Burn to Bloom is a personal talk, hosted by the Buena Vista Branch Library in Burbank, featuring regenerative designers Shawn Maestretti and Leigh Adams.

Drawing from their experience preparing for and living through a firestorm, they explore a new vision of wildfire resilience rooted in our relationship with the land and whole-system design.

But this isn’t a talk about loss. It’s a talk about relationship with land, with fire, with community, and with the future we are all co-creating.

Blending real-time fire response with decades of ecological wisdom, this talk explores the flaws in our current fire safety narratives and offers a living, practical alternative: whole-system design. Through vivid storytelling, critical unlearning, and grounded strategies for tending the land, you'll be invited to re-imagine the home not as a structure to defend, but as an ecosystem to relate to.

This is for homeowners, designers, policymakers, builders, land stewards, and anyone ready to shift from fear to connection—especially those living on the edge of wildness.
Because the most resilient design isn’t just in the land.

It’s in how we re-imagine who we can be!