TREES AND SHRUBS were the topic of a hot debate this week as the Berkeley City Council adopted new fire code amendments. 

The adoptions included new state and local maps that designate Fire Hazard Severity Zones — areas that state and local fire officials determine to have moderate, high or very high risk of fire — and a new local wildfire mitigation ordinance called Effective Mitigations for Berkeley Ember Resilience or EMBER. 

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.