What actually burns, what protects us, and why policy keeps getting it wrong.
The Fire Zone Report
Maintained as a public record
Cutting through the politics and pseudoscience shaping California’s wildfire policy.
California’s proposed regulations scapegoat living green gardens in the state’s fire zones — based not on ecological fire science but on insurance modeling and political expedience.
The Fire Zone Report exists to fill a critical information gap in how wildfire risk is being understood—and governed—in Southern California.
Here you’ll find clear, evidence-based reporting on the science, legislation, and industry forces shaping modern fire policy, including—but not limited to—California’s “Zone 0” defensible-space mandate.
This report examines how wildfire prevention has increasingly been reduced to parcel-level clearance, often detached from what actually burns in urban fires: homes igniting homes, land-use decisions that amplify exposure, and policy choices that shift risk onto individual property owners while calling it resilience.
The Fire Zone Report investigates the science, the legislation, and the economics behind these policies—and uplift real solutions that protect homes and neighborhoods.
Email to 30x30 Coalition
12/19/25
Subject: While We Celebrate 30x30, Nature Is Being Erased at Home
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 exists.
The Shift from Active Firefighting to Zone 0
California’s wildfire crisis didn’t just produce new fire science — it produced a new governing model. Under the banner of “Zone 0,” the state has quietly shifted wildfire defense from public agencies to individual homeowners, mandating the removal of living landscapes around millions of homes while offering no corresponding reduction in taxes, regulation, or risk. Framed as “science-based,” Zone 0 instead reflects a deeper pattern in California policy: expanding mandates paired with privatized responsibility, where ecosystems, neighborhoods, and homeowners absorb the cost of institutional failure. What Zone 0 really represents isn’t fire resilience — it’s the quiet privatization of fire defense.
Sanity Check: Framing Fire
How wildfire media shape policy—and mislead the public
This section documents recurring patterns in mainstream media wildfire coverage where responsibility is diffused, structural causes are minimized, and policy failures are reframed as inevitabilities or “complexity.” In these stories, risk is treated as natural, technology substitutes for accountability, and the public is quietly prepared to accept the privatization of fire defense.
The goal here is not to target individual reporters, but to make framing visible. Because when journalism flattens power, erases land-use decisions, or treats agency failure as an abstract problem to be modeled away, it doesn’t merely inform the public—it launders responsibility. And once responsibility is laundered, bad policy hardens.
Each critique below identifies what is emphasized, what is omitted, and why those choices matter.
Protected Plants Did Not Cause This Fire to Escape. Human Decisions Did.
Recent reporting and associated investigative materials surrounding the Palisades fire risk mislead the public by implying that protected plants and sensitive habitats played a role in allowing the fire to escape containment. The record described in the report does not support that conclusion.
The fire escaped not because native vegetation was protected, but because human decisions were made — and others were not.
When Modeling Replaces Accountability: A Critique of the LA Times’ Vision of “Fire Resilience”
This LA Times profile of a RAND researcher envisioning a “fire-resilient” Pacific Palisades reads less like journalism and more like a case study in how wildfire responsibility is quietly laundered through optimism, technology, and abstraction.
The article frames the destruction of the Palisades as a “complex problem” best addressed through computer simulations and future-oriented design fantasies. What it avoids is far simpler—and far more uncomfortable: the fires were not a mystery, and their severity was not inevitable.
Do Zone 0 Homes Really “Fare Better”?
Reality-testing wildfire policy, media narratives, and official claims. These articles and comments challenge misinformation, expose hidden influences, and advocate for wildfire strategies grounded in fire ecology, not fear.
What the article says is that an insurance-backed investigation found that only 9% of homes with little vegetation within five feet burned, compared with 27% of homes with more vegetation. The reporter’s implication is clear: Zone 0 works, skeptics are behind, and the data justify regulation. What the article admits (But Doesn’t Reckon With) is the study is exploratory, not causal. It does not account for home age, construction type, income, or retrofit timing, firefighting intervention…
The Public Record
Documentation, responses, and analysis related to California’s Zone 0 mandate. Reality-testing wildfire policy and official claims. These articles and comments challenge misinformation, expose hidden influences, and advocate for wildfire strategies grounded in fire ecology, not fear.
Zone 0, Evidence, and Uncertainty: What UCLA’s Scientists Say We Know—and Don’t Know—About the 5-Foot Ember-Resistant Zone
December 12, 2025
In this UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge webinar, researchers from across disciplines step back from the “soundbite science” that has dominated the Zone 0 debate and ask a more careful question: what does the strongest real-world evidence actually show about the drivers of home loss—especially in the first five feet around a structure? The panel emphasizes that much of what has been presented publicly relies on simplified demonstrations or anecdotal case reports, while post-fire statistical studies often find that plant effects are complex, context-dependent, and frequently outweighed by factors like building density, structure-to-structure ignition pathways, and combustible materials such as fences, mulch, dead debris, and clogged gutters. Across the discussion, a consistent theme emerges: there is broad agreement on practical, near-term actions (removing known combustibles, reducing dead material, and hardening homes), but far less scientific consensus supporting a one-size-fits-all mandate to eliminate all live plants and significantly reducing tree canopy within five feet—particularly given tradeoffs with urban heat, water, and slope stability, and the reality that California is making consequential policy decisions in a zone of uncertainty.
The Death of Active Firefighting
December 8, 2025
There is a moment in the YouTube documentary Abandoned—tucked between the shaky phone videos of burning rooftops and the interviews with stunned homeowners—where the entire story comes into focus. A resident leans over a backyard pool, filling a bucket while his friend drags burning debris off a fence. Not a single firefighter is in sight.
“Where are they?” he asks the camera. “There was absolutely nobody there,” another neighbor repeats. “Not a single truck.”
Coalition stands with Los Angeles City Council’s unanimous vote rejecting one-size-fits-all vegetation removal regulations
October 14, 2025
LOS ANGELES, CA — Homeowner and resident organizations from across the City of Los Angeles’ most fire-prone neighborhoods, representing thousands of households, have submitted a joint letter to the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection (BOF) opposing the proposed Zone 0 Defensible Space regulations..
Zone 0 and the Death of Local Control: Sacramento’s Fire Experiment in Our Yards
October 16, 2025
On Monday, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1455, authorizing the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection to impose new “Zone 0” regulations—the so-called ember-resistant zone—within five feet of every structure in California in the very high fire hazard severity zones.
How the Insurance Industry Quietly Rewrote California’s Fire Policy
July, 2025
When California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara appeared on KGO-TV’s ABC 7 News, he promised to “stabilize the insurance market” and “get this done within one year.” His new “Sustainable Insurance Strategy,” he said, would bring insurers back to wildfire-prone areas and lower premiums for homeowners. But as reporter Stephanie Sierra pressed him on-air, Lara’s plan revealed something else entirely: a massive concession to the insurance industry —