California is losing its forests to wildfire faster than it can grow them back — and neither the state nor the federal government has the seeds, staff or money to close the gap, according to a CalMatters review of the state's draft reforestation strategy.
Why it matters: Over the past quarter century, high-severity fires have burned 2.3 million acres of California forestland so completely that the trees are unlikely to return on their own, the working draft found.
A windowless warehouse on the outskirts of Davis shelters pieces of California’s forests.
Icy air swirls and fogs around 42,000 pounds of seeds — the past and the future of these trees, frozen in cardboard boxes. It smells like the woods on a snowy day.
“This is like the mothership of forestry in California right here,” said Stewart McMorrow, staff chief for wildfire resilience at Cal Fire, standing outside the heavy metal door of the state seed bank at Cal Fire’s Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis.
Private landowners especially rely on these seeds — some now more than a half-century old — to reforest property destroyed by wildfire.
At the pace California is burning, it’s nowhere near enough.
Climate change and more than a century of overzealous fire suppression are now fueling wildfires so severe that they’re wiping out the very forests that need fire to thrive — leaving iconic landscapes at risk of turning into brush and scrub, permanently.
Over the past quarter century, high-severity wildfires have burned 2.3 million acres of California’s forestland so completely that the trees are unlikely to return on their own — according to a working draft of the state’s new reforestation strategy obtained by CalMatters.
California is counting on these forests to store carbon, protect water supplies, clean the air, and shelter wildlife. By 2071, one recent analysis reports, half of California’s forest area could be gone.
“Reforestation,” said Malcolm North, a scientist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, “is pretty damn important.”
Yet to replant even a quarter of the privately owned forestlands in the state, California would need to increase seed bank capacity by roughly 300%, according to Cal Fire — which means more seeds, more people, more space. And that wouldn’t solve the problem on federal land, which accounts for more than half the forests in the state and most of the lands that need replanting.
CalMatters reviewed a working draft of California’s reforestation strategy; the USDA California Climate Hub is developing it with state and federal agencies, the conservation non-profit American Forests, and the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force.
But both Sacramento and Washington have spent decades letting the money and staff needed to grow back California’s forests wither.
“We need to focus on reforestation as an emergency, as a state,” McMorrow said. “We are slowly losing our forestland, and we’re not catching up.”
Timber harvests once paid for much of the U.S. Forest Service’s efforts to replant trees.
But as new laws tightened endangered species and other public lands protections, logging in national forests declined. Severe wildfires also increased.
The combination devoured the Forest Service’s resources, and people: from 1998 to 2015, non-fire staff tasked with managing National Forest System lands decreased by 39%, according to a 2015 report.
With ever-increasing demands, a 2022 Forest Service document warned, there is a “critical need” to increase the number of staff “substantially dedicated” to reforestation.
Congress and the Biden Administration unstoppered additional money for a reforestation trust fund in 2021, a move championed by the conservation non-profit American Forests. Just a few years later, the Forest Service reported that it had replanted roughly 285,000 acres nationwide — the highest yearly total in more than a quarter century.
But the need still dwarfs action, and federally-directed work is lengthy and intense. Crews must clear dead and dying trees quickly to reduce the danger to people and the chance of reburns, a Forest Service spokesperson said. Finding seeds and growing seedlings can take a year or two, even before planting.
The federal government’s capacity to replant forests eroded away over time, and it will take time to rebuild it, said Solomon Dobrowski, a professor of landscape ecology at the University of Montana. Dobrowski’s research found that the reforestation gap spans millions of acres across the West and is likely to double or even triple in the coming decades.
“You don’t turn that ship around on a dime,” Dobrowski said.
Instead, the Trump administration cut the Forest Service significantly. The agency lost 20% of its staff last year.
“It just makes me cry at night … it’s basically a child swinging a wrecking ball,” said Hugh Safford, a forest and fire ecologist with the UC Davis Environmental Science and Policy Department and a former regional ecologist for the Forest Service. “Morale is down, capacity already was really minimal.”
And California keeps burning.
The loss of forests “is one of the least-known impacts of climate change and megafires,” said wildfire task force director Patrick Wright.
The draft strategy for California obtained by CalMatters comes with no dedicated funding. The goal, Wright said, is to put every agency and organization trying to replant California’s scorched forests on the same page.
The strategy calls for streamlining planning, prioritizing projects tackling critical human safety concerns and ecosystem issues like water supply, and increasing the supply of seeds, seedlings and workers.
It urges land managers to avoid adding more fuel to the fires, and recommends replanting at lower densities and with more natural spacing instead of the classic, closely-packed “pines in lines” grid. Scientists have linked high-density plantings to high-severity fires.
The most startling pieces, though, come from the draft strategy’s look at the current landscape. California would need to scale up reforestation by 35% annually to meet the state’s existing post-fire replanting goals, which start at 280,000 acres per year in 2030. The increase would take “significant funds,” the report said, because reforestation can cost up to $6,400 an acre.
But the current pace is lagging. Statewide, land managers have replanted roughly 254,000 acres of severely burned forest since 2020 — or around 16% of the area stripped of forest cover by high severity fires between 2020 and 2024 alone. The number is just 8% on federal lands, outside of wilderness areas.
Safford said the numbers are actually even more dire: Factoring in both wilderness areas and excluding forests likely to regrow on their own, his recent study reports that the U.S. Forest Service replanted just 1.2% of the agency’s California lands that wildfire denuded between 2016 and 2023.
It wasn’t always like this, said Safford. The Forest Service’s replanting efforts mostly kept pace with wildfires until around 2006.
“And then,” Safford said, “it just falls to shit.”
For all the vitriol between Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Donald Trump over the care and raking of California’s forests, state and federal money — and people — often intersect on the landscape.
On California’s end, Cal Fire funds and conducts research, and provides grants for forest restoration on private, state and even federal land. Cal Fire also runs the reforestation center in Davis, where flats of glossy young conifers are gently misted with water in the summer heat.
McMorrow — tall and crisp in his navy Cal Fire uniform — can’t help but dig his hands into the dirt to pull out weeds tangling with the seedlings.
One of the most challenging chokepoints, McMorrow said, is finding the right seeds to grow these seedlings — getting climbers to the right spot, at the right time, to pluck ripe cones from the treetops.
“Believe me, I do it,” said McMorrow, who created a tree-climbing program at Cal Fire. “We are trying to meet the demand that’s in front of us, and it’s crushing.”
Yet the money for Cal Fire’s efforts — cobbled together from the state budget, federal grants and other one-time funds — represents a relatively small and ever-changing fraction of Cal Fire’s multibillion-dollar budget.
The nursery in Davis shut down in the early 2000s, a casualty of across-the-board state budget cuts. Though the seed bank freezer stayed on, the reforestation center didn’t fully reopen until after the Legislature in 2017 tapped a 2012 fee on wood products to bring it back online.
Scaling up and upgrading the facility now carries an estimated $26.2 million price tag; this year’s state budget included about $1.2 million to fund preliminary planning.
Meanwhile, other funding is on the line. California’s climate regulators — chaired by Newsom appointee Lauren Sanchez — voted in May to overhaul a key climate program in ways that could substantially reduce, or even eliminate, up to $200 million a year for wildfire resilience. Grants for reforestation are among the many competing priorities for this funding.
While the Proposition 4 climate bond includes $1.5 billion for wildfire and forest resilience, state leaders are spending down the bond quickly.
“The truth of the matter is that California is probably, infrastructurally speaking, in a better place than any other western state,” Safford said.
“What that tells you is how piss-poor the capacity is in general in the Western U.S., because California is nowhere near prepared for the scale of this.”
On the banks of Jenkinson Lake in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Stella Krone and Elyse Wohlenberg wrestled with a slingshot that towered over the two of them. It took their combined strength to slot the bungee into position, then Wohlenberg stepped back.
“All clear?” Krone asked, kneeling in a clearing and pointing the slingshot at a Douglas fir 50 yards away. “Firing!”
Krone, Wohlenberg, and dozens of other hard-hatted people were there, crunching over conifer needles, for Cone Camp — a training program led by American Forests with support from Cal Fire and the Forest Service.
The campers — some forestry professionals, some interested laypeople — peeled off with oversized slingshots and souped-up potato guns to learn how to knock cones loose from tree branches. That’s how they check the cones for ripeness and viability, before sending someone up the tree to collect them for a seed bank.
The problem was, there were hardly any. Last year’s dry cones rattled to the forest floor as Krone and another camper jiggled the rope they’d shot into the canopy.
“So far, not a great cone year,” said Leana Weissberg, American Forests’ California director.
In the clearing, the instructor asked whether the group was ready to try again.
“Let’s go,” Krone said. “We’re cone hunters for a reason.”
Topline:
It's Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. For many Jews around the world, a highlight of the holiday will be hearing the shofar: an animal's horn blown like a trumpet.
What is a shofar: It can be the small, curved horn of a ram or the dramatic spiral of an African antelope. The sound it creates is unmistakable.
Read on to find out how this instrument became a holiday's spiritual soundtrack.
It can be the small, curved horn of a ram or the dramatic spiral of an African antelope. The sound it creates is unmistakable.
Creating that sound is not difficult, but it does take some practice, said Rabbi Alicia Jo Rabins, a musician based in Portland, Oregon.
You take a deep breath and purse your lips, like you are playing a brass instrument.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, begins at sunset Friday. Across the world, Jews will spend the two-day holiday in prayer, reflection and celebration. And for many, a highlight will be hearing the shofar: an animal's horn blown like a trumpet.
How did this primal instrument become a holiday's spiritual soundtrack?
" The most basic answer is that it makes noise, right? It calls people to attention," said Daniel Picus, an associate professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham who researches religious practices and rituals. "All of the instances in which a shofar is used in the Hebrew Bible, that is what it's doing."
Shofar blasts marked the revelation of the Torah at Mt. Sinai and the start of the Jubilee year, Picus said. Priests blew shofars when they circled the walls of Jericho to bring down the walls. The shofar marks moments of heightened experience and emotion — and Rosh Hashanah.
"In the Hebrew Bible, Rosh Hashanah is the day of trumpeting and the day of remembrance," Picus said. "The association of the shofar with Rosh Hashanah is right there in the Biblical text."
Centuries later, the Mishnah, the earliest rabbinic codification of law, drilled down into greater detail in the tractate Rosh Hashanah, laying out exactly how a shofar should be prepared (hollowed out), repaired (it depends), blown (a complex series of blasts at several times during the service, thanks to debate over linguistic interpretation), and whether or not it can be blown when Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat (no, although some modern synagogues have changed course).
And within the Talmud and for centuries thereafter, people have debated the meaning of the shofar.
Rabbi Micha'el Rosenberg, who teaches at the Hadar Institute, a center for Jewish learning based in New York City, pointed to several sources that compare the sound of the shofar to the cry of a mother in pain — the mother of the slain biblical military commander Sisera, and the cries of a woman in labor.
Rosenberg said you can hear that in the sound — especially the broken staccato blasts, known as "teruah."
"You can really imagine someone so caught up that they can't get the full sound out even, that they're gasping with their cries," he said.
Another interpretation comes from Maimonides, the medieval Jewish rabbi and scholar known as the Rambam, who wrote "The Laws of Repentance." He describes the blast of the shofar as a sort of spiritual wake-up call to become your best self.
"In Jewish law, we have this expression of daled amos, my four cubits: I focus on the 6 feet around me, as it were," he said. "It's easy to do that — and there's value in doing that sometimes. But the shofar, per the Rambam, wakes us up and says, 'No, there's more beyond what I can immediately see around me.'"
Rosenberg also pointed to Hasidic theories that the blowing of the shofar reenacts the breathing of life into the world. But he said one of the most powerful things about the shofar is that it doesn't say anything at all. "It transcends my words, it transcends my rational thoughts, and it really is just a feeling that I can hope to hold onto," he said.
Rabins, the Portland rabbi and musician, said the shofar can call across time to speak to those wordless places inside us. "It really brings you into the moment, and you also feel connected to your ancestors, who have been hearing this sound and making this sound for thousands of years," she said.
It's a sound, Rabin said, that can wake you up to all the joy and sadness of life, whether it be a birthday horn or a mother's cry. And it makes you pay attention — both to this moment, and to the year to come.
This story was created through a partnership between NPR and Religion News Service.
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
The Pitt, Hacks, Widow's Bay and Pluribus are leading the Emmy nominations pack this year.
So: Here's who we'll have our fingers crossed for during the ceremony on Monday night.
How to watch the show: The 2026 Emmys will air live on NBC and stream on Peacock on Monday, Sept. 14, 2026, beginning at 5 p.m. PT.
TV critics care a lot about the people who bring us the shows we love, so of course we each have folks we're pulling for this Emmy season. The Pitt, Hacks, Widow's Bay and Pluribus are leading the Emmy nominations pack this year. Here's who we'll have our fingers crossed for during the ceremony on Monday night.
The 2026 Emmys will air live on NBC and stream on Peacock on Monday, Sept. 14, 2026, beginning at 5 p.m. PT.
HBO Max hit The Pitt likely wins here. But Apple TV's Pluribus triumphs as a revolutionary sci-fi story; a virus, created with instructions sent from the stars, unites humanity in a giant hive mind, creating paradise or the largest cult in history. — Eric Deggans
It's easy to overlook the massive feat star Noah Wyle achieved on The Pitt's second season; pushing a beloved character to the brink of unlikability. Wyle plays struggling Dr. "Robby" Rabinovich as a good guy in serious crisis, finding new depths. — Eric Deggans
At least half of this show is just watching Rhea Seehorn's Carol all by herself, parsing out the rules of a new post-apocalyptic world while mourning her wife. Yet it's always compelling, because Seehorn is a talent who should already have an Emmy! — Aisha Harris
Hoping Emmy voters look past the four actresses nominated from The Pitt to honor a performer who brought empathy and depth to a thankless role: Karolina Wydra as Zosia, the voice of the global hive mind, talking to Rhea Seehorn's Carol in Pluribus. — Eric Deggans
Apple TV's Margo's Got Money Troubles is a comedy nominee that doesn't seem like one. But the story of a young woman leaning into problematic choices to build a life with her baby and quirky family was the year's most surprising, energizing show. — Eric Deggans
This nomination was a surprise after Marvel cancelled its creative, quirky superhero series, Wonder Man. But star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is spellbinding as a superpowered guy who just wants to be a successful actor, blending comedy, pathos and drama. — Eric Deggans
The category's stacked, but Lisa Kudrow's Valerie Cherish threads many needles beautifully: self-absorbed yet caring, oft-humiliated yet resilient, wacky but grounded when necessary. As a character in Season 3 says to her: "To me, you're it." Indeed. — Aisha Harris
It's all there in Episode 4, the one in which Patricia's desperate play to improve her social status — a cocktail party — goes awry. Kate O'Flynn knows this character, what drives her and what makes her so cringe (to us). It's utterly mesmerizing. — Aisha Harris
Nick Offerman excels playing macho guys who are more sensitive than anyone expects. But he scales new heights as Jinx, an ex-wrestler/once-estranged dad, struggling with addiction while trying to support his daughter in Margo's Got Money Troubles. — Eric Deggans
A new season comes around every 10 years (like the census!) to provide us a clear-eyed accounting (like the census!). This show was right about reality TV and streaming services; we ignore this season's dire, hilarious warnings about AI at our peril. — Glen Weldon
It's tough to explain how a show about the mysterious death of a schlubby guy stuck in a love triangle became the year's most creatively quirky limited series. Somehow, star David Harbour turns this tale of middle-aged desperation into poignant, dark comedy. — Eric Deggans
I'm happy to report that two of my picks already took home their Emmys in a ceremony last weekend formerly known as the Creative Arts Emmys. So congratulations to Betty Gilpin, who won outstanding guest actress in a comedy for Widow's Bay, and to The Muppet Show for outstanding writing for a variety special. (A third pick — Connor Storrie's game, goofball turn as SNL host — didn't end up winning outstanding guest actor in a comedy, but seeing as that award went to the late Rob Reiner for The Bear, I'm not complaining.) — Glen Weldon
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
Tiffany Galaviz, from Glendale, is in the finals of México Canta, a singing competition in Mexico with contestants from both sides of the border.
Why it matters: The program has a social mission: to strengthen the bonds between those with Mexican heritage in the U.S. and Mexico.
The backstory: The contest was created last year by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Culture Secretary to counter the proliferation of songs that glorify drug dealing and violence.
What's next: The Sept. 13 México Canta finals will take place three days before Mexican Independence. The three winners will receive recording contracts.
Read on… about Galaviz and her road to the finals.
A Spanish-language TV singing competition from Mexico is doing something that mega-popular shows like The Voice are not. México Canta brings contestants from the U.S. and Mexico together to share the stage — and cultural ties.
“I am very connected to my Mexican side and those roots, [but] I've never really gotten to perform for such a big Mexican audience,” said Tiffany Galaviz, who performed on the show last month. She was born and raised in L.A. County and lives in Glendale.
The semifinals were held in L.A.’s Orpheum Theater on Aug. 23, and the winners were chosen by hundreds of thousands of people who cast votes online. Galaviz made it through, which means she’ll be one of seven finalists who will perform in the competition on Sunday, Sept. 13 at Mexico City’s prestigious Auditorio Nacional.
Three will be named winners and will receive recording contracts.
“It's a huge, huge venue [that’s] very important to the Mexican culture,” Galaviz said. “More than anything, I just feel really proud, especially making my family proud. Most of my family is from Sinaloa, and I spent a lot of summers there growing up."
The U.S. semi-finalists included performers from Arizona, Illinois and New York, while finalists from Mexico came from Morelos and Mexico City, among other places.
Galaviz is 24 and first started learning to play violin and sing in mariachi bands when she was 8. She plays violin and sings in mariachis across Southern California now and makes a living from it.
“I signed up for México Canta because I feel like I have everything that I need except the connections, the resources, the producers, the studios,” she said.
The Voice and its Spanish-language counterpart La Voz create a platform for celebrity and the potential for stardom. But that’s less so for México Canta. The competition was created by Mexico’s Secretary of Culture to bring together people of Mexican heritage from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border around songwriting that’s an alternative to music that glorifies violence.
“We’ve strengthened fraternal ties between people in Mexico and the U.S.,” said Claudia Curiel de Icaza, Mexico’s culture secretary, when she presented the seven U.S. semi-finalists at a morning press conference on July 23. The seven semi-finalists from Mexico were presented a week later.
“Youth are front and center in the transformation of culture. [The contest has shown] that music has no borders, and it is furthering fellowship between Mexicans and Mexican Americans,” Curiel said.
Galaviz said that’s another important reason she signed up for México Canta.
She picked the corrido musical genre for the song she performed at the Orpheum. She’s had a love-hate relationship with corridos, she said, because many contemporary songs in the genre glorify drug dealing and violence.
“I felt like I could make a positive impact, not just me but the rest of the contestants [too] by doing songs that are a little bit more positive in nature in their lyrics,” she said.
The song is about a breakup and begins with a description of a photo torn in two. It’s about a woman’s heartbreak, she said, “ but then it kind of shifts to an empowerment, you know, of being able to be by yourself as a woman.”
México Canta's finale is tonight, Sept. 12, at 6 p.m. PDT
You can watch it here.
Galaviz began to get teary after finishing the song and talking to the presenter on stage.
“[I'm] proud of being able to represent Mexico and my roots. … It means a lot to have my family here, who’ve always supported me,” she said.
Days after making it past the semifinals, Galaviz had not picked the song she’d sing for the Sept. 13 finals. The performance carries weight for all contestants because it’ll be three days before Mexican Independence Day. Held in Mexico’s capital, the finals will take place in front of thousands of people, with an audience on TV, radio and online on both sides of the border.
Topline:
The new digital K-Town Archive is preserving nearly 500 oral histories from Koreatown and nearby communities. The stories cover everything from the pandemic to elder care, from LGBTQIA life to traditional healing.
Why it matters: These are first-person accounts from one of L.A.’s most diverse immigrant communities. The archive makes them free and publicly accessible.
Why now: The K-Town Archive launched Wednesday as the first sister site of UCLA’s Archive of Healing. The first batch of interviews, focused on COVID-19, is already online.
The backstory: The project grew out of Koreatown Storytelling Program, which the Koreatown Youth and Community Center started in 2020. High schoolers are trained to interview community members and elders.
What's next: More interviews will be added in stages. Organizers also plan to expand the collection of photos and other archival materials.
Lauren Kim works alongside her father, Hanjik, at his traditional medicine clinic on the border of Koreatown and MacArthur Park. But it took an oral history interview for her to hear parts of his story for the first time.
Filmed speaking in Korean, he animatedly described how he came to traditional medicine.
“It’s just so precious to have that captured,” Kim said.
Now that interview, along with hundreds of others about life in and around Koreatown, is being gathered into the new K-Town Archive in a partnership with UCLA that also includes photographs and ephemera.
The archive grew out of Koreatown Youth and Community Center’s Koreatown Storytelling Program, which launched in 2020 with plans to have young people interview elders. Then COVID-19 hit. Participants pivoted to delivering necessities for older residents such as masks and disinfectant.
They also started documenting what people were going through – in English, Korean, Spanish and Bangla. A current offshoot project involves interviewing people who live or work along the stretch of Third Street in Little Bangladesh.
“People hear Koreatown, they assume that it means that this is a program or an archive for Korean Americans,” said Katherine Yungmee Kim, director of the storytelling program. “But we are multiethnic. We want to represent the entire community that lives here.”
In the last several years, the teen interviewers have turned their attention to subjects including the garment industry, LGBTQIA life and food culture. As the collection of interviews grew, Kim began thinking about where they would ultimately live.
“I was always worried that we have all of these interviews and they’re just sitting on a hard drive,” she said.
A path toward a more permanent home began to emerge in 2024, when the storytelling program focused on traditional healing.
While researching Zapotec plant medicine, one high schooler came across UCLA’s Archive of Healing, a vast digital collection of knowledge about healing practices from cultures around the world.
Its materials stretch back more than 200 years and include published sources, folkloric fieldnotes and oral histories.
Kim asked UCLA’s David Shorter, a professor of World Arts and Cultures who’s overseen the Archive of Healing since 2012, to serve as an adviser to the project.
At first, the two had an idea to add Koreatown’s traditional healing interviews to the UCLA collection.
Then the idea got bigger.
Kim said she began seeing storytelling itself as a form of healing, especially as people described immigration, war, displacement and other difficult experiences.
“All of these stories are healing,” she said. “Why are we just narrowly looking at traditional healing modalities?”
The resulting K-Town Archive became the Archive of Healing’s first community-specific sister site. The two databases are connected, meaning material from Koreatown can also surface through searches of the larger Archive of Healing.
“What the K-Town Archive brings is real people’s stories in long form, so it's not just little snippets anymore,” Shorter said. “You actually get to hear a person, know that these are real humans, and talking from a contemporary moment.”
To share your story, go to K-Town Archive's website.
Kim said that it was important to populate the archives with as many voices as possible so visitors encounter more than “one historical perspective.”
The effort to create places for those conversations won’t be confined to the internet.
KYCC is also setting up an art and wellness Center at Pico Boulevard and Western Avenue in a building that used to house a Dollar Tree.
Kim said the center will host Koreatown Storytelling Program events as well as arts and healing workshops. Public programming is expected to begin in January.
Lauren Kim’s family continues to stay connected to the storytelling project. She agreed to sit for an oral history of her own, talking about her childhood and connection to Koreatown.
That sparked new conversations within her family and sent them digging through old photographs, including images of her as a child posing in front of her father’s wooden apothecary cabinets.
For Kim, she was honored to contribute to the archive as “an example of what it means to work intergenerationally,” Kim said. “That felt special.”
