies and critical physical geography to critically analyze and intervene in research and policy processes to be more responsive to the needs of place based communities. This work crucially involves valuing and centering Indigenous and local knowledge of fire, water, species, and social relations.

I earned a B.S. in Interdisciplinary Geosciences from the University of Montana. I earned a M.S. and Ph.D. in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley, where I convened a collaborative of scientists and Sonoma County residents to experiment with storing and infiltrating winter rain to increase summer streamflow to benefit juvenile salmon, and exploring the possibilities of collaborating with beavers to create cool refuges for coho. I also have expertise in home water and wastewater systems, and have evaluated health and economic aspects of water delivery in Oakland, CA and Hubli-Dharwad, India.

As a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, I drew this field experience together with queer, transgender, and Indigenous theory. My book Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice argues that rivers’ future vitality requires centering the values of justice, sovereignty, and dynamism. Incorporating work with salmon, beaver, and floodplain recovery projects, I weave narratives about innovative field research practices with an affectively oriented queer and trans focus on love and grief for rivers and fish. Drawing on the idea of underflows—the parts of a river’s flow that can’t be seen, the underground currents that seep through soil or rise from aquifers—I elucidate the underflows in river cultures, sciences, and politics where Native nations and marginalized communities fight to protect rivers.

I am a white settler who identifies as queer and transgender, and I have experienced privileges and discrimination in natural resources work. I am deeply committed to the never-ending work of uprooting racism and settler colonialism in the university and society. As a co-PI on the Humanities Education for Anti-Racism Literacy project, I co-developed curricula, training materials, and reflective approaches for creating pathways to higher education for Native youth, and for training students to engage in respectful collaborations with Native partners. I am excited to continue this work at UC ANR. In the future, I also hope to develop a Queer Trans TREX program to train and support queer and trans fire practitioners, modeled on the WTREX and Indigenous Womens’ TREX programs.