Brenda Kyle, 53, has lived in the foothills of California’s San Gabriel Mountains all her life. She is a program manager at Nature for All, a community-based organization focused on protecting public lands and natural resources, and a volunteer at Eaton Canyon who conducts nature walks by moonlight in both English and Spanish. Kyle, an Indigenous Mexican of Tarahumara and Tepehuán ancestry, said the expansion of San Gabriel Mountains National Monument — which became official on May 2 — matters because it will give thousands of people of color like her greater access to green space.
A Center for American Progress analysis found that expanding the existing monument by about 110,000 acres, to about 346,000 acres, would make it accessible to about 90% more people than it currently is. (The actual expansion added slightly less than this, 105,919 acres.) A larger monument means that about 757,000 more Angelenos — including nearly 464,000 nonwhite residents — will live within 5 miles of it. Driving times will be reduced from over an hour to about 30 minutes for nonwhite, low-income, communities that lack easy access to green space. That’s why many see this expansion as a milestone for environmental justice, in line with the Biden administration’s pledge to address climate change, conservation and inequitable access to the outdoors.
But others question the wisdom of expanding a monument that is already under-resourced. This year, San Gabriel was included on Fodor’s list of places to reconsider visiting. Fodor’s, which produces travel guides and online tourism information, noted that trash and graffiti litter the area and clog the San Gabriel River, which runs through the monument. When it was originally designated in 2014, the monument received $6.5 million in government funding along with $4 million in donations, but that has not been enough to manage the overwhelming number of visitors. In 2021, the latest year for which data is available, the Forest Service estimated that the Angeles National Forest, of which the monument is a part, received 4.59 million visits — more than the Grand Canyon or Yosemite.
Acknowledging these issues, the Biden administration also announced a suite of additional investments for the expanded monument on May 2. These include more field staff to support visitor engagement and conservation efforts, a “Transit to Trails” shuttle for visitors from the underserved LA basin, rehabilitated barracks to provide housing for Angeles National Forest staff, funding to reduce trash and other pollution on the San Gabriel River, and various programs to improve restoration and stewardship of the monument in collaboration with local communities. Partners in these efforts include municipalities, various state departments, nonprofits and philanthropic organizations.
Claire Robinson, managing director of Amigos de los Rios, a nonprofit focused on building green infrastructure in the San Gabriel Valley, sees what she calls “a mosaic approach to management” as one of the greatest opportunities presented by the expansion. She cited the Santa Monica Mountains as an example of a national recreation area run by the Department of the Interior in collaboration with state parks, municipalities and counties. Such partnerships are also common in the greater New York area, where a place like Central Park is cared for by a conservancy or a consortium of local residents along with the private sector and the local parks agency.
Belén Bernal, executive director of Nature for All, part of the broader “Nature for All” coalition that has been lobbying for the expansion, also said it could attract more local companies and nonprofits to sponsor cleanups and “leave no trace” programs for visitors.
Still, some continue to wonder if the increased funding and partnerships are enough to address all the issues the monument faces. “The idea of stewardship is to be in a relationship with a place,” Kyle said. She believes this relationship should be established first and foremost at the city park level in LA. “If there’s no city park, going out into the wilderness, you know, people wild out,” she said. “You kind of forget that you still have responsibilities.” Without the idea of stewardship already in mind, visitors may not appreciate the full value of the existing monument or its expansion, which benefit both human health and local biodiversity, as well as the economy in the foothills, including hotels and local stores.
“The idea of stewardship is to be in a relationship with a place. If there’s no city park, going out into the wilderness, you know, people wild out.”
Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and founding director of the university’s California Center for Sustainable Communities, said that LA County needs to provide more public open space close to where people live. That way, city dwellers need not drive to the mountains in such high numbers in order to enjoy nature. Another way of limiting visitation, she said, might lie in initiating the kind of permitting strategy used at other popular parks, such as Yosemite, which caps guest numbers per day. (The May 2 announcement hinted at this, stating that, “Working in partnership with State, county, and local agencies, the Angeles National Forest will better manage visitor use on peak days. The intent is to manage access to align with resource protection, current visitor capacity limitations, and public safety needs.”)
Robinson also noted that wildfires pose another ongoing challenge. The 2020 Bobcat Fire, for example, burned more than 115,000 acres within the monument. The Angeles National Forest has funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act, regular appropriations, and grants for Wildfire Crisis Strategy projects, including postfire restoration, water quality improvement, and hazardous fuels treatment. But with climate change increasing both the frequency and intensity of droughts and extreme temperatures, wildfire-related challenges are only poised to grow.
Perhaps the greatest opportunity for better stewardship comes with the expanded role of Indigenous communities in its management. The Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, which represents 26 tribal nations in the Los Angeles area, expressed disappointment over the exclusion of their voice and knowledge during the initial designation of the monument in 2014. But under the current expansion, tribal nations and Indigenous communities will provide input on the area’s management plan, and they will also serve on a Federal Advisory Committee that guides the monument’s management.
“We are deeply moved that the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument is expanding,” said Rudy Ortega, president of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, in a statement. “Over 80,000 acres of the expansion are located within our Fernandeño territory, with 30% of our 900-plus tribal citizens descending from villages that predate the existence of California. We thank the Biden administration for making this longstanding vision a reality.”
The current designation includes heritage sites that tribes want to limit public access to. Moving forward, they also hope to have a greater say in wildlife and vegetation caretaking, specifically in replacing invasive species with native plants that have not been able to thrive in their natural habitat for over a century.
Pincetl believes the importance of the lands to Indigenous people only heightens the need for better stewardship by all visitors and caretakers. “These spaces have historic cultural value and meaning for tribal people, and we’re asking them to share,” she said. “How do we graciously acknowledge their generosity in sharing this land with us by taking good care of it ourselves?”
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