When the Palisades Fire started near a hiking trail in Los Angeles on January 7quickly spreading to more than 200 acres in 20 minutes, and nearly 3,000 acres by the end of the daysome critics argued that land management was to blame.Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer who lost the L.A. mayoral race in 2022, claimed that a root cause of the fires was failing to remove brush from the hills. Elon Musk blamed crazy environmental regulations that he said prevented creating firebreaks and clearing brush. Donald Trumpwho had said in the past that California needed to rake its forestscomplained again about the states forest management. And when Congress reintroduced a Fix Our Forests bill this week that would make it easier for the logging industry to cut down trees, some politicians implied that the fires in L.A. could have been prevented if it had been in place; on Thursday, that bill passed in the House.The problem: The landscape around Los Angeles isnt a forest, and clearing out the native plants could make fires even worse.Altadena, California, January 2025 [Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images]It drives me crazy when you hear people talk about how we need to manage the forests around L.A., says Richard Halsey, director of the nonprofit California Chaparral Institute and the author of Fire, Chaparral, and Survival in Southern California. There arent any.Unlike mountains in parts of Northern California that are filled with pine and cedar trees, the hills around L.A. are covered in chaparral, an ecosystem made up of small drought-tolerant shrubs like manzanita. In some Northern California forests, prescribed burns can help prevent extreme fires by clearing out undergrowth on the forest floor. (Decades of fire suppression in these forests have helped make fires bigger and more destructive.)But chaparral doesnt naturally burn as often, and deliberately burning it can kill it off. The result of that is you lose all the native shrubs and they are eventually replaced by more flammable, non-native grasses which then present a greater fire risk on the landscape than the chaparral ever does, Halsey says.Firefighters battle flames from the Smokehouse Creek Fire in March 2024 near Sanford, Texas. [Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images]Grass fires can be incredibly destructive. When the Marshall Fire burned in Colorado in 2021, destroying hundreds of buildings, killing two people, and forcing tens of thousands of residents to evacuate, it spread through grass, not trees or shrubs. In Texas last year, the record-breaking Smokehouse Creek Fire burned through more than a million acres of ranchland, not forests. Strong winds and hot weather made the fire spread quickly.In Southern California, the extreme weather conditions, with hurricane-force winds, meant that the fires almost certainly would have spread even if there were large fire breaks in place with no vegetation. You could have put a 10-lane freeway in front of that fire and it would not have slowed it down one bit, Brian Fennessy, the fire chief in Orange County, told the Los Angeles Times.High winds send embers flying off a burning palm tree during the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California. [Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images]The L.A. fires spread as embers flew miles through the air, not just through vegetation on the ground. And as houses ignited, they became the main fuel, not trees or shrubs. If clearing vegetation in wild areas isnt helpful, Halsey argues that cities should be focused on making homes more resilient to fires. That includes creating defensible space around a house, adding features like fire-resistant windows and decks, and making sure that sparks cant enter a house through vents. Halsey also advocates for exterior sprinklers for buildings that are more commonly used in places like Australia and Canada. (In a fire in Minnesota in 2007, nearly 200 houses that had sprinkler systems survived, while neighboring houses burned.)We keep going to vegetation, and weve been doing this for 100 years, he says. We keep losing more people and more homes. Youd think somebody in the room would say, You know, maybe we should be doing something differently.