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Stumpy stands alone.
It’s hard to miss, rising scraggily up from the soil on the southeast side of the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. It picturesquely frames the Washington Monument with an outstretched limb, which also happens to be its only limb.
Stumpy is a Yoshino Cherry tree, a Prunus x yedoensis, one of the thousands that line the water of the Tidal Basin, and it’s been having a bit of a rough time lately. The nearby seawall, built 80-odd years ago, has slowly been settling into the mud and the muck, dropping about three feet in the time since it was built. High tide is also a foot higher now, and twice a day Stumpy’s roots are inundated with brackish water that’s saltier than the nearby Potomac River — a state of being that is no good for a tree. The trunk looks mostly hollow, like someone took a few large scoops out of it. All but one of the branches have rotted away and been trimmed by its caretakers at the National Park Service, leaving Stumpy with a windblown toupee of sticks, leaves, and buds.
Naturally, people are obsessed.
“This is my ninth cherry blossom season and I would be hard pressed to find another tree that’s gotten either a name or that sort of fame,” said Mike Litterst, Chief of Communications for the National Parks Service and Stumpy’s de facto spokesman. “People are literally lining up to take photos with it this year, and somebody’s even got Stumpy t-shirts now.”
Stumpy’s story began as a Reddit post in 2020, when a user said the tree was “as dead as my love life.” Stumpy is, of course, still kicking, and the Redditor met a girl, but for reasons unknown to everyone including the National Parks Service, the tree has been more popular this year than ever before. Perhaps D.C. was primed for Stumpy’s resurgence; back in December, residents of the Columbia Heights neighborhood became similarly obsessed with a diminutive Christmas tree they’d nicknamed Tiny Timber.
We like to tell stories about trees, and lately I’ve noticed them cropping up more often. Perhaps this is just frequency bias, the detritus of spending the early pandemic in a house with a maple tree in the backyard, where for the first time in my life I found myself paying attention to arboreal rhythms as the seasons changed. But we all, to some extent, became amateur naturalists in lockdown, and the trees (and the birds) are what remain.
Stumpy and Tiny Timber both belong to the Charlie Brown class of trees, the ones that, because of their smallness and sadness and apparent untree-ness, evoke a kind of empathy that allows us to give human emotions to them. Litterst thinks this is why Stumpy is so popular this year — it’s an underdog, and we like underdog stories.
Then there are the stories of magic and majesty, like The Giving Tree and the Kalaloch Tree of Life in Washington State and The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. These are the trees that make us feel small; we gape at their stoic enormity, the generosity with which they share their shade. I think these are the same reasons why tree planting is such a popular, if misguided, climate solution: We are so drawn to the idea of trees being older and wiser than us, we take such comfort in their leaves and branches, that we can’t help but hope they will fix our mistakes for us.
They won’t, of course, and perhaps we ought to reexamine our expectations of trees. Their effects on our planet are matters of circumstance rather than agency; trees, after all, may have accidentally killed off half the planet when they evolved roots a few hundred million years ago. They didn’t know what they were doing then, and they don’t now — an idea I find somewhat freeing, for it lets a tree simply be a tree.
Take Stumpy. Peak bloom was over by the time I made the pilgrimage to see Stumpy for myself: Its flowers and the crowds were both gone, although one couple briefly stopped on their walk to quickly chuckle at Stumpy before continuing.
There’s a sort of solemn quietude to Stumpy without the crowds. There were other, more conventionally beautiful cherry trees nearby, a few of them still hanging onto their pink and white flowers. But Stumpy, standing by the water on its own, with its one lone branch pointing towards the Washington Monument, bucked the trend, as if someone had dropped in a bonsai among the rest.
It reminded me a bit of another out-of-place plant I’d seen, back in 2019, when a tomato sprouted in a wooden piling in the East River, just off Brooklyn Bridge Park. That, too, was the kind of thing that made people stop and point and laugh, but with the kind of laugh one emits when they crawl to the edge of a cliff and look out at the sea yawning below. An errant seed or a stubborn tree: These are conduits for wonder, whispers of the ecosystems we inhabit.
They’re also reminders of our roles as stewards. Despite how it looks, the fact that Stumpy flowered means it’s in pretty good shape overall, Litterst told me, and the parts of the trunk that deliver nutrients to and from the remaining branch are still working as they should. Plans for a new, improved seawall — one that’s embedded in the bedrock unlike its predecessor, so it doesn’t sink — are in the works, with construction planned to begin next year. The National Parks Service doesn’t know how long Stumpy has left, but if it manages to hold out until the seawall is finished it’ll eventually be spared the rising tides and could live to see some of its brethren take their places alongside it.
I’m sure they’ll be pretty, in the way cherry blossoms always are. But I’ll still be going back for Stumpy.
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From grid monitoring to controlled burn robots.
Los Angeles has a long way to go before city and state officials can start looking for lessons to take away from these fires. Likely topics of discussion will include building resilient structures, vegetation management, and community preparedness. But there are also some more out of the box solutions coming from a growing number of technology companies — “firetech” startups, if you will — that are putting new, high-tech spins on some of these familiar solutions.
BurnBot, for instance, makes a remotely operated machine that executes efficient controlled burns to help mitigate wildfire risk. “I don't think you can ever replace the talent and the expertise and the know-how of the front line [firefighters],” Anukool Lakhina, CEO of BurnBot, told me this week. “But what you can do is make their job safer.”
Last August I wrote about Convective Capital, the venture capital firm exclusively focused on funding wildfire solutions, and one of its portfolio companies, Rhizome, which makes an AI-powered wildfire risk mitigation platform for utilities. Here are five more notable companies in Convective’s portfolio that will hopefully help bring wildfire prevention and mitigation into the future.
On January 8, as flames began to encircle Los Angeles, Gridware announced its $26.4 million Series A funding round. The company uses sensors placed on power poles to provide continuous monitoring of grid infrastructure and can alert grid operators to hazards and faults in realtime. This allows for rapid repairs and immediate response to wildfire threats such as equipment failure, downed lines, or any contact with vegetation. And because Gridware’s devices operate on solar power, they can remain online even during a power outage.
“Our country depends on the electric grid, yet until now, utilities have been operating it without reasonable monitoring capabilities,” said Bryan Schreier, a partner at Sequoia Capital, which led Gridware’s Series A, in a statement about the funding round. Utility-caused wildfires tend to be particularly damaging, as they often occur near populated areas. And though California utilities spend over $6 million annually on risk mitigation, most of that goes towards older technologies, something Gridware hopes to change.
Gridware implemented a successful pilot with PG&E last year, and has since expanded to monitoring over 1,000 miles of power lines for 18 different customers, with devices installed on about 10,000 poles.
As mentioned above, BurnBot deploys robots that can chop up vegetation and conduct controlled burns in a wide variety of geographies, from densely treed forests to shrubbery near urban environments. Traditionally, controlled burns are only safe to do in very particular weather conditions, but because BurnBot captures the smoke from its operations and immediately extinguishes the fires after vegetation is removed, Lakhina told me the robots can operate in all weather.
“Today, a lot of the predominant way that fuel treatment is done, regrettably, is extremely archaic. It's humans with matches setting things on fire, or humans with shovels and spades that go and dig the vegetation.” Some estimates calculate that the U.S. has about 200 million acres of land that need to be treated for wildfire risk, and “you're not going to get there relying only on humans or only on grazing,” Lakhina said. He estimates that the company’s robots can treat 40 times the area of a typical hand crew.
BurnBot has piloted its tech with CalFire, PG&E, and the U.S. Forest Service, and raised a $20 million Series A funding round last year.
Fire Aside makes software products that help fire departments and other safety agencies to digitize their inspections processes, thereby ensuring that homes and businesses are complying with fire safety requirements and helping to scale state and community wildfire prevention programs.
“It enhances the reach of municipal fire departments so that they can, at scale, communicate with their neighborhoods and their communities, and automate and digitize these inspections,” Jay Ribakove, principal at Convective Capital, told me. That’s certainly a step up from the traditional method, which involves “a firefighter showing up and leaving you with some handwritten notes on what you can do better,” Ribakove said. Residents in communities that use Fire Aside are five times more likely to take actions to protect their property against wildfire, the company says.
Fire Aside raised a seed round of undisclosed size in 2023, led by Convective Capital.
Early fire detection is one of the most critical factors in keeping blazes under control. Pano is a software company that relies on artificial intelligence and computer vision to automatically detect when and where a wildfire is breaking out. The company mounts its cameras on telecommunications towers, poles, or other equipment, which, combined with other inputs like satellite data, field sensors, and emergency alerts, gives fire professionals and first responders a unified view of any developing situation.
“The sooner that we can detect fires, the faster we can respond,” Ribakove told me, citing research that indicates that if wildfire response times in California were just 15 minutes quicker, the frequency of large, out-of-control fires could be reduced by at least 3% and as much as 7%. Given that California has experienced, on average, $117 billion in total annual economic losses from wildfires from 2017 to 2021, tech like Pano’s could save it as much as $8.2 billion per year.
Pano raised a $20 million Series A round in 2022 and a $17 million growth round in 2023.
Overstory has another approach to minimizing the presence of fire fuels, providing utilities with a “global vegetation management platform” that applies artificial intelligence to satellite imagery, allowing the company to identify the location, size, health, and species of any tree in the world. With this data, Overstory can then help utilities identify particular areas where vegetation might pose a wildfire risk, such as by growing too close to a power line, and recommend specific actions. Overstory also hopes its tech will save utilities money, as vegetation management budgets have ballooned in recent years.
Overstory works with more than 40 utilities, including PG&E, along with others in Canada, Brazil, and Europe. At the time of its $14 million Series A round, in 2023, the company said that it monitored about 2 million acres and protected about $6 billion in utility assets.
The island is home to one of the richest rare earth deposits in the world.
A top aide to incoming President Donald Trump is claiming the president-elect wants the U.S. to acquire Greenland to acquire more rare minerals.
“This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources,” Trump’s soon-to-be national security advisor Michael Waltz told Fox News host Jesse Watters Thursday night, adding: “You can call it Monroe Doctrine 2.0, but it’s all part of the America First agenda.”
Greenland is rich in “rare earths,” a class of unique and uncommon hardrock resources used for advanced weaponry, electronics, energy and transportation technologies, including electric vehicles. It is home to the Kvanefjeld deposit, believed to be one of the richest rare earth deposits in the world. Kvanefjeld is also stuffed with uranium, crucial for anything and everything nuclear.
Experts in security policy have advocated for years for Western nations to band together to ensure that China, which controls the vast majority of the world’s rare earth minerals, does not obtain a foothold in Greenland. U.S. and Danish officials have reportedly urged the developer of the island’s Tanbreez deposit — rich in the rare earths-containing mineral eudialyte — not to sell its project to any company linked to China. Eudialyte also contains high amounts of neodymium, an exceedingly rare metal used in magnets coveted by the tech sector.
If the U.S. somehow took control of Greenland, it could possibly seize these resources from Denmark, a NATO ally, and the Greenlandic home-rule government. So too could it lead to Greenlanders losing control of their homeland. The country’s minerals have been a major source of domestic debate, as politicians critical of mining have won recent elections and regulators have since fought with mining companies over their plans.
Waltz didn’t go into that much detail on Fox. But he made it clear how the incoming administration sees the situation around control of the island.
“Denmark can be a great ally, but you can’t treat Greenland, which they have operational control over, as some kind of backwater,” Waltz told Waters. “The people of Greenland, all 56,000 of them, are excited about the prospect of making the Western Hemisphere great again.”
Exhausted firefighters are unlikely to catch a break just yet.
On Friday, Angelenos awoke to their first good news in three days: that the battle against the city’s unprecedented fires had finally turned in firefighters’ favor. Though the two biggest blazes — the Palisades and the Eaton — were still only single-digit contained, at 8% and 3%, respectively, it was the first sign of progress since the fires ignited and roared out of control on Tuesday.
The days ahead, though, won’t be easy. Though the Santa Ana winds dipped enough on Thursday and Friday for firefighters to establish a foothold, two upcoming wind events have forecasters and emergency management officials worried. The first will be shorter-lived, beginning on Saturday afternoon and continuing through Sunday, but “it does look significant enough where we might need additional red flag warnings,” Ryan Kittel, an L.A.-based meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. NOAA is anticipating gusts of between 35 and 50 miles per hour during that event, and at those speeds, aerial firefighting support will likely be grounded again.
A second wind event will follow that one, which is tracking to hit Monday night into Tuesday. “We’re still figuring out the exact details as far as the strength, but we’re very confident that it won’t be nearly as strong as the winds we saw on Tuesday this week,” Kittel said. “But it could be number two in the ranks of wind events that we’ve had over the last seven days.”
The associated concerns are twofold. The first is that the return of strong wind gusts will fan the blazes that firefighters are only now getting a handle on, potentially pushing the fires into new areas. But there’s another concern, too: that new fires will start.
“What we’re trying to communicate is that the environment is favorable for a fire to get really big, really fast, if one starts. We just don’t know if or where,” Kittel said.
Though the L.A. fires flared up as big as they have because of the Santa Anas, the wind’s cessation creates new risks. The Santa Anas “blow the fires towards the ocean,” Dan Reese, a veteran firefighter and the founder and president of the International Wildfire Consulting Group, told me. But when the Santa Anas subside and L.A.’s normal west-to-east winds return, they’ll push the fires back in the other direction and potentially into neighborhoods that haven’t burned yet.
“Right now, [firefighters’] challenge is what we call closing the back door, making sure that what was once the heel of the fire, or the back side of the fire, does not get up and all of a sudden become a running head the other direction,” Reese explained.
The weather is one problem, and it’s a big one. But there are other challenges, too. Firefighters are only human, and many are completely exhausted after working double shifts and doing the grueling work of defending people and structures for days on end.
There are also logistics-related challenges. Aerial firefighting is exceedingly complex and dangerous, and pilots are only allowed to fly a certain number of hours, which varies depending on whether operations are conducted during the day or at night. “Rotating those crews and keeping those crew hours balanced becomes critical, especially when you’ve got ongoing, continuous fires,” Reese pointed out.
There’s one more bit of bad news. Putting out the fires is only the first challenge. A second will come close on its heels: the mop-up.
“Maybe the fire went through a community but the houses were left standing,” Reese said. “Now all those structures and properties are at the mercy of mudslides and rain, because all of the holding capacity keeping the soil in place has now been burned off.” Soil can even become hydrophobic after exposure to intense heat, repelling water instead of absorbing it, making runoff even more severe.
But there is no rain in the forecast, and the fight against the L.A. County fires — while it’s taken a turn for the better — is far from over. Firefighters “have to deal with the disaster they’ve got right now,” Reese said. “And then they’ll deal with the secondary disasters when those occur.”