Chaparral Wisdom

To our friends in the Los Angeles area who have suffered from the recent wildfires. We are so sorry for the devastation and sadness you are facing.

To those of you who want to actively seek change, we humbly offer our advice. After more than 20 years fighting to help Californian’s adapt to wildfire, having our hearts broken from loss more times than we can count, we have learned that success in trying to prevent another devastating wildfire in Los Angeles will not come easily.

To effectively battle the system, one must not waste precious time thinking the system will listen. It won’t. You’re competing with billions of dollars of power and influence. Facts and logic will not matter. Prepare to be ignored and personally attacked. Or perhaps worst, into believing that you are being listened to. So, speaking at hearings, writing letters, etc., should only be seen as a strategic path to establish legal standing to, as attorney Victor J. Yannacone famously said, sue the bastards. Understanding this helps prevent discouragement and burn out. We wrote a brief essay on this kind of thing when confronting the California Coastal Commission: What’s Public Testimony Worth?

Educating and supporting intelligent candidates for office who know you also have the votes to kick them out can be another effective path to take.

Unfortunately, the misinformation and the purposefully anxiety/fear-driven news and social media machines about the wildfires will make the job difficult, much more so than during previous wildfire events. Understand that the messages you are hearing from the left (“it’s about climate change”) and the right (“its about lack of prescribed burns and DEI at the LA Fire Department”) are absurd. Both positions deflect the focus away from immediate solutions that can save lives and communities (see below).

Large, high-intensity wildfires have been a natural part of the southern California landscape for thousands of years (and have increased dramatically due to human-caused ignitions). Like earthquakes, it is a fool’s errand to think we can stop them. Yes, climate change is drying the California environment. Drier environments are more flammable. But it is not possible to determine what role, if any, climate change played in the Los Angeles fires. More importantly, blaming climate change ignores the primary variables responsible for loss of life and property, variables that can be resolved now. Increased prescribed burning will only result in the spread of invasive weeds and grasses, making the environment even more flammable. And that, in 2025, bigots are able to publicly ridicule Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley solely because she is a woman is a disgrace to what our country stands for.

Large, high-intensity wildfires have been a regular, unstoppable phenomena in the Los Angeles Basin, long before climate change and the culture wars. Senator Richard Nixon on roof during the November, 1961, Bel Air Fire in Los Angeles. Photo by Allan Grant, Life Magazine

What to Remember When Seeking Change

First, in whatever change action you plan, the key thing to remember is that there are entrenched interests that have no interest in change. From the federal level down, including research institutions like the University of California, Berkeley, fire bureaucracies, and fire-safe councils, it is mostly about supporting the fire suppression apparatus and the habitat clearance paradigm.

The fact that homes can be made nearly completely fire safe through retrofits/exterior sprinklers, and community-based fire suppression groups, is minimized or rejected because both take away dollars and power from the current system. It is an old story, as many of you have likely experienced in your own lives and careers: “It is useless to argue with a man whose opinion is based upon a personal or pecuniary interest.”
– William Jennings Bryan

Proper defensible space is important, but meaningless in the wind-driven fires that do all the damage or in areas like Pacific Palisades where dwellings are only a few yards apart. Local communities must take more responsibility because there will never been enough firefighters and engines to defend every community, every home, during a wind-driven firestorm.

Most wildfire home losses are preventable. Our booklet, From the House Outward, will help explain why and how to keep your home safe.

Second, we are battling a convergence of forces that make it even more difficult to solve the wildfire problem: the growing rejection of rational thought, the proliferation of false information, and the exploitation of fear about fire/lack of ecological knowledge by the current system. Beyond partisan sources, once trusted purveyors of local information like the Los Angeles Times now habitually embellish and exaggerate disasters to attain readership attention. Triple check your sources. Question authority.

Third, the solution has been fully described after the 2003 and 2007 Firestorms. Most of what you are hearing now is just a rehash of what happened during those fires, plus the 2005 Topanga Fire, 2009 Station Fire, 2018 Woolsey Fire, and the 2020 Bobcat Fire. What has happened in the neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades this time is a repeat of what happened to Coffey Park in Santa Rosa during the 2017 Tubbs Fire. The disaster reveals the horrible price paid for the myopic focus on defensible space and habitat clearance.

The primary job of government is to protect its citizens, and plan accordingly. This has yet to be accomplished when it comes to wildfire. After Coffey Park, every fire prone community with a similar geographic condition, like Pacific Palisades, should have been identified and disaster plans formulated. Pacific Palisades was lost in part because this was not accomplished. Similarly, every area that is prone to post-fire mass flooding, like Montecito, should plan for the same. To our knowledge, authorities have not done so for Mission Canyon in Santa Barbara. A full set of recommendations can be found in our 2019 letter to Governor Newsom, which his administration ignored.

Demand that we learn from the past.

Finally, understand that it is impossible to prepare and predict for every contingency during full-blown disasters. Systems collapse. Plans fail. Firefighters do the best they can with the training and equipment they have. Reject snap judgements. Search for solutions.

The summarized points and supporting research papers providing solutions are available on our website pages:

1. How to protect lives and property.

2. How devastating wildfires actually work.

3. Why the current approach (clearing habitat) through mechanical and prescribed fire continually fails.

4. Why the current belief about “dense” vegetation is false.

5. Most people do not understand that the chaparral fires in Los Angeles are radically different, with different solutions, than forest fires.

Prepare for the long haul. Pace yourself. Realize most decisions at government hearings are made long before you testify. Get a good attorney. Celebrate the friendships you gain, strengthen the ones you have, and enjoy the satisfaction you experience knowing you are fighting for truth.

A fire in Rancho Peñasquitos, San Diego, California, August 27, 1995. From R.W. Halsey (2008). Fire and Survival in Southern California.