Zone Zero

Across the West, there's a contentious debate playing out over how to adapt homes and neighborhoods to this era of increasingly extreme wildfire risk. In Berkeley, California, it's become a particularly emotional fight because of a very specific architectural history that began all the way back in the 1890s. Emmett Fitzgerald reports on the new rules about what plants you can grow around your house.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop off, the first sweater weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions. Crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed-sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most.

• 0:43Roman Mars?

  Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. A couple of years back, 99PI producer Emmett Fitzgerald created a series called Not Built For This. It was all about how the world we currently live in was not designed for the weather it's starting to experience.

• 1:27Roman Mars?

  Emmett is back this week with an episode that has a lot in common with that series, and it takes place very close to 99PI headquarters in Berkeley, California. I'll let Emmett take it from here.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Michel Thwadi had been dreaming of California since childhood. As a little French kid, he was obsessed with cowboys and big mountains and the American West. And so, when he finally arrived in Berkeley in 1984, he was totally prepared to fall in love with the place. But still, there was one thing in particular that exceeded his high expectations: the gardens.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  I remember being absolutely awed by that phenomenal richness of plants. Almost anything can be grown around here, you know? So the variety, the colors, the textures were extraordinary. It was almost like being in a fairy tale, you know, for me.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Michel was a Navy brat. He grew up bouncing around French naval bases, many of them in North Africa. These were hot, dusty places without much in the way of vegetation.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  And looking at Berkeley was such a change, the lushness of the landscaping.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Michel had come to California for a graduate program at UC Berkeley, and his advisor had a beautiful house up in the Berkeley Hills with an incredible view of the Golden Gate. And every time that Michel went over for dinner, he would look at the sun setting behind the bridge and think, someday I want this view for myself.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  I didn't really think I would ever be able to have it, but now I do.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  The Berkeley Hills are an expensive place to live. But after grad school, Michel and his wife managed to find a fixer-upper that they could afford.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  And we essentially spent the next 10 years investing every minute that we had and every dollar into turning the house into a place that we liked living in.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  The most important home improvement project for Michel was the yard. He planted a lush, unruly garden, just like the ones he fell in love with when he first got to Berkeley. There were dense blocks of shrubs right against the sides of the house, persimmon trees and figs, jasmine vines crawling up the walls. And Michel loved it. All was well in the garden, at least for a little while.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  A fresh look at the damage from the CZU Lightning Complex fire raging in Santa Cruz County.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Between 2015 and 2020, California experienced 10 of the most destructive wildfires in its history.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  One of the biggest fires is threatening the city of Calistoga.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  And as fire risk grew more and more omnipresent in the psychology of Californians, Michel's wife started to get nervous about their verdant hilltop dream home.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  It was around 2020, my wife realized the problems about wildfire much earlier than I did. So I was in total denial early on.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  At one point, Michel's wife even suggested that they consider moving out of the hills and down into the flatter parts of Berkeley that were less vulnerable to fire. But Michel was having none of it.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Then I said, look, I'm going to research this, and I'm going to prove it to you that you're wrong and that we're totally safe. And we know how it turned out, because we weren't safe at all.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  It turned out that Michel's neighborhood was actually extremely vulnerable to wildfire. And part of the reason why was precisely because of all those lush gardens that had attracted him to the area in the first place. And as he did more research, Michel began wading into a contentious debate that is playing out all across California about how to adapt our homes and communities for an era of increasingly extreme wildfire risk. In Berkeley, it would eventually bubble over. There would be recall campaigns and accusations flying around online.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  But to understand how it all got so tense, it helps to know a bit more about the area. Because it's not just that these gardens are central to the character of the Berkeley Hills. It's that they're part of a very specific architectural history that has roots going back more than 100 years. Berkeley, California is synonymous with 1960s counterculture. But the city's bohemianism actually began long before the free speech movement and the Vietnam War. All the way back in the 1890s, Berkeley was a hotbed for artists and poets and intellectuals. Around the turn of the 20th century, a number of these free thinkers began moving up into

• 6:32Speaker 01

  the hills above the University of California, Berkeley, which at the time were grasslands speckled with oak trees. And as more and more people started to build houses up there, they formed a social organization that tried to shape what the development would look like. It was called the Berkeley Hillside Club.

• 6:51Speaker 05

  The Berkeley Hillside Club was founded in 1898 by a group of Berkeley women who fundamentally were interested in preventing the Berkeley hillsides from being disfigured.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  This is David Mustardy, who is the historian of the Hillside Club, which is still active to this day. And David says that the club's definition of disfigurement was basically what had happened just across the bridge in San Francisco. When San Francisco's famous hills were developed for the first time, they just laid a perfectly rectangular street grid down on the landscape and built Victorian gingerbread houses up and down the steep slopes.

• 7:32Speaker 05

  And the women at the Hillside Club felt that this was a desecration of what California had to offer.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  The members of the Hillside Club wanted a different kind of architecture for the Berkeley Hills, one that was more attuned to the area's unique landscape. And they found the perfect architect to realize that vision in an eccentric New Yorker named Bernard Maybeck.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  Maybeck was a bohemian sort of fellow. Gray Brecken, the historian, calls Maybeck the first hippie, you know, 80 years before the other hippies came to town.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Maybeck trained at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris before arriving in the Bay Area with his wife Annie in 1890. And Maybeck was a genuine oddball. He had a long, dwarven beard and often dressed in red robes he sewed himself. When his first child was born, Maybeck called the baby "boy" until the age the kid was old enough to choose a name for himself. And Maybeck's diet was like that of a teenage art school student.

• 8:38Speaker 06

  Somebody in a recent article said he was a vegetarian. He was not. He lived on fried potatoes, coffee, and donuts.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  This is Maybeck's daughter-in-law, Jacamina, in an interview with the Berkeley Historical Society. Jacamina also lived in the Berkeley Hills, and she frequently stopped by for coffee with the red-robed potato eater.

• 9:01Speaker 06

  I could not keep up with him, and I could not interpret everything he said. He was a great reader, and he threw it all in together like a big soup.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Maybeck was a Renaissance man. In one of the only remaining recorded interviews with him, he implores architects to seek inspiration outside the confines of their profession.

• 9:25Speaker 07

  From history, from different countries, and literature, and the theater, all those ideals you ought to absorb.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Maybeck considered architecture to be as much an art form as a practical trade. And he thought that buildings should, above all else, be beautiful.

• 9:46Speaker 07

  Beauty is the essence of architecture. In other words, it isn't a question of the man living in the building, or whether he has a refrigerator and all that sort of thing. But it's the man in the street who has to look at your building when it's done.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Bernard Maybeck designed many beautiful buildings in a wide variety of styles. But his most enduring legacy might be the arts and crafts houses that he built in the Berkeley Hills. The idea of the arts and crafts movement was to simplify architecture back to its basics, to move away from the excess of the Industrial Revolution and Victorian-era frippery, and to build simple, beautiful structures that were in tune with the natural world around them. Maybeck's first commission in Berkeley was for a writer named Charles Keeler. And the house that he built Keeler was like a wooden temple. It had a steep vaulted ceiling with chunky, exposed redwood beams.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  And in what would become a signature of Berkeley architecture, the exterior of the house, including the roof, was clad entirely in wooden shingles. Keeler, for his part, adored the house, and he bragged about it to anyone who would listen. In fact, he became something of a propagandist for Maybeck's arts and crafts vision.

• 11:15Speaker 05

  One of his most influential pieces, if not the most influential piece he ever wrote, was a book called The Simple Home.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Keeler published The Simple Home in 1904, and around the same time, he was elected president of the Berkeley Hillside Club.

• 11:31Speaker 05

  And it became a manifesto of sorts for the Hillside Club. Basically, here's how you go about building a house in the Berkeley Hills.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Bernard Maybeck was also a member of the Hillside Club by this point, and he and Keeler helped shape the organization's philosophy about architecture and also landscape. One of the primary tenets of this philosophy was that all new development in the hills should respect the area's unique geology. Instead of the symmetrical grid that had been laid down on San Francisco's hills, roads in Berkeley should be carved into the contours of the hillside. If there was a rock in the way--

• 12:15Speaker 05

  If you don't blow the rock up and smithereens and go straight through, you go around the rock. If there's a huge old oak tree in the way, you go around the tree. You're integrating all of these things into the architecture and the landscape.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  The club had very specific recommendations for anyone who wanted to buy a house on the hill. David pulled out a pamphlet from this era that the Hillside Club gave to prospective homebuyers.

• 12:40Speaker 05

  This is the Landscape Architecture pamphlet from 1906.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  That's a beautiful, beautiful document.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  It's a beautiful piece, yeah.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Flipping through, I was surprised by just how much of the text was devoted to gardening. To the Hillside Club, the garden was the most important feature of any property, more important even than the house, which the pamphlet jokes was really only necessary as protection from inclement weather.

• 13:07Speaker 05

  This is the famous line, "Hillside architecture is landscape gardening around a few rooms for use in case of rain."

• 13:16Speaker 01

  The idea was to have a complete continuity between the house and the garden, a seamless transition between indoors and outdoors. The club called for extensive planting of trees and shrubs right up to the edge of the house. They wanted figs and plums with trailing willows and ivy-covered walls. The pamphlet was an invitation to partner with the Hillside Club and help turn the Berkeley Hills into a lush California Arcadia. It reads, "With the help of the hillbuyer, the Hillside Club can lay out on the Berkeley Hills a perfect landscape, connecting green canyons with piling green forests, making

• 13:58Speaker 01

  of the barren place as a park, with only here and there a tower or a glimpse of roof to tell of the city underneath. A city of homes in an immense garden." The only problem with the Hillside Club's beautiful dream of a garden city was that the Berkeley Hills are a landscape that is meant to burn. And the earthy design principles that shaped the development of the hills were pretty much a nightmare from the perspective of wildfire risk. The wood-shingled houses were highly flammable, the twisted streets were hard to evacuate, and the dense, lush gardens grown right next to the house were the perfect fire fuel.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Maybeck and company had unintentionally built a lush, idyllic fire trap. And in 1923, the inevitable happened.

• 14:52Speaker 05

  It all happened on one afternoon. This is September 17, 1923. In fact, the Hillside Club was going to have its annual dinner that night.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  A fire started in the afternoon up the hill, and within six hours, it had burned all the way down to the flat parts of Berkeley. The fire destroyed many of the houses that Maybeck designed, including his own, and the Hillside Club's clubhouse, which he also designed, burned to the ground. In the following decades, the hills were rebuilt, and there were gestures towards fire safety. Many of the homes were remade with stucco rather than wood. And Maybeck himself started experimenting with fire-safe materials. But much of the Hillside Club's arts and crafts vision, and particularly the dense

• 15:42Speaker 01

  and beautiful gardens, remain intact to this day. When Michel Thuati first got to Berkeley in the 80s, it was this vision that he fell in love with. And over the years, he grew a garden that Bernard Maybeck would be proud of. It even had a few rooms in case of rain. But by 2020, he was becoming increasingly worried about fire risk. By this point, insurance rates in the hills were starting to skyrocket, and anxiety about fire was widespread. And so Michel did what he does best.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  I'm a thorough person. I have a little bit of OCD sometimes. And so I read, for a year and a half, I read every single paper on what I discovered was called wildfire science, probably 400, 500, 600 articles. I got in touch with some of the most prominent wildfire scientists in the country.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  And they all told him the same thing, that his home was in a high-fire-risk area, and that the garden that he had grown right against the side of the house was only exacerbating that risk.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  It took me basically 2020 to 2022 to move to a psychological point where I was ready to actually do things. So in 2022, I realized that we had to change, and I started slowly making changes.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Michel learned that the most effective steps he could take to mitigate that risk would be to harden his home to wildfire and create what's called defensible space. Defensible space is a concept that was developed by a wildfire scientist named Jack Cohen. We actually did a whole episode about him that you can find back in the archives. But the idea at its simplest was that if you get rid of all the flammable stuff around a house, you make it much less likely for the house itself to catch on fire. Contrary to what many people imagine, in most cases wildfires do not consume houses in a tidal wave of flame. It's much more likely that a house catches on fire because of a single ember.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  As a fire burns, it launches a blizzard of embers into the air. They drift along on the wind, and if one lands on the dead leaves in your gutter, or the weeds growing in your alley, or the dry grass landscaping out front, it can easily burn down your entire house. But if you get rid of all that flammable stuff, then the ember threat goes way down. For Michel, this was going to be very difficult because he had a lot of plants growing around his house.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Well, you really couldn't see the bottom 10 feet of the wall pretty much anywhere because it was absolutely covered with shrubs.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  But Michel started hacking away. He cut down a lot of plants and transplanted others further away from the structure. It was hard work physically and emotionally. He had spent a lot of time and effort growing that garden, and he had deep feelings about many of the plants.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  The fig tree particularly, the fig tree. Fig trees have a smell. I can smell a fig tree sometimes from 200 or 300 yards away. And walking in my garden, every time, I would smell the fig tree. And ugh, cutting it was very difficult.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  As painful as it was, Michel was committed. And little by little, he re-landscaped the entire property with defensible space in mind. But the thing about defensible space is that it really only works if everyone around you does it too. Wildfire experts love to say that what most determines whether your house will burn down in a fire is whether your neighbor's house burns down. And so Michel started organizing with his neighbors. They created a series of fire-wise groups and began working together to try to make the entire neighborhood safer. Still, they didn't have any real political power to mandate changes.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  And so while they made some progress on defensible space with some houses, many other gardens remained overgrown and dangerous. Around this time, a new city councillor was elected to represent the Berkeley Hills. His name was Brent Blackaby. And on the surface, he didn't seem like a transformational political figure. On the campaign, he talked about the issues that every California politician seems to talk about: building more housing, dealing with homelessness. Blackaby knew that wildfire was an issue in the hills, but just a few weeks into the job, the stakes were made very clear when the city of Los Angeles experienced the most destructive fire in its history.

• 20:28Speaker 06

  This morning, the firestorm officials had feared it becoming a reality. In the coastal neighborhood Pacific Palisades, multiple homes completely engulfed in flames, with desperate residents rushing to get out.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  The parallels between the Berkeley Hills and the Palisades were obvious to Blackaby. They're both coastal hillside communities with perilous fall winds. And as he watched the Palisades burn on the news, Blackaby felt a growing sense of terror. Yeah, I mean, it was scary. I think you always kind of knew from an academic perspective, intellectual perspective, yeah, this is my responsibility. But it became really real, driving through--

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Neighborhood, walking around with my kids. And it just, that responsibility, I just, I couldn't live with myself if we just sort of said, hey, well, we're going to hope for the best.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  At this point, the state of California was considering updates to state-level defensible space rules, but it was taking a long time. And Blackaby was anxious to get moving. He got together with a small group of politicians and members of the fire department to talk about how to respond.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  And kind of the consensus in our little, small group is like, this is the time. This is a wake-up call for us. We just can't afford to wait any longer. The risks just pile up. And if we're always going to wait for someone else to do it, we're never going to do it. Let's just go.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  And so shortly after getting into office, Blackaby introduced a bold new wildfire adaptation plan for the Berkeley Hills, an initiative called the Ember Ordinance.

• 22:05Speaker 05

  And there's a number of things to it, but the big one is Zone Zero, or the home ignition zone, which is the space within five feet of a structure. And that area has to be free of any combustible material of any kind.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  This is Dave Winneker. He's a retired wildland firefighter and a fire risk expert who was brought in to help with the rollout of the Ember Ordinance. And Dave says that Ember makes an exception for mature trees, but otherwise, you can have nothing flammable in Zone Zero at all. No shrubs, no jute doormats, no wooden gates, nothing burnable within five feet of the structure. In other words, basically the exact opposite of the vision laid out in that hillside club pamphlet over 100 years ago. Instead of a seamless transition between the house and the garden, the ordinance essentially calls for a protective moat of lifelessness around every home.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Dave says that they knew this was going to be a hard sell.

• 23:05Speaker 05

  And so since this is so hard, and because the margin of failure is so thin at the individual parcel level or at the neighborhood level, it's critical that we focus on the absolute smallest possible distribution of the least amount of work to be effective.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  The fire department carefully selected a zone of about 950 homes right along the edge of Tilden Park, where a fire was most likely to start. This was a tactical choice to try and create a buffer between the city and the park. That way, if a wildfire were to start in Tilden, it would be much harder for the embers to catch houses on fire and burn down the entire hillside. In this high-risk zone, the ordinance also calls on residents to do things like install gutter guards and cover their vents with metal mesh to prevent embers from getting inside the house itself.

• 23:59Speaker 05

  And if we can get everyone in those areas to do everything, we will achieve the state of wildfire adaptation and we will form a non-burnable buffer by virtue of this program so that the other 10,000 homes that live downhill, there's about 950 up at the top, and there's about 10,000 that are downstream, those 10,000 are now free riders. That's a pretty good deal. That's achievable.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  When Michelle Suwadi and his neighbors in the Firewise group heard about the Ember Ordinance, they were thrilled.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  We were overjoyed. You know, we thought this plan could actually save the neighborhood. But very quickly, we realized that the support was definitely not uniform.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Right away, an angry debate broke out on the famously friendly platform, Nextdoor. On the one side, you had people like Michelle cheering their bold, progressive city councillor, who had the courage to act decisively. And on the other side, you had a lot of residents who were extremely pissed off that someone was forcing them to cut down their beloved bougainvillea.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Opposition was very, very strong and sometimes difficult to deal with. I've always felt at home in California, ever since I arrived here. And one of the reasons I felt so at home is that people are mellower. And it was the first time that I was seeing a very bitter debate when that wasn't true, where personal attacks were rampant.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  For yourself, too?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  For myself, too. Yeah. One of the big opponents of this rule has accused me on Nextdoor of having a landscaping business from which I'm profiting. I, you know, I never made a cent from any of this.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  The critics of Ember had a lot of very specific complaints with the ordinance. They worried that removing plants would cause erosion and lead to habitat loss. They argued that it was unfair for the city to single out this one group of residents to make all the hard sacrifices. And besides, the state of California was already working on its own Zone Zero regulations. Why did Berkeley feel the need to preempt the state? But fundamentally, I think this all got so emotional because people were understandably attached to a vision of the Berkeley Hills that goes back all the way to the days of Maybeck. They chose to live in a hillside garden city for a reason.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  And even if most residents knew that climate change was real and fire risk was escalating, the Ember Ordinance just felt like too much change, too fast. And at first, Michelle had a lot of sympathy for this.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  And I understood very well that you can't go from loving your garden to having to radically change it quickly. It's impossible. You have to go through a period of grief and acceptance and all such things. It's very, very difficult. It took me a long time. It took me a year and a half to accept the fact that I had to make changes. So I totally understood that it would be difficult for some people.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  But Michelle naively thought that once they had been presented with the science, his neighbors would be persuaded of the logic, that they would go through the same conversion process he had. Yet, as the year went on, the debate about the Ember Ordinance only got more heated.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  A new organization called the Alliance for Practical Fire Solutions launched a recall campaign of Brent Blackaby. Neighbors butted heads for months until a final vote was scheduled at the city council. When the Ember Ordinance came up on the agenda, the mayor read out a special disclaimer, warning people about behavior that would not be tolerated.

• 27:59Speaker 06

  Shouting, making disruptive noises such as boos or hisses, creating or participating in a physical disturbance, speaking out of turn, or in violation of applicable rules, just like that, that's a hiss, not allowed.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  The debate lasted for over two hours. And if you're imagining over-the-top testimonials from residents who thought that getting rid of their ornamental grapevine was the worst thing to happen since 9/11, well...

• 28:25Speaker 06

  I'm reminded of 9/11. There was a terrible attack on our country, and in the rush to judgment, they bombed Iraq.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  There were also warnings that this draconian policy was just the first step down a slippery slope towards fascism, and that people should resist the tyranny of their local government. I'm not letting anybody inspect my property. Go get a warrant.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  But I have to say, I was surprised at the level of support for the Ember Ordinance in the room that night, including from people who lived in the mitigation area. Many of the residents who were going to have to do the most work to comply were begging the city council to vote yes.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  I live in a wood-shingled house. I don't have the money to change the siding. I'm working on defensible space. The science makes sense to me, and global warming is something that I believe is actually happening. I don't want to end up like the Pacific Palisades or Altadena. And I see this as an extremely critical thing to saving my home, if it can be saved. And I support Ember. Please vote for that. Thank you. Thank you.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  In the end, the city councillors were convinced that even though this was a hard pill to swallow, it was worth it to try and keep the city safe. The Ember Ordinance passed with a nine to zero vote.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  After the break, we head back to Michelle's neighborhood to see what it's like to put a policy like Ember into practice.

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• 33:16Speaker 01

  We are back with Emmett Fitzgerald. The Ember Ordinance passed in June of 2025, and a little over a year later, the state of California finally released its own statewide fire safety regulations. They're not as stringent as Ember, but they apply to a wider swath of the Berkeley Hills, meaning that even more people will have to get to work clearing out vegetation in Zone Zero. One of the biggest challenges here will be financial. Berkeley residents either have to do this work themselves or pay for it out of pocket, and not everyone can afford professional landscaping. Michel Duwadi knows this is true, and so he and some of his friends in the Firewise Group have been doing everything they can to help.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  We had that big clearing event. We had 350 volunteers working on clearing and rock mulching. We did a ton of rock mulching and all those things. And it's not that hard, you know? But, you know, when you're 86 and you've lived here for 42 years and you're starting to forget things a little bit, this is not something you can do on your own.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  They hosted a gates and fences day, where contractors came to show off different non-flammable fences. And an anonymous donor offered to help pay for the installation costs.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  And we had 200 homeowners showing up, and to this day, I'm still getting emails about it going, oh, can I get the handout?

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  So it was really, it really paid off.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Michel is also helping run an informal assessment program, where he or another Firewise member will come to your house before your official inspection from the fire department and give you an honest take about how you're doing. Michel says he's done over 150 of these, and he's gotten good at delivering the good news with the bad. He'll congratulate you on replacing your wooden gate and then gently point out that the ivy growing against your chimney is probably going to have to go. He compared this work to a vaccine rollout. It's only going to work if they can get as many people as possible to buy in.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  I wish we could convince more people to let us help them, if that makes sense to you.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Because, I mean, it's, it's, uh, there's a lot at stake.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. And it's for them and also for us. Quite frankly, they are two, they are both, both dimensions apply. It's very helpful to them, but it's also very helpful to the neighborhood, you know, herd immunity.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Some people are still refusing to do the work, and Michel says that's why the mandatory aspect of Ember is key. The fire department wants to give residents time, but eventually, they will start fining people for non-compliance. Ultimately, the most important arbiter of the success of the policy will likely be the insurance industry. Here's city council member Brent Blackaby again. You know, 18 months from now, when we've got a lot of our neighbors who've done the mitigation work, are the insurance companies ready to take all of this work and properly give attribution and credit to our residents for doing this hard work and make sure it shows up at the insurance rates?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Blackaby is actively negotiating with insurance companies, and he's hopeful that they will recognize the risk reductions created by Ember and lower rates throughout his district. The insurance companies are saying, oh, look, if you can actually do this across this entire landscape and get 60, 70, 80% of people in a neighborhood to do this work, it will look a lot different. Our response to that risk will look a lot different than it does now. On the day I visited Michel, some contractors were putting the final touches on a brand-new metal fence.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  So you're seeing, basically, it's almost done, but not quite done.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. I gotta say, it looks pretty nice.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  It looks nice. It looks nice, and it's actually a very cost-effective way to build fencing.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Looking around, it's obvious how much time and money Michel has put into making his own house more fire-safe. He ripped out a massive wooden fence, rebuilt retaining walls, rock mulched paths, and moved countless plants further away from the house, out of Zone Zero. So have you gotten your inspection yet?

• 37:40Speaker 02

  Not yet, but, uh, but I'm sure I'm going to pass.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Michel says that while there is still quite a lot of anger flying around online, you don't notice it as much on the ground. And quietly, little pockets of compliance have started to spread. He says that when the neighbors immediately around you are doing all the work, the work itself becomes less intimidating. You can ask your neighbor how to replant a shrub or get a phone number for a contractor who might be able to help you out with your fence. Michel is clearly energized by the challenge of trying to reimagine the landscape to better fit the reality of our increasingly fiery world.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Fundamentally, the landscape design today can't be the same as the one that was there in the 1920s, which is what we're all using.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  You're talking about kind of the aesthetic ideals that, that Maybeck and the Hillside Club and these people.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. So that it, the, everything modern would disappear behind nature, and nature would be flourishing and, and otherworldly, et cetera. And they did a magnificent job. I love every one of those places, but you can't do this anymore. What you have to do is the opposite.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Instead of integrating the home and the garden, you have to decouple them, surround the house with rocky paths, and move the plants further away. Adapting to wildfire means a complete rethink of the landscape architecture principles laid out by Bernard Maybeck and the Hillside Club. And there will inevitably be some sadness as that older chapter comes to a close. But Michel thinks that the Ember Ordinance doesn't need to be a loss, just a rearrangement.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Same amount of greens altogether, but differently organized. And I think this can be gorgeous and magnificent, but revolutions don't happen in a day.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Michel says that we shouldn't be too quick to judge what comes next. The Berkeley Hills can still be lush, but it will be years before all these redesigned gardens reach maturity. He's going to plant a new fig tree in a safer spot, but he'll need to be patient. It's going to take time to grow. 99% Invisible was reported and produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald and edited by Delaney Hall. Mixed by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real and George Langford. Fact-checking by Sona Avakian.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Special thanks this week to the Berkeley Historical Society and the Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley. If you want to hear more about the history of defensible space, check out the old 99PI episode called Built to Burn. There's a link in the show notes. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, LaShma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradly, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 41:27Speaker 06

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