Guest Commentary written by

Chad Hanson

Chad Hanson, based in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains, is a wildfire scientist with the John Muir Project.

One year ago, in early January, the Eaton and Palisades fires devastated the communities of Altadena and Pacific Palisades. Driven by extremely dry, warm and powerful winds, the fires destroyed more than 10,000 homes and claimed at least 31 lives. 

How can we make sure it doesn’t happen again?

The good news is, science has provided a clear answer: The only effective way to protect homes and lives from wildfires is to implement direct measures to create fire-safe communities — including home hardening, defensible space pruning next to homes and businesses, and evacuation planning and assistance. 

This community-based approach is highly successful in saving towns from firestorms. 

Importantly, the evidence also indicates that vegetation removal and management beyond 100 feet from homes and other structures provide no additional safety benefit.

More bad news: State and federal politicians of both parties are supporting the wrong things.

At the state level, only 2% of all wildland fire funding is being allocated to the proven fire-safe community measures, while the other 98% is being spent ineffectively, mostly on activities in wildlands, such as logging and removal of chaparral, distant from homes.

And at the federal level, there are no requirements that any wildland fire funds be spent on fire-safe community measures. The Infrastructure Act of 2021 includes hollow language about community wildfire protection but focuses on logging in the “wildland urban interface.” 

The Act not only ignores many at-risk communities that are nowhere near forests — such as Altadena and Pacific Palisades — but it also defines the wildland urban interface so broadly that it allows backcountry logging on public lands, miles from the nearest home.

Even after the profound losses of homes and lives in the Eaton and Palisades fires, Congress’ response so far has been the so-called “Fix Our Forests Act,” proposed legislation currently in the Senate that would override environmental laws to expedite taxpayer-subsidized, backcountry logging of mature trees and clearcutting on public lands — in the name of wildfire management. 

More than 100 environmental groups strongly oppose it. Alarmingly and ironically, the act would eliminate the very environmental analysis that would inform land managers about whether a particular logging or chaparral removal project would worsen wildfires and increase threats to nearby communities.

This is not merely an academic concern. Many of the U.S. Forest Service’s own scientists are sounding the alarm, as evidence increasingly indicates “thinning” and other logging activities erode the natural windbreak that denser forests have, making fires spread much faster and more intensely. 

This means fires can reach towns more rapidly, giving people less time to safely evacuate and first responders less time to arrive and assist. 

Similarly, abundant science indicates that removal of chaparral — native shrub habitat— in the name of curbing wildfires tends to convert landscapes into far more combustible, invasive grasslands, which can carry flames more quickly toward nearby houses and businesses in southern California. 

As hundreds of scientists have warned, recent wildfires have raced through large areas of “thinned” forests and “fuelbreaks,” burning down entire communities.

The truth is, most people do not have the knowledge or resources to make their homes and communities fire-safe. Many people need assistance. Elected officials — Democrats and Republicans — must change course. Instead of advancing legislation that pleases logging industry campaign contributors, they should prioritize measures that directly help create fire-safe communities. Otherwise, the devastation of January 2025 is all but guaranteed to recur.