The City of Berkeley has passed strict regulations that will require residents in certain parts of the city’s hills to keep five feet around their homes, dubbed “Zone Zero,” free of flammable materials. That includes wooden fences and trellises that are attached directly to homes, trash bins, and most controversially, almost all vegetation. The State of California too, is drafting Zone Zero rules that include limiting vegetation directly next to buildings in high risk areas. In this episode of Terra Verde, Earth Island Journal editor-in-chief and cohost Maureen Nandini Mitra talks with two scientists who study how vegetation ignites and burns — Max Moritz, head of the Mortiz Fire Lab in UC Santa Barbara and a wildfire specialist at the University of California Cooperative Extension, and Luca Carmignani, assistant professor of engineering at San Diego State University and a former fire advisor for the Wildland-Urban Interface in Southern California. Moritz and Carmignani say what appears to matter more for keeping plants from becoming fuel for fires is how well they’re maintained, and that the debate around plants is distracting from the essential and urgent work of implementing other home hardening measures.

Read an article they co-wrote citing their concerns in The Conversation.

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