This is a particularly timely visualization, giving the ongoing and increasingly dangerous scale of California wildfires. As a native Californian, I grew up knowing that fires are a part of our natural ecology, however the scale and destruction of wildfires has notably increased in the past decade.
I wonder if a similar visualization exists for earlier fires, and if so, if there is a way to collage calendars of different fires across the last 20, 30, 50 years? How could such a visualization show the mounting urgency of climate change?
This image shows a bird's eye view of toxicity. However, I wonder how we can better incorporate the human element into these scales. Could we collage it with data on hospital visits, pharmacy records for asthma medications, emergency room visits for difficulty breathing?
Aesthetically, the rhythm and repetition of the image is effective and strong. It shows change and the passage of time, and does provide a feeling of accumulation, or heightening circumstances, with hazardous symbols. The everydayness of the calendar feels real and close-up, and the worsening affect feels critical. It does automatically conjuer ideas about land, however with the green to red spectrum and wildfires parallel to the air quality measured herein. Maybe simple lettering as part of the calendar to label as air?
