In a lawsuit that calls into question the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire)’s underlying vegetation clearing techniques, the San Diego Superior Court has ordered the agency to modify its program to reduce wildfire risk across the state because it could make matters worse.
Years of lawsuits brought by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the Forest and Fire Protection Commission highlight the deep gulf between the approaches of ecologists and firefighters to solving California’s wildfire crisis.
Richard Halsey, director of the California Chaparral Institute, was elated. “Chaparral and sage scrub make up more than 10 percent of the state,” he said.
“Despite all the rhetoric about how much we love biodiversity, we are going to wipe out the places in the state where most of the biodiversity is,” making the landscape even more flammable in the process, Halsey said of the Cal Fire plan.
Cal Fire’s aims to use tree and shrub clearing in addition to prescribed fires to reduce the risk of wildfire ignition, uncontrolled explosions, and exposure to life and property. In doing so, the agency also strives to foster native biodiversity and protect clean water and soil health.
In California’s coniferous forests, this often involves thinning out unnaturally dense trees and shrubs that cause very intense fires.
However, in Southern California, where much of the wilderness is home to chaparral ecosystems with shrubs, oaks, native grasses and flowers, the typical approach is to reduce fuel breaks. This means creating long strips of vegetation along ridgelines and roads to deter creeping ground fires along roadsides and give firefighters safe access to wind-driven fires that can easily jump.
Severe and frequent wildfires have already reduced some areas of trees to chaparral and some areas of chaparral to nothing more than flammable grass. The lawsuit claimed that Cal Fire’s Chaparral firebreak could cause this “.
When native chaparral is removed from the landscape due to wildfire or vegetation management projects, it is often opportunistic, fast-growing non-native grasses rather than native plants that regrow.
Cal Fire claimed that its program addressed this issue in its environmental impact review. But the California Chaparral Institute and the Endangered Species Habitat Federation said the agency didn’t take into account that these non-native grasses are much more flammable than the native grasses they’re cutting, meaning they can increase the risk of fire.
The vegetation management program guides the actual work in the field. So far this year, work has been completed on more than 5,400 acres in 26 projects. Approximately 13% of the work was done in scrubland such as chaparral.
The board did not respond to requests for comment.
ecology groups, and in 2023 the San Diego Superior Court ruled against Cal Fire. The group appealed, and in May 2025, California’s Fourth District Court of Appeal reversed the trial court and ordered it to decide how to resolve the issue.
On Nov. 14, a lower court ordered Cal Fire to address the potential for type conversion that would exacerbate wildfire risks and prohibited individual projects in the vegetation management program from relying on the program’s comprehensive environmental review to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act until that time was completed.
The order does not apply to new fuel break projects or maintenance of existing fuel breaks that already have plans to prevent the growth of flammable grass. Projects on land that have already lost trees or chaparral to type conversion will also be allowed to continue.
Ecologists and fire officials ultimately have the same goal. It’s about reducing catastrophic wildfires and protecting native biodiversity. After all, a fire can wipe out thousands of acres of native ecosystems, and the exotic ecosystems plaguing the area can ignite much more easily.
However, ecologists tend to favor solutions that preserve native ecosystems (e.g., programs focused on ), whereas fire officials tend to be drawn to solutions that view plants as potential fire “fuel” (e.g., cutting vegetation to create fuel breaks).
Fire officials argue that refueling breaks are a way to give firefighters a much-needed strategic advantage in protecting their communities. But some ecologists question whether even breaks help fight ember fires and whether fire departments actually staff refueling breaks during emergencies.
Those differences were put on full display when Santa Monica Mountains fire departments and land managers broke ground on the project in September, thanks to an expedited approval process created by Gov. Gavin Newsom and funding from the $10 billion climate bond that California voters approved last November.
“The Governor and the Legislature have been clear: We need to move faster to implement more of these projects…Wildfire risks are worsening,” California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said at the time. “Properly designed fuel breaks with environmental protection measures will not only protect these communities this winter, but will also enable broader, more integrated landscape management.”
