California lawmakers are once again wrestling with how far the state should go to speed up wildfire prevention work — and whether public health and environmental safeguards should be set aside to get there.
I write as someone who knows firsthand what it means to lose normalcy to fire. More than a year after I fled my home during the Palisades Fire, I still haven’t been able to move back in. My house didn’t burn, but it became unlivable after fire retardant containing toxic heavy metals rained down on our neighborhood. That experience left me deeply committed to reducing wildfire risk — but it also taught me that rushing these efforts without proper safeguards can create new dangers just as serious as the fires themselves.
That’s why I’m concerned about Senate Bill 1370, introduced by state Sens. Henry Stern and Josh Becker. The bill would exempt many wildfire prevention projects from a wide range of state environmental laws, including regulations covering water and air quality, endangered species protections and the California Environmental Quality Act. Projects involving herbicide spraying, removal of trees or native vegetation, and land clearing on parcels up to 3,000 acres would no longer need to comply with these existing rules.
In effect, SB 1370 would make permanent what Gov. Gavin Newsom authorized temporarily through an emergency proclamation this past June, which fast-tracked hundreds of wildfire prevention projects by suspending many of the same environmental requirements.
A look at the state’s public dashboard tracking these fast-tracked projects raises real red flags. Many projects run by Southern California Edison, the utility serving much of the region, rely heavily on herbicide application to clear vegetation. Chemicals like Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, are commonly used but have been linked in multiple studies to cancer, respiratory illness and neurological damage. These are not fringe concerns — they’re documented risks that current state law is specifically designed to guard against, including rules that restrict spraying near drinking water sources and sensitive tree stands.
If SB 1370 becomes law, those safeguards would no longer apply to a broad swath of projects. Consider the Blodgett Forest Fuel Reduction Project in El Dorado Forest, which calls for herbicide treatment across up to 471 acres to reduce shrub cover. This forest is home to more than 400 plant species and 150 animal species, and it sits near waterways that feed into a county where roughly 42% of residents rely on private wells — wells drawing from shallow groundwater that could easily be compromised by nearby chemical spraying.
What troubles me most is how little oversight actually accompanies these expedited projects. There’s no requirement that they prove cost-effectiveness or measurable wildfire risk reduction — even though that reduction was the entire justification for loosening the rules in the first place. The state’s tracking dashboard offers scant detail on what protective measures, if any, were applied to each project, leaving communities with almost no way to voice concerns or hold anyone accountable. Compounding the problem, the state’s own Statewide Fuels Reduction Environmental Protection Plan — meant to guide these projects — is vague and, in many cases, purely voluntary.
This comes at a moment when federal protections are also eroding. The U.S. Forest Service and timber industry are preparing to spray unprecedented amounts of glyphosate across California’s forests, while the Trump administration has finalized changes gutting the national Endangered Species Act, clearing the way for expanded mining and logging nationwide.
Given that backdrop, California should be reinforcing its own environmental protections, not dismantling them. Instead, SB 1370 would strip away safeguards for projects that could damage fragile ecosystems and expose nearby residents to cancer-linked chemicals — all without any guarantee that these efforts will actually make our communities safer from fire.
There are better paths forward. The state should be putting resources into hardening homes against fire and encouraging smarter development that avoids high-risk areas. SB 1370, as written, doesn’t get us closer to a truly wildfire-resilient California — it just trades one danger for another.
Original source: CalMatters
