While We Celebrate 30x30, Nature Is Being Erased at Home
12/19/25
Dear colleagues,
Many of you are on this list because you care deeply about California’s commitment to 30x30—the effort to expand our public lands. That goal matters. Protecting large landscapes is essential.
But there is a growing contradiction we can no longer ignore.
While we celebrate the protection of distant open space, nature is being systematically removed from our own neighborhoods—from the very places where most Californians live, where children encounter nature for the first time, and where urban wildlife still survives.
Across the state, a statewide wildfire mandate commonly referred to as “Zone 0” is advancing. In practice, it requires the removal of living plants within five feet of structures in the very high fire hazard zones. Multiplied across millions of homes, this policy is already:
Accelerating urban tree and canopy loss
Eliminating backyard habitat that supports birds, pollinators, and small mammals
Increasing urban heat, especially in older neighborhoods
Replacing living landscapes with gravel, hardscape, and sterile clear zones
For a policy that removes nature from millions of private yards, worsens heat, and fragments urban ecosystems, one might reasonably expect California’s major environmental organizations to be leading the pushback. Instead, they are missing. Some are silent. Some are hedging. Some are promoting the policy under the banner of “sustainable defensible space,” despite a lack of science or evidence that wholesale vegetation removal near homes prevents structure loss in wind-driven fires.
This is not a fringe issue. Over 90% of California’s urban forest exists on private property. If we lose nature in residential landscapes, we lose it almost everywhere people actually live.
30x30 cannot succeed if conservation is treated as something that happens somewhere else—on public land, far away, out of sight—while everyday landscapes are sacrificed to blunt, one-size-fits-all mandates driven by insurance models and fear.
Conservation that does not include home, neighborhood, and community is incomplete. Fire policy that treats living plants and native plant communities in cities as the enemy is ecologically incoherent. Environmentalism that stays silent while nature is erased in plain sight is not neutrality—it is consent.
This is a call to engage. To ask hard questions. To distinguish ecologically informed fire resilience from clearance-based theater. To defend nature not only in parks and preserves, but in the ordinary places where it still persists— yards, parkways, schoolyards, and remnant oak woodlands that exist on the slopes behind homes.
If we cannot speak up for nature here, it is worth asking what, exactly, we mean by environmental protection at all.
Please reply to this email, if you’d like to get involved.
Sincerely,
diana