Gavin Newsom’s “Zone 0” Disaster: The Governor’s Latest Wildfire “Solution” Is a Deadly Farce

What actually works are defensible landscapes—vast areas of naturally reduced fuels that slow or stop fire spread before it reaches communities.

NOTE: this article was sent by email, with permission to publish, by Captain William E. Simpson II, founder of Wild Horse Fire Brigade.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has just signed one of the most arrogant, ignorant, and outright dangerous executive orders in recent memory: the so-called “Zone 0” mandate.

Homeowners must now strip every last blade of grass, shrub, and low-hanging branch within five feet of their houses—turning backyards into barren dirt patches under threat of fines and forced compliance. Newsom sells it as wildfire protection. The reality? It’s performative nonsense that will cost lives while doing almost nothing to stop real catastrophic fires.

Here’s why this is lethal theater:

Wind-driven wildfires don’t politely respect five-foot buffers. They hurl burning embers miles ahead of the flame front.

• The Eagle Creek Fire (Oregon, 2017) jumped the Columbia River—a mile-wide waterway—and kept burning.
• The Klamathon Fire (Northern California, 2018) crossed Interstate-5 twice—over 120 feet of bare concrete and asphalt shoulders—like it was nothing.
• In the Almeda Fire (Talent & Phoenix, Oregon, 2020), modern buildings (supermarkets, banks and homes) built to the latest fire codes, surrounded by 100–300 feet of parking lots and cleared space, were incinerated in minutes by ember storms.

“Defensible space” around individual homes is a cruel illusion in 70+ mph wind events. What actually works are defensible landscapes—vast areas of naturally reduced fuels that slow or stop fire spread before it reaches communities.

In July 2018, during the same Klamathon Fire, our pilot herd of ~200 privately-owned cultural-heritage horses proved exactly that. Living free on adjacent wilderness land at Wild Horse Ranch, these horses had been grazing the landscape for years. Their selective foraging created thousands of acres of low-fuel zones and massive natural firebreaks—precisely the areas where CALFIRE crews were finally able to contain the 38,000-acre wind-driven blaze. This wasn’t theory. It was documented on the ground, in photos, field notes, and direct observation as I worked as the technical advisor to CALFIRE on the Camp Creek fire line.

Newsom’s order ignores science, wastes taxpayer money, and creates a deadly false sense of security. Homeowners will spend time and money complying with “Zone 0” while the real threat—untreated wildlands loaded with brush and grass—continues to fuel monster fires. Meanwhile, a proven, cost-effective, humane alternative exists: strategically relocating and managing wild horse herds to maintain large-scale fuel reductions in remote, fire-prone areas, and, locating various other herbivores in appropriate areas.

The Natural Wildfire Abatement and Forest Protection Plan isn’t a concept—it’s an empirically tested reality that saves human lives, protects wild horses from roundups, preserves ecosystems, and slashes the billions spent on reactive suppression and endless holding corrals.

Gavin Newsom isn’t protecting Californians. He’s showboating. And Californians will pay the price—again—in lives, homes, forests, and tax dollars.

See the documented evidence for yourself: 

(Video above is available here -> https://www.ambest.com/video/video.aspx?s=1&rc=wildhorses323)

It’s time to stop the ego-driven mandates and start scaling solutions that actually work.