Chaparral Wisdom
To celebrate the magic and beauty of Nature & the chaparral
The End of Wild Nature in California
Governor Newsom and Cal Fire target all wildlands in California
with herbicides, logging, grinding machines, and fire
Part I: The scope of the destruction
One third of California, 35.5 million acres, are in the sights of the state’s new, updated Vegetation Management Program (VTP). Rather than something to cherish, Nature is now seen as the enemy, a thing that needs to be controlled, mitigated, cleared. Using Orwellian double-speak to mask the madness, the clearance and ripping apart dense, biodiverse habitat is referred to as “ecological restoration,” improving “forest health,” and making wildlands “fire resilient.”
In this eleven part series we will be offering an in-depth look into the consequences of the belief that Nature can not function without us, and needs to be forever mowed, trimmed, and chemically treated to create the fantasy gardens of European royalty – open pastures, forests with trees spaced for picnics, and mosaics of neatly shaped shrubbery.
The Nature-as-our-garden belief has seduced environmental organizations, public agencies charged with protecting wildlands, politicians, research institutions, and the public into thinking that if we can just “manage” the entire landscape of California like Indigenous Peoples are claimed to have done, we will be safe from wildfire forever.
We are being lied to.
We’ll first provide an overview of the state’s Nature-is-the-enemy battle plan, then ten recommendations concerning how to change the approach in a way that will actually save lives and property from wildfire, and keep Nature wild.
Part I: The scope of the destruction
February 25, 2026
Dear Members of the California Board of Forestry,
By targeting more than a third of California, the Cal Vegetation Treatment Program update will impact nearly every wild landscape remaining in California under state jurisdiction. And through partnership agreements, it will also influence how wildlands under federal and tribal jurisdiction will be managed.
Consequently, the CalVTP update has the potential of having the greatest negative environmental impact on protected wildlands, state parks, local preserves, and wild open space of any state policy or project on record.
These impacts will be generated by the clearing of existing habitats in an effort to change fire regimes across the landscape. The methods employed to do so are, by definition, biocidal: logging, mastication, crushing, grazing, burning, and herbicide use. All of these can lead to the elimination of native plant communities (especially those that are adapted to high-severity fire), long-term loss of biodiversity, and increased flammability (Halsey and Syphard 2024, Lindenmayer et al. 2026, Fusco et al. 2019).
Therefore, it is essential that the Board requires:
1. A careful examination of all potential environmental impacts through different lenses, not just through the lens of a fire manager.
2. Recommendations and conclusions based on a full, objective review of verifiable science, avoiding confirmation bias and anecdotal information.
3. Objectives and terms (e.g. type conversion, fire resilience, ecological health, etc.) be defined in scientifically measurable ways.
Contrary to the prevailing paradigm, open forests and mosaic-like clumps of chaparral are not the typical, natural condition in California. Dense habitat, plant litter, and dying trees and shrubs are essential components of the state’s diverse, ecologically rich terrestrial ecosystems. Plant growth and death are natural processes. Hundreds of acres of contiguous, impenetrable chaparral, and forests with rich, dense understories are natural formations.
No region in California has a high enough lightning frequency, as found in dry ponderosa forests in the Southwest to cause the frequent, low-intensity fire regimes required to create the open, less biodiverse landscapes the 2019 CalVTP envisioned (Keeley 1982).
Attempting to create and maintain such landscapes requires constant artificial disturbance. In doing so, negative environmental impacts are inevitable. And ironically, such activity can defeat the very purpose of the CalVTP – to reduce fire risk. Opening habitats through clearance projects not only can increase the flammability of the landscape through invasive weed spread, it can also multiply the generation and flow of embers, accelerate a wildfire’s rate of spread, and reduce the hydration of whatever shrubs and trees remain after the project is complete, making for a more flammable environment (Koo et al. 2012, Lesmeister et al. 2021)
This fuel-centric approach has led to a disturbing fact that has been frequently pointed out by USGS fire scientist Jon Keeley:
“Every decade we increase funding for fuel modifications and other vegetation management; every decade has been followed by a decade of even worse fire impacts.”
One of the goals of the CalVTP update is to double down on “fuel” modifications across the landscape, ignoring the fact that such an approach has been failing us for decades.
We urge the Board to listen to the fire scientists who have been studying the wildfire problem over their lifetimes.
“Wildfires, and thus extreme wildfires, are inevitable. Does that mean wildland-urban (WU) fire disasters are inevitable as well? Absolutely not! WU fire research has shown that homeowners can create ignition resistant homes to prevent community wildfire disasters.”
– Jack Cohen (2020)
“Although fuel manipulations of ponderosa pine ecosystems may effectively reduce fire hazard on those landscapes, they are decidedly less effective on chaparral landscapes, and ultimately fire hazard reduction is likely to be achieved by directing fuel modifications away from wildland areas and more toward the wildland-urban interface.”
– Jon E. Keeley et al. (2009)
“Focusing primarily on a narrow issue, such as fuel reduction in forests or evacuation in built environments, will only ignore the broader context and ensure future disasters. More holistic solutions are needed. In spatial terms, most losses of lives and homes tend to occur at the wildland–urban interface (WUI), where human communities are located within or adjacent to flammable landscape.“
– Max Mortiz et al. (2022)
In light of the continued focus on “fuel” management, despite its failure, the Board needs to investigate Catastrophic Risk Management (CRM) in order to reevaluate the state’s response to wildfire hazard. CRM is successful because it helps managers in high-risk organizations like Cal Fire to make better decisions by reducing their tendency to “normalize deviance,” a behavior that focuses on positive data about operations while ignoring contrary data or small signs of trouble that can lead to disasters.
Airlines use CRM to objectively analyze plane crashes, thereby creating safer planes. Without CRM, small deviations from standard operating procedures are often tolerated until disasters, such as the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil platform blow out, the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion, or the 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles expose an organization’s failures. Importantly, the CRM process would involve scholars outside of the fire profession, scientific or otherwise, who are not limited by assumed constraints and prevailing paradigms. Such an environment encourages individuals to speak freely, enabling them to offer creative solutions. The Center for Catastrophic Risk Management is based at UC Berkeley (ccrm.berkeley.edu).
We are eager to assist the Board in creating an updated CalVTP that can avoid negative environmental impacts and achieve the attainable goal of eliminating catastrophic losses in our communities by focusing on reducing community flammability, rather than attempting to alter the forces of nature across more than 35 million acres.
Part II: Tribal Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is History, not Science
To read all ten recommendations, here is our full letter to the Board of Forestry.
Bravo to your efforts! We at Robust Home Defense is devoted to providing home hardening services and active fire suppression for homeowners using stored water supplies.