Cal Fire Fails to Address the Fires that cause nearly all the destruction

Instead, Cal Fire is targeting 10 million acres of native habitat for clearance by burning, grinding, and herbicide spraying a half million acres per year

Cal Fire's Vegetation Treatment Program (VTP) Ignores the Real Risk 1. Nine out of 16,909 fires in California during 2017 and 2018 caused 95% of the damage. All nine fires occurred under extreme, wind-driven conditions. 2. Cal Fire acknowledges that the VTP will not be effective during wind-driven fires, the fires that kill the most people and destroy the most homes. The Solution: Focus on making communities themselves fire resilient rather than clearing habitat in an attempt to control Nature. How to help the state of California make the needed changes? We are taking them to court (see below).
Photo above by J. Robinson

The Details

After 15 years of trying to convince Cal Fire to follow the science, protect lives and property from wind-driven fires, and not clear thousands of acres of fragile chaparral habitat, we are forced to turn to the courts. With our partner, Endangered Habitats League, we filed a lawsuit to stop the program on 1/28/2020. Our first court hearing was November 9, 2023. As we expected, the court ruled against Nature in our case, deferring to the "agency" as courts often do, regardless of the facts. We are appealing the decsion. Please see UPDATES below. Here are the five main reasons we're suing Cal Fire. Cal Fire's Vegetation Treatment Program (VTP) targets 10 million acres of habitat to be burned, masticated, or sprayed with herbicides under the guise of fire protection (at an estimated quarter million acres/year).
The Program will make it impossible for independent experts and the public to question environmentally destructive projects that would normally be required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The VTP was approved and certified on 12/30/2019. You can find the full Cal Fire VTP document here: https://bof.fire.ca.gov/projects-and-programs/calvtp/ Here's an Los Angeles Times editorial from 2013 telling Cal Fire to withdraw their plan and start over. The judgement remains relevant. Our full analysis of the VTP can be found in our 8/9/2019 comment letter.

What you can do

1. Please donate to support our legal battle.
2. Please share this page with everyone you know.
3. Stay informed by signing up for additional information via our email sign-up list in the green box below. We also encourage you become familiar with the history of Cal Fire's effort to promote their habitat clearance program. Information regarding Governor Newsom's unfortunate promotion and funding of the VTP can be found here. UPDATES below.
PLEASE DONATE TO HELP US STOP THE DESTRUCTION
Find out what Cal Fire Plans to do to Your Favorite Wild Place
Go to the Vegetation Treatment Map for the state here. On the right-hand side of the map is a symbol that looks like a stack of paper. Click that. That will open up the menu to allow you to click areas targeted for "ecological restoration" and other environmentally damaging clearance operations that have nothing to do with protecting communities at risk. As an example of how disconnected the Cal Fire proposed treatments are, look up Indian Canyon, in the Anza-Borrego Desert (see photos below). Unbelievably, the mountains in the background of the photo below are targeted for "ecological restoration" by Cal Fire.
Looking up Indian Canyon, Anza-Borrego Desert. Unbelievably, the mountains in the background are targeted for "ecological restoration" by Cal Fire.
Fragile habitat in the Anza-Borrego Desert targeted for habitat clearance by Cal Fire. Red areas are to be "treated" for ecological restoration. Olive colored lines are proposed fuel breaks on top of desert mountains.

Cal Fire should listen to those who understand wildfire best

- the Australians

On January 2, 2020, NPR's Ailsa Chang talked with Cormac Farrell, an environmental scientist who works in bushfire management, about what Australia has learned from past seasons, and how it's coping with the current one:
CHANG: Now, one suggestion that's been repeated is that there should just be more controlled burns - basically, reduce the fuel sources for these fires. What do you think of that idea?
FARRELL: I think it's a very simplistic way to look at it, and it simply hasn't worked. We've seen in these really catastrophic fire weather conditions that even areas that were fuel-reduced through controlled burning, they're burning again.
Read/listen to the complete NPR interview here.
Wildfires burning across Australia on Jan. 3, 2020.
Masticators ripped through this pristine stand of chaparral, leaving behind scattered shrubs. This is one of project types, far from any community at risk , that Cal Fire is proposing. Los Padres National Chaparral (Forest) Reserve. Photo from Los Padres Forest Watch.
Old-growth chaparral destroyed by mastication to protect an artificial tree farm (along the ridge) on the Cleveland National Chaparral (Forest) Reserve.

How the VTP violates state law and threatens the remaining chaparral in California

1. Clearing Mature Chaparral Anywhere in the State

The VTP has targeted all mature stands of chaparral throughout the state for what it calls, “ecological restoration,” via mastication, burning, herbicide spraying or some other clearance operation. The VTP never actually justifies this approach. In fact, the VTP makes a concerted effort to explain that chaparral is threatened by too many fires. The only restriction to conducting "ecological restoration" in chaparral is that the community must be outside its natural fire return interval. However, that restriction can be ignored if the project proponent demonstrates habitat function will be improved. Based on previous determinations, such things as increasing deer browse by clearing chaparral or the desire to increase the number of wildflowers would likely qualify for improved habitat function. The fact that old-growth chaparral itself is an incredibly biodiverse community is ignored. This component of the VTP basically gives Cal Fire a blank check to clear old-growth chaparral wherever and whenever someone is able to acquire the public funds to do so.

2. Violating State Law Through Semantics

Recognizing the threat of increasing fire frequencies, the California state legislature passed a law that restricts Cal Fire from conducting any clearance projects that cause “type conversion” away from the chaparral and coastal sage scrub currently on site. Unfortunately, the legislation did not define type conversion, allowing the Board of Forestry to do so itself in a manner that circumvents the law's intent. The VTP defines type conversion in terms of "habitat function," which it claims is the arrangement and capability of habitat to provide the resources needed to support plant and animal life. This is completely inconsistent with what type conversion actually is. And in a clear conflict of interest, the determination of that quality of "habitat function" is the responsibility of the individual or organization that is promoting the clearance project itself. The VTP considers clearance of up to 65% of an intact chaparral plant community as supporting proper habitat functioning. Cal Fire thinks that clearing most of a site's habitat is an ecological plus (see photos below).
This is what 65% clearance looks like. Cal Fire believes this "managed" stand of chaparral retains proper "habitat function." Note piles of clearcut shrubs to be burned later.
The usual consequence of clearing chaparral habitat - invasion of highly-flammable, non-native weeds.

UPDATES

UPDATE 7/25/2024 We filed our opening brief with the California Appellate Court. A few points we made in our brief: - ... the notion that chaparral, defined as naturally having 80% or more canopy cover, could remain a viable habitat with 35% or less cover, is scientifically unsupportable. - Buried in response to comments, the PEIR explains that the 35% relative cover, or 20% from baseline density is based on “professional judgment”. “Professional judgment” means the Board of Forestry simply made up the number. - Every study relied upon by the Board of Forestry to support vegetation treatments, concerned fire behavior in forests, not shrublands. Clearing chaparral and California coastal sage scrub does not decrease fire risk. To the contrary, the risk of fire increases after vegetation treatments. UPDATE 6/27/2024 We are working on our legal brief for our appeal. It is due July, 2024. UPDATE 1/5/2024 We filed our appeal with the California Appellate Court. UPDATE 11/9/2023 Despite the facts being on our side, and despite contradictions within their Vegetation Treatment Plan (they acknowledged their plan would cause environmental harm and fail to address the most devastating wildfires), the judge ruled against us in our first court hearing. We are filing an appeal. UPDATE 10/28/2023 We celebrated the Chaparral Institute's 20th Anniversary, which was founded right after the 2003 Cedar Fire when the public and local politicians blamed Cal Fire for the fire's devastation. We were Cal Fire's strongest defenders back then. Our court hearing is November 9, 2023. UPDATE 10/27/2023 Our response to the Board of Forestery/Cal Fire's response to our opening brief was filed. Their response was filled with logical fallacies such as strawman arguments and a complete failure to understand the nature of wildfire and the value of native habitat. The California Attorney General's Office needs reconsider the use of boiler plate legal language and focus on the actual case it is arguing. If you would like a copy of our response, please send us an email. UPDATE 9/19/2023 Opening brief filed. If you would like a copy, please send us an email. UPDATE 9/5/2023 Our hearing before the California Superior Court, San Diego, has been set for November 9, 9:30AM (two months later than orginally scheduled). UPDATE 2/28/2023 The public record was finally certified on 2/15/2023. UPDATE 3/10/2022 After further delays by the state, it appears the public record is about to be finalized and approved. Consequently, we are now working on our opening brief. It's been more than two years since we filed our lawsuit on January 28, 2202. COVID was responsible for some of the delay, but the state's sluggish behavior didn't help. UPDATE 10/21/2021 The California State Attorney's office who is representing the Board of Forestry (and Cal Fire's VTP) claimed that they didn't receive the public record we assembled and sent to them in the spring. Apparently there were staff changes. So we lost four months in the process. UPDATE 5/13/2021 We are just about finished organizing the public record. We'll be working on our opening brief soon. Please stay tuned. In the mean time, we are trying to convince the California state legislature not to waste $1 billion per year over the next 5 years to empower Cal Fire to clear/burn/herbicide hundreds of thousands of acres of native habitat without any independent public oversight. UPDATE 2/23/2021 The Board of Forestry has finally begun to produce the required public record documents, a full year after they were obligated to deliver them. We could not begin to develop our legal briefs without these documents. We have experienced similar delays with other California state agencies, unnecessarily delaying legal action. It will take some time to go over the record, after which we will file our initial briefs. UPDATE 8/27/2020 Governor Newsom signed an agreement on 8-12-20, with the US Forest Service (at the direction of the Trump Administration), calling for increasing "treatment" (devegetation, grazing, logging, herbicides) from a 2018 partnership goal of about 50,000 acres per year, to 1 MILLION acres per year by 2025. That's a 2,000% increase in logging and devegetation. Combined with Cal Fire's lobbying efforts in Sacramento to gut any bill that set limits on their habitat clearance operations, we are looking the beginning of the destruction of every accessible wild space left in California. All of this is hidden under the guise of "ecological restoration." UPDATE 5/29/2020 The Board of Forestry and Cal Fire rejected all of our settlement points, claiming they were already addressed in the VTP. They weren't, so we sent a revised, more detailed settlement document on 7/20/2020. They rejected all of our points. UPDATE 4/7/2020 We had the required pre-settlement meeting via phone with the Board of Forestry and Cal Fire. We offered our settlement points (all of which had been included in some form in our prior comment letters). At the end, knowing several of the officials on the call personally, we suggested that we all had the collective wisdom and knowledge to craft a truly successful program that would be superior to anything the court could offer. We then asked if they would be willing to work collaboratively to come up with a positive solution. The attorney for the Board only replied that they would examine our points in good faith. UPDATE 1/28/2020 Lawsuit filed charging the California Board of Forestry and Cal Fire for ignoring science and failing to address the fires that actually cause the most damage. UPDATE 12/30/2019The Board of Forestry approved and certified the final EIR. The public has 30 days to object.
UPDATE 12/11/2019The Board of Forestry deferred action on the final EIR until the next meeting. Please see our final comment letter on the VTP from 12/10/2019.
UPDATE 12/4/2019The final EIR has been released and will be considered by the California Board of Forestry on December 11, 2019. It again ignores the wildfires that kill the most people and destroy the most homes.
UPDATE 8/9/2019The latest draft EIR was released June 24. The plan ignores science (again) and proposes to "treat" (clear/burn/spray) chaparral throughout the state. Beautiful, old-growth chaparral is especially targeted.Here's our detailed comment letter.
UPDATE 3/1/2019The Board of Forestry has decided to start over. The previous plan draft is being replaced with a new effort. The comment period ended March 1, 2019.The full comment letter with 3 appendices (7MB) can be downloaded here.
UPDATE 1/12/2018We have submitted our comments. You can read our letter here.
UPDATE 11/13/2017The new, official final draft has been released. Comments are due January 12, 2018.
UPDATE 6/8/2017A revised draft of the Vegetation Treatment Program was released. It was presented to the Board of Forestry on June 14. The official draft for public CEQA review will be released some time in the future. We are currently studying the new revision.
UPDATE 4/22/2016It is with a great sense of disappointment that the latest draft of the Vegetation Treatment Program did not correct many of the errors and misrepresentations contained in the last version. See above for details and our comment letter on this version.
UPDATE 10/30/15Our 2015 comment letter on the developing VTP. While we believe the current draft being developed is a vast improvement over previous attempts, it still contains significant contradictions and scientifically unsupportable statements that compromise the achievement of our common goal: protecting life, property, and the natural environment from wildland fire.
UPDATE 10/6/15A new "Notice of Preparation" (NOP) was issued for the development of a third draft of the VTP EIR. The new draft will likely be released for public comment sometime in early 2016.
UPDATE 9/1/15At the August 26, 2015 California Board of Forestry meeting, the second draft of the EIR was presented. The board decided the EIR needed further study. The second draft is an improvement, but still contains significant problems including misconceptions regarding chaparral. We offered testimony at the meeting and offered two new research papers that refute the notion that the clearance/burning of chaparral in northern California provides ecological benefits (which the second draft incorrectly claims).
Wilkin et al. (2015). Discusses the trade-offs of reducing chaparral fire hazard in northern California.and... Newman et al. (2015). Discusses the negative impacts caused by chaparral clearance in relation to the spread of Lyme disease.
UPDATE 12/31/14In August, 2014, the California Fire Science Consortium recommended in their peer-review report that the Cal Fire Plan, “undergo major revision if it is to be a contemporary, science-based document." The board then began the process of rewriting the document in the Fall of 2014 with assurances they would be modifying their plan by incorporating the new information and offering opportunities for the original reviewers to provide input on the developing draft.
UPDATE 2/11/14After the board received criticism from fire scientists that the Plan did not reflect the most current research, the California State Legislature asked the California Fire Science Consortium, an independent network of fire scientists and managers, to review the document.
UPDATE 8/16/13A sobering review of Cal Fire's approach when we once felt very positive about the department's willingness to collaborate to create a science-based plan. It all eventually broke down. August 14, 2013 interview on public radio.

The Back Story Since 2005

We have been involved in this process since 2005, long before most environmental groups understood the threat habitat clearance programs, promoted under the guise of fire protection, posed. Our first effort to prevent the wholesale destruction of Nature from misguided fire policy was when San Diego County proposed the clearance of 300 square miles of habitat after the 2003 Cedar Fire. We were fortunately able to stop it. You read the entire story here. The Cal Fire VTP program is the San Diego County plan on steroids. Here is our first comment letter (August 31, 2005) on the proposed Cal Fire VTP Program. The current review process began January, 2013. We submitted a detailed letter along with a petition with 3,080 signatures (and citizen comments) that called on the Board of Forestry to retract its proposed habitat clearance program and to instead work with fire scientists, the California Natural Resources Agency, and the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water to create a Comprehensive Fire Protection Program that:
- focuses on actual assets at risk rather than habitat clearance- preserves the rights of citizens to object to destructive projects- incorporates the most current science- understands the difference between forests and other ecosystem
You can read our 2016 petition here.
Our three important comment letters include:1. January 25, 2013 - detailing the major flaws of the proposal.
2. February 25, 2013 - addressing legal issues, type conversion, and the importance of incorporating citizen input into the planning process.
3. April 8, 2013 -reframing the question asking, "How can we protect lives and property from wildland fire," rather than "How can we try to stop wildland fires?" To see our full set of comment letters from 2005 to 2018, you can download the file here.
Another useful comment letter is from the Conservation Biology Institute.
If you would like to view the Board's original proposal, please send us an email and we can send you a copy. The file is about 20 MB. The basic points we made in our original comment letter (which still apply to the final 2019 plan) include the following: 1. We Requested the Board of Forestry to retract the Vegetation Treatment Program Programmatic EIR (Environmental Impact Report) and create a program that will properly consider the entire fire environment, reflect regional differences, allow for independent oversight, and incorporate the most up to date science. 2. The Wrong Focus. This program focuses entirely on clearing vegetation, despite extensive scientific research that clearly indicates the best way to protect lives, property, and the natural environment from wildfire is by addressing the entire fire environment: ignitability of structures, community and regional planning, and science-based vegetation management within and directly around communities at risk. Leave the natural landscape alone! Concentrate where the actual risks are: in and around communities. Additional details here: Protecting Your Home 3. Inadequate Alternatives. By law this document is required to offer reasonable alternatives to the proposed program. The only differences between the alternatives offered are different mixes of methods to clear vegetation. There is no alternative that looks at the entire fire environment (see #2 above).
4. Impossible to Determine Impacts. The Vegetation Treatment Program is so generalized that it is impossible to determine its environmental impacts on wildlife, plant communities, water and air quality, visual and aesthetic resources, recreation, soils, and invasive weed spread. There are no maps showing the location of clearance projects, only estimated number of acres per region.
5. Taking Away Citizen Rights. All projects within the scope of this Program will only be evaluated by a yet-to-be formulated checklist. They will not be reviewed through the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) as they normally are now. This will prevent citizens and independent scientists from challenging a project under CEQA that they feel is environmentally damaging. Citizens have the right to have individual projects thoroughly evaluated under CEQA. 6. Underlying Bias. This proposal is based on the questionable, overly-broad assumption that past fire suppression efforts have allowed a buildup of unnatural amounts of vegetation across the landscape, thus creating a fire hazard. While it may be true that some forests have been negatively impacted by fire suppression, this is not true for many other ecosystems, especially the chaparral. The proposal takes a simplistic, forest-centric approach that attempts to make fire issues out as broadly similar across the region, when in fact they are very different.
7. Ignored Contrary Views. By law this document is supposed to make an honest effort to review points of disagreement among experts. It failed to do so in areas such as the effectiveness of vegetation treatments, prescribed burns, and impact of fire severity in forests. 8. Cumulative Impacts Dismissed. The document only considers clearance programs conducted by other agencies and timber harvest activities in determining cumulative impacts. It does not include the impact of increased fire frequency on ecosystems, such as chaparral, already impacted by such a trend. Such an approach precludes a proper analysis of cumulative effects.
Please listen to this special podcast with Roy Ben-Tzvi This interview provides an excellent overview of all things chaparral including what we do, what chaparral is, the best way to deal with wildfire risk, and the role Nature can play to create better lives and a more positive society.
Contact
California Chaparral Institute P.O. Box 545 Escondido, CA 92033
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