Ten months after the Eaton Canyon and Pacific Palisades fires, the landscape still carries the memory of loss — charred hillsides, disrupted neighborhoods, and families still navigating insurance claims and reconstruction delays. The scars are visible, but the deeper wounds are often invisible: anxiety, displacement, and the slow erosion of trust between residents, utilities, and institutions.
At Praxis Energy, we see recovery not as a return to what was, but as a re-grounding — a deliberate eBort to business and home hardening our physical and social foundations. Hard-truing began as a practical idea: strengthening structures and landscapes to withstand fire, flood, and wind. But it is also a mindset — a way of aligning human systems with natural forces and with each other. Just as a builder levels a foundation before setting walls, communities must level their emotional and institutional ground before rebuilding trust and resilience.
When Southern California Edison recently announced its Wildfire Relief Fund, it created an opening to do both: repair what was lost and reimagine what resilience means. Praxis’s work with utilities like SCE is to help translate relief into relationship — by helping teams listen deeply to the lived experiences of residents and by co-designing collaborative energy solutions that embody empathy as much as engineering.
Our Praxis App supports this work by oBering guided reflection questions that draw out the human story beneath the data:
• What do you most want your community to learn from this fire?
• What would make you feel that rebuilding is fair, safe, and lasting?
• Where do you see opportunity for renewal — not just replacement?
These conversations become the soil in which post-traumatic growth can take root. They remind residents that resilience is not just surviving the next fire — it’s shaping a future where the grid is buried, the homes are hardened, and the social fabric is strong enough to withstand whatever comes.
The business and home hardening systems — undergrounding transmission lines, protecting property values, and integrating equitable insurance and compensation models — mirrors the hard-truing of our human systems — learning to show up with compassion, humility, an ear toward understanding, and shared purpose.
When we build both together, we transform trauma into trust.
That is the Praxis approach to resilience: not just keeping the lights on, but keeping hope alive.