It has been a year since the January 2025 wildfires. From a distance, Los Angeles’ recovery can look steady and unified. Up close, it feels more uneven, shaped by loss, resilience, uncertainty, and choice. 

I experienced the fires through my sister and her family, who evacuated their Palisades home expecting to return, only to watch embers encroach via their Ring camera feed.  Their house was lost in the small hours of the morning. In the weeks that followed, there was little I could do to fix their situation but I helped where I could—and I listened. 

At the same time, I was beginning my role as Executive Director of the Theodore Payne Foundation. I––and the rest of the staff––found ourselves listening in much the same way: to neighbors, gardeners, organizers, and residents trying to make sense of what recovery means in a fire prone city. 

Over the past several weeks, I spoke with three Angelenos whose experiences of the fires were very different. Their stories don’t offer conclusions—but together, they reveal how this moment sounds when we slow down and pay attention.  

Staying and Organizing: Connor 

Connor lives in a small pocket of the Hollywood Hills, wedged between the Hollywood Bowl and Runyon Canyon, close enough to wildland that coyotes and deer regularly pass through the neighborhood’s backyards. 

When the fires came, Connor and his husband evacuated with their dogs, fully expecting to return to a damaged or destroyed home. Their house survived. What shifted instead was Connor’s awareness of how much neighborhood-level action shapes everyday resilience. 

Before the fires, Connor was involved in local civic life through a volunteer-run group focused on neighborhood beautification along Outpost Drive. The group helped maintain landscaped traffic islands designed to slow cars and make the street safer and more pleasant to walk – work that was practical, incremental, and collaborative. 

After the fires, Connor was asked to serve on his Neighborhood Council. In that role, he began participating in large town halls, listening to presentations from city agencies, and helping neighbors navigate questions about insurance and fire-related regulations. Issues that once felt abstract quickly became personal. 

Walking the neighborhood now, Connor sees recovery as steady involvement and follow-through. He notices how few native plants are present, despite the surrounding open space, and hopes to see future efforts that include more natives for their practical benefits: lower maintenance, slope stabilization, creation of fire defenses, and support for pollinators. In his own garden, he has had success with Bruce Dickinson buckwheat, chosen simply because it is well suited to the hills. 

Rather than creating something new, Connor encourages neighbors to plug into organizations that already exist—Neighborhood Councils, Friends of Runyon Canyon, and park partners—and to move from concern to action by showing up and participating in work that is already underway. 

Surviving Without Being Spared: Adam 

Adam and his husband moved to Altadena in 2020, settling into a neighborhood known for its warmth and neighborliness. They live at the edge of the foothills, where wilderness meets backyards. When the fire broke out, they were told of the need to evacuate by a neighbor. They left early, but, like many, they expected to return quickly after the fire had been extinguished, as had happened in the past. 

By morning, much of Altadena was burning. News coverage was chaotic. Information was scarce. They received conflicting information about the status of their house, but eventually learned it had survived, part of a small cluster of homes surrounded by loss. 

Survival, however, did not mean safety. 

Their backyard studio had burned to the ground, and their garden was destroyed. Smoke had infiltrated the house, leaving behind heavy metals and toxic residues that would take months to remediate.  What followed was nearly a year of displacement, seven temporary homes, and a bewildering maze of insurance disputes, testing protocols, and contractors of uneven quality. 

Adam described it as the hardest year of his life, not because the house burned, but because it didn’t burn all the way. Partial survival meant prolonged uncertainty, ongoing exposure to risk, and a recovery process with no clear standards and little institutional guidance. 

Yet even here, he noticed resilience. Certain native plants—coyote brush in particular—returned with astonishing speed. The community of Altadena rallied in ways that surprised even longtime residents. Neighbors whose homes were completely lost organized nonprofits, lobbied legislators, and dreamed up projects to bring beauty back to empty lots, including ambitious plans to reseed the neighborhood with wildflowers. 

Adam knows there is much left to rebuild, but he also recognizes that recovery isn’t only about structures. It’s about what you choose to bring back—and what you decide to leave behind. 

Losing Everything—and Choosing Meaning: Deirdre 

Deirdre and her husband lived in Malibu for nearly four decades. Over that time, they evacuated eight times. The eighth time, their house burned. 

Given the persistence of the threat, Deirdre had prepared herself psychologically long before the fire. Every fall, she asked herself a blunt question: Am I willing to lose everything I own to live here? Each year, she answered yes—not casually, but consciously. For her and her husband, the land, the life, and the relationships it fostered were worth the risk. They were keenly aware that the space they occupied was inspirational, artistic, and singular. 

When the house burned, grief came, of course, but it was not the grief of surprise. It was often expressed through friends and family who mourned the loss of the place itself and what it had meant to them—for the creativity, refuge, and transformation they had experienced within its walls and in its gardens. 

The question of rebuilding, Deirdre admitted, initially felt narrow—almost beside the point—in the face of global suffering. What changed her mind was a reframing. Instead of rebuilding a generic house, she and her husband committed to rebuilding something special for their friends and appropriate to the land.  She calls it a hemple: part home, part temple. A structure intended to honor the land, invite healing, and continue the cycle of giving that had defined her life there. 

After the fires, Deirdre came to Theodore Payne—not for answers she would immediately use, but for orientation. Classes, community, and shared language helped her imagine what might someday grow again. Even before the soil was ready, the act of learning became a form of repair.  And in the seasons since the fire, her property has been covered in California and coastal poppies—a quiet, shifting field of gold that marks the beginning of recovery. 

What These Stories Teach Us 

These conversations were different in tone, geography, and outcome, yet several threads ran quietly through all of them: 

• Preparedness is as much psychological as it is physical. 

• Community often deepens not in the crisis itself, but in its aftermath. 

• Land remembers and responds, whether we are paying attention or not. 

• Recovery is not a return to what was, but a choice about what comes next. 

To my ear, none of these stories offer a single answer to how Los Angeles should live with fire. Instead, they point toward a posture: humility, attention, and long-term care. 

Listening as a Practice 

At Theodore Payne Foundation, our work has always been about more than plants. It’s about helping people understand where they live and what it means to be in a healing relationship with that place over time.  

These conversations reminded me that listening itself is a form of stewardship. Before we design policies, plant landscapes, or rebuild neighborhoods, we have to make room for the lived experiences that shape how people understand risk, beauty, and belonging. 

Los Angeles is still healing. If there is a way forward, it will be built not only with better systems and smarter science, but with attention to the human stories that continue to unfold, quietly and unevenly, pointing us toward wiser ways to live within our landscapes and our communities.