The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has extended its stay of a judge’s order to build housing on the VA’s West Los Angeles campus, setting an expedited April hearing for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ appeal.
The order issued Monday night ends U.S. District Judge David O. Carter’s fervently pursued goal to have as many as 200 units of the temporary housing opened by early next year.
The VA appealed in October Carter’s sweeping order that it build hundreds of temporary and permanent housing units on the campus, saying that it would cause “irreparable harm” by forcing the agency to divert funds — up to $1 billion for all the housing — from crucial services to veterans.
In the weeks since issuing his judgment, Carter incessantly pushed VA officials and the veteran plaintiffs’ housing experts to quickly produce modular units on the parking lot of UCLA’s Jackie Robinson stadium and other vacant parcels on the campus.
Following Carter’s repeated admonishments to “get it done,” the plaintiffs’ experts, Steve Soboroff and Randy Johnson, the developers of Playa Vista, had teamed with the global architecture firm Gensler to draw up plans they said could be realized by spring.
Under pressure from the judge, VA officials said they could pay for the modest cost of the temporary units and worked with Soboroff and Johnson to identify sites and provide maps of utilities.
But meanwhile, the government appealed. The appeals court’s Nov. 8 emergency stay stalled the purchase of the modular units and blocked the developers’ access to the VA property.
Carter’s orders stem from a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of veterans that alleged the VA had failed in its duty to provide housing on the campus for disabled and homeless veterans and had illegally leased portions of the 388-acre campus to UCLA, Brentwood School and several other outside interests.
After a four-week trial in August, Carter ordered the VA to produce 1,800 new supportive housing units on the campus and 750 temporary housing units. His ruling also invalidated leases of VA property, including to UCLA and Brentwood School, and ordered the VA to increase its outreach staff. He subsequently backed off that number of temporary units, while issuing an emergency order to immediately build up to 200, including 32 on the parking lot of UCLA’s Jackie Robinson baseball stadium.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Rosenbaum of the pro bono firm Public Counsel said he appreciated the accelerated schedule but not the government’s position.
“The government’s action in seeking a stay, claiming a lack of resources, makes a lie of their stated commitment to end veteran homelessness as rapidly as possible,” Rosenbaum said.
The state’s first electric-vehicle-charging roadway is expected to debut by the 2028 Olympics after a multimillion-dollar grant to UCLA — the site of Los Angeles’s Olympic Village.
Nearly $20 million will go to electrify the university’s BruinBus fleet and install underground charging for shuttles and buses along a route that stretches for less than a mile in Westwood. The grant will also fund a new transit hub between the UCLA bus depot and a planned UCLA/Westwood Metro station that would connect to the future D Line light rail extension.
The buses would pick up charge while driving throughout the day or when parked at a stationary wireless charger. Several minutes spent at a stationary charger would offer a greater amount of charge than driving over it, said Clinton Bench, director of UCLA Fleet and Transit. In both cases, a vehicle would get at least the same amount of charge as it would from a wired charger.
“A wireless inductive option is a game changer … When a vehicle is driving over [a charger], the vehicle can collect charge while it’s moving,” Bench said, comparing the technology to a mobile-phone charger. “If you’re stationary at a stop and you had a five to seven minute layover … that’s probably giving you a pretty good head start on your next route and reducing the amount of charge you need in the evening.”
The operation would save time by cutting out the need for a driver to hook up a vehicle to a charging port and would also offer flexibility for charging times. That would be especially beneficial during moments when the grid is heavily impacted, such as on a hot summer day.
“It’s even more of an opportunity to really balance that load on the grid over the course of the day,” Bench said.
The plan is to install inductive charging coils underground along Charles E. Young Drive between the Westwood Plaza intersection and Murphy Hall. Stationary chargers would also be added at passenger drop-off and pickup locations and transit depots where UCLA buses typically stop.
The grant came from California State Transportation Agency’s Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program and was received in collaboration with clean transportation nonprofit CALSTART and wireless charging provider Electreon, whose technology was used to develop the nation’s first EV-charging roadway in Detroit last year.
“The world needs innovative, scalable solutions with transformative impact to advance electrification, and this project demonstrates California’s commitment to a more sustainable, efficient and accessible future,” Electreon’s vice president of business development Stefan Tongur said.
Only buses equipped with the technology will be able to utilize the roadway’s charging power. Bench hopes that the pilot program could lead to bigger possibilities in the future, such as the ability for people to charge while sitting in traffic.
“I’d love to get there someday,” he said.
For now, Bench said that the the goal is to get “at least some of the wireless charging functionality implemented and able to be used before the Olympics start.” The university will host athletes in its residence halls, as it did in 1984.
The announcement comes as state leaders have maintained their commitment to clean air initiatives amid President-elect Trump’s campaign promise to cut electric vehicle tax credits. Gov. Newsom recently said that the state is prepared to offer state tax rebates if the federal credit is eliminated.
The round batteries, small as buttons and shiny as coins, are prized for the energy they pack at their size. In households, they have become commonplace, powering remote controls, hearing aids, toys, electric tea lights, wristwatches, greeting cards that play music and other familiar items.
But doctors warn that such “button batteries” can maim and kill. Pop one into your mouth and swallow — as thousands of children do annually — and they can quickly cause devastating injuries.
A growing number of medical associations is pushing for battery manufacturers to head off the threat by making a new product: A button or “coin cell” battery that will not lead to catastrophic injuries when swallowed.
“The only real solution to the battery problem is to make the battery itself safer,” said Dr. Toby Litovitz, founder of the National Capital Poison Center.
When button batteries are lodged in the body, their electrical current breaks down water, driving up alkalinity to dangerous levels akin to bleach. Bodily tissues can begin to liquefy. Physicians say serious injury can happen within two hours, sometimes before a parent has even realized that a battery was swallowed.
As button batteries have proliferated in common items, the rate of pediatric emergency visits for battery-related injuries has more than doubled in recent decades, according to a study published in the journal Pediatrics. Some children have ended up relying on tubes to breathe or suffered massive hemorrhaging, doctors said.
“Unfortunately, these batteries cause such severe injuries so rapidly,” some of which are impossible for surgeons to repair, said Dr. Kris Jatana, surgical director of clinical outcomes at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio.
Jatana became alarmed by the risks after caring for a 2-year-old child who ended up needing a tracheostomy to breathe. “It was a moment that motivated me to try to see what we could do to prevent these injuries from happening in the first place.”
Button battery safety
Here are recommendations from Nationwide Children’s Hospital:
Some battery manufacturers have tried adding bitter coating or saliva-activated dye to tip off parents.
Reese’s Law, a federal statute named for a child who died of serious injuries after swallowing a button battery, now requires compartments for such batteries on consumer products to be harder to open and mandates child-resistant packaging for button batteries.
But advocates say more needs to be done. For instance, Litovitz said that harder-to-open packaging would not address the many injuries caused when children swallow batteries left sitting out or discarded. Among those pushing to develop safer batteries is biotech entrepreneur Bryan Laulicht.
“What makes them really great for devices is also what makes them so dangerous when you swallow them,” Laulicht said of button batteries. “They’re powerful enough to split water … which spikes the pH up to Drano levels in a matter of minutes.”
Doctors began raising alarms about the threat decades ago as more children began to suffer grave injuries. One study found that between 1985 and 2009, the percentage of button battery ingestions that led to serious or deadly injuries had risen more than sixfold.
Reese Hamsmith suffered grave injuries after swallowing a button battery and died less than two months later. Her mother, Trista Hamsmith, vowed to do everything she could to prevent other children from suffering the same fate.
(Trista Hamsmith)
Litovitz and other researchers pointed to the rising popularity of the 20-millimeter diameter lithium coin cell battery: Their analysis found that 12.6% of children under the age of 6 who ingested button batteries around that size suffered serious complications or death.
They’re “just the right size to get stuck in the esophagus of a small child, especially a child younger than four years,” Litovitz said in an email. “Further, these lithium coin cells have twice the voltage of other button cells.”
Doctors may not immediately recognize and diagnose the problem if no one realized a battery was swallowed, because the symptoms can initially look like those of other childhood ailments.
The problem has worsened over time: From 2010 through 2019, an average of more than 7,000 children and teens went to emergency rooms annually for injuries related to batteries, according to the Pediatrics study. The rate of such emergency visits had doubled compared with the period of 1990 to 2009.
Button batteries were implicated in the bulk of cases where the battery type was known. Researchers have tallied more than 70 deaths from ingesting button batteries over time, but Litovitz said the true number could be far higher because that figure only includes cases documented in medical research or the media or reported to the National Button Battery Ingestion Hotline, which stopped operating six years ago.
At Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, doctors see roughly one child a month who has been injured by a button battery, said Helen Arbogast, injury prevention program manager in its division of general pediatric surgery. Children are attracted to shiny things and pick up on the attention that adults pay to electronics, she said.
“Remote controls are really fascinating to them — the buttons, the colors — and part of their natural motor skill development is to learn how to open and close things,” Arbogast said.
She stressed that time is critical. “If a parent suspects their child having swallowed a button battery, it’s important to get them to a hospital right away.”
In Texas, Reese Hamsmith awoke one morning in 2020 congested and wheezing. Her mother, Trista Hamsmith, took the toddler to the pediatrician, who suspected croup. It wasn’t until the next day, after a Halloween night when Reese had remained ill, that her mother realized a button battery was missing from their remote control.
Reese Hamsmith suffered grave injuries after swallowing a button battery and died less than two months later.
(Trista Hamsmith)
Reese underwent emergency surgery, but the damage continued even after the battery had been removed, burning a hole through her esophagus and trachea, her mother said. In the weeks that followed, she underwent more surgeries, sedation and intubation. Less than two months after her injury, Reese died.
She was a year and a half old. After she died, “I held her again, and I promised to her that I would do everything I could that no kid would die this way again,” Trista Hamsmith said.
The Lubbock mother started a nonprofit, Reese’s Purpose, that successfully pushed for federal legislation that imposed new requirements for battery compartments, childproof packaging and warning labels. Hamsmith was glad to see those rules go into effect, but rued that such protections had not been put in place earlier.
“It shouldn’t have to take what we went through” to spur action, she said. “It definitely should not have to take someone like me screaming at the world.”
The group is also funding research into a medical device that could detect a swallowed battery without subjecting a child to radiation, which Hamsmith wants to see used whenever a child shows up with possible symptoms. And it worked with Energizer on safety features including a telltale dye that turns blue with saliva.
“The missing ingredient here … has been the ability to alert the caregiver that something has happened,” said Jeffrey Roth, Energizer’s global category leader for batteries and lights. “That’s really what ‘color alert’ does — it gives the caregiver notification that a child might have put something in their mouth that they shouldn’t have.”
Litovitz cautioned, however, that because not all batteries have the blue dye, doctors and parents should not assume that no battery was swallowed if they don’t see that color.
Roth said that in recent years, Energizer has spent tens of millions of dollars on research and other efforts surrounding button battery safety. “We believe that one day we will solve this,” he said. “But it certainly requires a breakthrough innovation.”
Laulicht, cofounder and chief executive of Landsdowne Labs, said his company has been testing an alternative battery with a different kind of casing, intended to shut down inside the body. Tests that involve sandwiching the battery between two pieces of ham do not show the kind of damage inflicted by commercially available button batteries, he said. (Ham is used as a readily available substitute for human gastrointestinal tissue, Laulicht explained.)
One of their challenges has been getting the same level of battery performance with those alterations, Laulicht said. But as a father of young children, “I would rather a battery that only lasted a year on the shelf … but didn’t kill my kid when they swallowed it.”
Fire authorities have issued evacuation warnings as an 85-acre wildfire burns near Canyon Crest Drive in Riverside County.
The Canyon Crest Fire was first reported Saturday evening and its cause remains under investigation, according to the California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection.
Evacuation warnings specified the area north of the 60 Freeway, east of County Village Road, south of the Riverside/San Bernardino County line, and west of Sierra Ave.
The fire was zero percent contained as of 9 p.m., Cal Fire reported. A care and reception center had been set up at Jurupa Valley High School located at 10551 Bellegrave Ave. in Jurupa Valley.
Mammoth Mountain has experienced its snowiest November since 2010, with a huge storm dumping nearly 50 inches on the Eastern Sierra resort earlier this week, the National Weather Service said Thursday.
The system that passed through the area Nov. 23-26 brought nearly 50 inches of snow. In all, the mountain has received 62 inches this month, the resort said. That’s one inch more than November 2022, which kicked off a record-setting winter season at the resort.
“This is definitely significant — the first big storm of the season,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Gigi Giralte.
Thanksgiving weekend will be a dry one on the mountain: Giralte said no snow is forecast through Sunday. That means the 88 inches of snow Mammoth received in November 2010 will remain the record for the month during this century.
In the Southland, Thursday’s mild weather will remain through the weekend, with highs in the low- to mid-70s. On Sunday, it could hit about 80 degrees, said National Weather Service meteorologist Ryan Kittell.
A man found dead after his Laurel Canyon house was badly damaged in a fire Wednesday afternoon was a member of the prominent Rothschild banking family, neighbors said.
The body discovered at the Lookout Mountain Avenue property was that of William Rothschild, three people told The Times on Thursday. A magazine seen at the property was addressed to “WM DE ROTHSCHILD.”
The Rothschilds, a sprawling Jewish family originally from Frankfurt, Germany, long dominated European banking, with its English and French branches playing major roles in finance and politics, most notably during the 18th and 19th centuries. At one point, the Rothschilds were widely considered to have amassed the largest private fortune on Earth.
Today, the family is spread across the globe and maintains interests in financial services, energy, real estate and other sectors, while several of its prominent members have become high society and philanthropic fixtures in London, Paris and beyond. The Rothschild fortune, now divided among many heirs, is said to be worth billions of dollars.
The burned-out residence, described by a real estate listing service as an 825-square-foot, two-bedroom property worth about $1 million, seemingly had little of the opulence befitting a descendant of the world’s most powerful bankers. The Hollywood Hills home was bedraggled and sooty a day after the blaze, which, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department, was put out by 45 firefighters in a little more than 30 minutes around 5 p.m.
Video of the conflagration, shared by a neighbor who requested anonymity over privacy concerns, showed flames in several places along the front of the brick and stucco structure, which is perched above street level and accessed by a long set of tiled stairs. As the blaze unfolded, the resident said, she saw “huge flames” and heard “glass shattering” — and watched as another neighbor held a hose and monitored the fire’s progress. The woman, who didn’t know Rothschild, had quickly called 911.
Another neighbor, Dana Gladstone, said he was at home during the incident but didn’t see the fire. Still, he said he heard a woman say, “Oh my God, that’s awful!”
“She was probably given the news that he passed,” said Gladstone, who has long lived on the street.
Voter registration records show that William A. De Rothschild, listed as 87, has resided at the burned house. Another database shows a 77-year-old man with a similar name owning the property. The deceased man will be formally identified and his cause of death determined by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner.
The office did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment. A woman whose name appears in the records for the Lookout Mountain house also did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.
The scent of smoke hung in the air Thursday as passersby stopped to take in the scene and neighbors tried to make sense of the incident. Gladstone said Rothschild was in his late 70s and devoted to his dog, an Afghan hound. He was a friendly man who described himself as a graduate of Yale University, Gladstone said.
“The guy was attached to his dog,” said Gladstone. “I knew him as Will.”
A portion of the home, located near Wonderland Avenue Elementary School and built in 1937, was smoldering Thursday morning, prompting a neighbor to call the authorities. Within minutes, firefighters arrived on the scene and extinguished what one of them said was a decorative piece of wood.
Rothschild, neighbors said, maintained a vintage car collection, storing some at his house and others up the street at another property that was ornamented with busts of great thinkers including Raphael and Michelangelo — and several security cameras. Two people said his holdings included a red Porsche that had once been owned by Michael Jordan.
The basketball superstar has owned several Porsche 911s over the years, including a red one that sold at auction last year for $500,000, according to reports.
The Fire Department said no other injuries were reported. But one neighbor said that Rothschild’s dog hadn’t been seen since the incident.
Times researcher James Kim contributed to this report.
Law enforcement officials seized nearly $3 million in psilocybin mushrooms from a Lake Elsinore home this week and arrested one person as part of an investigation into an alleged “large-scale” mushroom growing operation, according to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.
Jesse Arroyo, a 43-year-old Lake Elsinore resident, was arrested Tuesday on two felony drug related offenses and two felony weapons violations, according to Riverside officials and online jail records.
The sheriff’s department said in a news release that Lake Elsinore law enforcement officials started their investigation following a report of a suspicious package delivered to a business in August. The package, which contained psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana products, was traced to Arroyo, officials said.
After serving a search warrant at Arroyo’s home, officials seized 445 pounds of vacuum-sealed mushrooms, 2,805 bags of mushrooms in various stages of growth, and several weapons including semiautomatic rifles and semiautomatic handguns that lacked serial numbers, according to officials.
Officials said the raid targeted a “large-scale” psilocybin operation.
“The property contained separate structures used for the cultivation, processing, and storage of large amounts of psilocybin mushrooms,” according to the news release.
Authorities also seized a semiautomatic handgun suppressor and two ballistic vests.
The arrest report says Arroyo was taken into custody on Lundell Road. While there is no Lundell Road on Google maps, a Lindell Road runs through sparsely populated hills north of the city.
This Thanksgiving, let’s be thankful for giving thanks. Research has shown that practicing gratitude is a good way to deal with stress or anxiety. The simple act of saying a sincere thank you, or just counting one’s blessings, can offer a cornucopia of mental and physical benefits.
So we’re fortunate to have a national holiday dedicated to showing appreciation, reminding us to seek the good in our fellow Americans, our shared experiences and ourselves. In that spirit, here are some of the people, events and more for which we’re grateful:
— Voters in the city and county of Los Angeles embraced major ethics and government reforms this fall. The city will get independent redistricting and a stronger Ethics Commission, while the county will gain a larger Board of Supervisors, an elected executive (a kind of county mayor) and, for the first time, its own ethics commission. These changes should give residents more representation, transparency and accountability.
— The federal government designated the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary off California’s Central Coast to protect the area’s biodiversity and cultural heritage. The more than 4,500-square-mile preserve will be the first in California to be managed in cooperation with Indigenous peoples.
— Californians passed Proposition 3, guaranteeing marriage rights for same-sex couples. The state’s voters had outlawed such marriages in 2008 by approving Proposition 8, and although that initiative was overturned by the courts, its language remained in the state Constitution. Now voters have amended the Constitution to recognize a fundamental right to marry and a greater measure of dignity for all.
— The Dodgers clinched their eighth World Series title with a thrilling, come-from-behind Game 5 victory over the New York Yankees. Freddie Freeman’s MVP performance throughout the series was something to behold, from his walk-off grand slam in the first game to the two-run single that helped the Dodgers win it all.
— The Los Angeles Unified School District is moving forward with a ban on student cellphone use during the school day. It won’t be easy to pry the phones out of teenagers’ hands, but it’s the right thing to do for their academic success and well-being.
— Disneyland will replace the fume-spewing gasoline engines powering its popular Autopia attraction with clean, climate-friendly electric vehicles by 2026 — finally bringing the park’s Tomorrowland back to the future.
— Thanks to voters’ support for a sales tax increase under Measure A, Los Angeles County will get billions of dollars a year for intervention and prevention services and affordable housing to alleviate the region’s homelessness crisis.
— The country is increasingly embracing the idea that not everyone needs to go to college to have a meaningful, well-compensated career and a full life. New opportunities in training and employment are opening up, and it’s about time; Switzerland has been doing this for years.
— California voters approved Proposition 4, a $10-billion state bond measure to finance clean water, climate and conservation projects. Some of the money will be spent to protect against wildfires, reduce air pollution and deal with extreme heat events.
— College admissions could become fairer now that many schools are bringing back the requirement that applicants submit SAT or ACT scores. The standardized tests are imperfect, but they are closer to an objective, across-the-board measure than anything else available, especially in light of grade inflation.
— Angelenos overwhelming backed Measure HLA on the March ballot, requiring the city to add bike and bus lanes and pedestrian improvements. The strong support sent a clear message that voters want safer streets and climate-friendly transportation choices.
— DreamWorks released the funny and beautiful animated film “The Wild Robot,” which reminded us of the meaning of family and the freedom to love even under oppression.
— Wild creatures still manage to share our urban and suburban spaces with us: Deer pick their way through L.A.’s hillsides, coyotes howl at passing sirens, mockingbirds run through their repertoires like DJs making megamixes, and mountain lions slink out of canyons and into backyards before vanishing again into the dark.
The owner of the Inglewood Oil Field is suing the state of California in an attempt to invalidate a state law that will require the energy company to cease production and plug all of its wells — or pay costly fines.
In a lawsuit filed this week, Sentinel Peak, the sole owner and operator of the oil field, argues that Assembly Bill 2617 is an unconstitutional statute that will impose unreasonably high penalties on the company, forcing it to halt operations.
The law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September, requires all low-production wells in the Inglewood Oil Field to cease operations by March 2027 and all wells to be plugged by the end of 2030. Failure to meet those deadlines will result in a monthly $10,000 penalty for every well in violation.
The law would effectively oversee the end of fossil fuel extraction in the Inglewood Oil Field, where drilling has occurred for a century. The 1,000-acre field — located in Culver City, Los Angeles’ Baldwin Hills and unincorporated Ladera Heights — has approximately 820 unplugged wells, including 420 that are actively pumping oil. Roughly 80% of these operating wells are considered low-producing, meaning they yield less than 15 barrels of oil or 60,000 cubic feet of gas per day.
Attorneys for Sentinel Peak said the law “represents an illegal attempt to coerce an individual company to stop operation of its legal business,” according to court documents. They allege that mandatory fines in particular, violate federal and state laws that forbid excessive monetary penalties.
“The monetary penalties imposed by AB 2716 are grossly disproportional to the gravity of the offense that it is designed to punish,” the lawsuit reads. “The imposed penalties are fixed and mandatory with no apparent upper limit.They have no relationship to any actual harm incurred by neighboring uses.”
The California Department of Conservation’s Geological Energy Management Division, the state oil and gas regulator, declined to comment on the litigation. But Assemblyman Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), who authored the law, vowed to defend the legislation.
“Our community has stood strong for decades to close this dangerous low-producing oil field, and we will stand strong in court to protect those frontline communities who have long deserved the right to live a full and healthy life,” Bryan said. “The people of California spoke through their legislature that dangerous oil wells have no business right next to the community. It is the right and prerogative of the government to protect its people.”
The litigation is the latest sparring match over the landmark legislation. The original version of AB 2617 included $10,000-a-day fines for all low-producing oil wells statewide. However after negotiations with California’s oil lobby, the bill was narrowed to only the Inglewood Oil Field.
Sentinel Peak, a Denver-based energy company, said the law “intentionally singles out and discriminates against” their operation in the Inglewood Field.
“AB 2716 does not impose any requirements on other similarly situated oil production operations even if they also operate in proximity to residential areas,” the lawsuit reads. “The law applies to Petitioner as a ‘class of one.’”
Environmental organizations say the state is within its rights to enact regulations designed to protect public health. The law intends to prevent toxic fumes from oil production from drifting into neighboring communities.
Sentinel Peak had previously agreed to plug all its 38 wells in Culver City by 2030. But this ensures the larger portion of the oil field will be capped.
“The state has a right to set limits on wells that have big environmental impact and little economic benefits,” said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog. “There is a compelling state interest in closing these wells to protect the community.”
Elected officials highlighted the health risks when Newsom signed the measure into law at the Kenneth Hahn Soccer Field, where children play soccer a short distance from the oil field’s pumpjacks.
“They feel like they are being targeted but they are running the largest urban oil field in nation,” Court said. “They’re not getting much oil and the environmental health impacts are well-documented. We’re not taking away their land, we’re just saying you can’t operate within 450 feet of a soccer field because it’s dangerous.”
The Joshua tree is cherished for its distinctive silhouette and singular role as a linchpin of the Mojave Desert ecosystem. Yet the iconic succulent is losing suitable habitat at a brisk clip due to climate change, worsening wildfires and development, scientists and environmental advocates say.
A new plan by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to ensure the Joshua tree’s survival calls for limiting development in certain areas, including those where the plant may be able to thrive in a future anticipated to be warmer and drier, even as other portions of its range become uninhabitable.
The draft plan also calls on government agencies to develop strategies to mitigate and fight wildfires that threaten Joshua trees.
“It’s groundbreaking in that it’s really the most comprehensive attempt done by the state of California or really any entity I’m aware of in the United States on how to manage a species that’s clearly threatened by climate change,” said Brendan Cummings, conservation director of the Center for Biological Diversity.
The nonprofit petitioned to list the western Joshua tree as threatened under the state Endangered Species Act in 2019.
The plan does not spell out exactly how much land should be prioritized for protection, or where it is. But it lists criteria for ranking its conservation value, like having a high density of healthy Joshua trees and existing within an area where conditions are cooler and wetter than much of the rest of the range. It sets a goal of identifying priority conservation areas by December 2025, and protecting 70% of these areas by 2033.
The plan also recommends introducing Joshua tree populations with genetic variations that make them more resilient to climate change into these areas, said Drew Kaiser, senior environmental scientist at the Department of Fish and Wildlife. That strategy, called assisted gene flow, can be accomplished by planting seeds or seedlings, or by relocating mature trees, he said.
Much of the western Joshua tree’s range is federal land, so the state will have to work across jurisdictions to effectively protect it, Kaiser said. Multiple federal agencies have shown interest in establishing conservation agreements under which they’d adopt the management actions suggested in the plan, which also include minimizing harms from wildfire, grazing, offroading and pesticide use, he said.
Cummings said the effectiveness of the plan will depend on how it’s implemented.
To that end, a new coalition of nonprofits and government agencies has formed to foster collaboration among the many researchers, land managers and tribes working to conserve Joshua trees, with the help of $1.4 million in seed money from California’s Wildlife Conservation Board. The coalition will be instrumental in carrying out the plan’s goals, Kaiser said.
More than a third of the western species’ range in California is private land and includes some of the fastest-growing communities in the region, Kaiser said. Large-scale renewable energy projects have bulldozed thousands of Joshua trees at a time.
“The Joshua tree is widespread and abundant now, but you have all these pressures with development, with wildfire and then, on top of that, climate change,” Kaiser said. “That really is a death-by-a-thousand-cuts kind of situation.”
The conservation plan was mandated by a law that enacted last year after the California Fish and Game Commission deadlocked on whether to declare the species threatened. The Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act also requires developers to obtain permits and pay fees to kill, damage or remove Joshua trees. That money is earmarked for a conservation fund to purchase and conserve suitable habitat.
The law drew criticism from some high desert politicians, who feared it would drive up the cost of living in some of the last affordable regions in Southern California.
Both the conservation act and the potential listing under the state endangered species act were opposed by the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, whose representatives said either move would discourage economic investment in Mojave Desert communities.
In a letter sent last year to the state Senate and Assembly budget committees, Supervisor Dawn Rowe pointed out that there are tens of millions of western Joshua trees over a range of roughly 5,300 square miles and said the species “is abundant, widespread, and is in no danger of extinction.” State biologists had also recommended against designating the western Joshua tree as threatened, saying concerns about the effects of climate change were premature.
Assemblyman Tom Lackey (R-Palmdale) grew up in the desert town of Boron and appreciates Joshua trees as “part of the culture of desert existence,” he said.
But he thinks the conservation law goes too far in the fees it imposes on developers.
“For our communities to survive, we have to figure out a way to balance environmental stewardship with economic development,” he said, recalling a recent project in which a Lancaster high school sought to build new athletic facilities and learned the cost would increase by $200,000 due to the removal of Joshua trees on-site.
“It seems like the Joshua tree has become somewhat of an ATM for government officials,” he said.
Even though the Joshua tree is currently ubiquitous, climate models clearly show there won’t be much suitable habitat left by the end of the century, Kaiser said. The conservation plan states that just 23.4% of the western Joshua tree’s range in California falls into the category of predicted climate refugia — places where the species will be able to continue to survive as conditions get hotter and drier — and that’s under a modeling scenario in which carbon emissions remain lower than many expect.
Many of these cooler, higher-elevation areas that are expected to have the most hospitable climate are also susceptible to wildfires because they tend to have denser vegetation, he added. Two large wildfires have killed an estimated 1.8 million Joshua trees in and around the Mojave National Preserve since 2020.
Kelly Herbinson, executive director of the Mojave Desert Land Trust, said the idea for the Joshua tree coalition was inspired by the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition, which was similarly born out of concern for a tree that serves as the namesake of a national park and is under threat from climate change and habitat loss.
“We won’t be able to protect them once there’s few of them left — we have to be thinking about it from a proactive approach,” she said.
The conservation nonprofit convened the coalition, which includes representatives from the Native American Land Conservancy, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, National Park Service and other federal agencies.
California’s Wildlife Conservation Board provided $1.4 million in seed funding to build the coalition and launch a massive statewide monitoring effort led by scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey. Dozens of biologists will fan out across the western Joshua tree’s range and take measurements from each population to assess how the plants are doing, with the goal of returning every seven years to measure changes over time. They expect to start early next year and have results wrapped up in late 2026, Herbinson said.
The coalition partners plan to work on strategic land protection by identifying climate refugia and protecting those areas from development.
The Native American Land Conservancy will ensure the many Indigenous groups on whose ancestral land Joshua trees grow will have a seat at the table, said Elizabeth Paige, education and stewardship program manager of the nonprofit and a member of the Torres Martinez Band of Desert Cahuilla Indians.
“We hold thousands of years of hypotheses being tested and knowledge being bestowed from generation to generation — that’s how we learn history,” she said. “It’s a whole other level of holistic care of the environment.”
Joshua trees are two distinct species — eastern and western — that grow in California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Mexico. Across most of their range, they’re one of the few tall plants that provide shade and shelter.
Dozens of animals rely on them to survive. An estimated 25 bird species, including ladder-backed woodpeckers, loggerhead shrikes and western screech owls, nest in their trunks and branches. Desert night lizards sleep and forage beneath their fallen boughs. Yucca moth caterpillars, kangaroo rats and ground squirrels eat their seeds.
