It’s a beautiful summer day in Venice, California, and everyone seems to be out enjoying the beach—except for me.

I am profoundly autistic. As a result, I may jump up and down at strange moments or laugh uncontrollably. I cannot speak at all except for a few rote phrases, though I can write with the aid of a letter board or electronic device. And I am profoundly afraid of the dogs off their leashes that seem to be everywhere, especially in summertime.

It does not matter how small or large the dog is or whether it is well-behaved or not. Moreover, I’m not the only autistic person who panics around dogs. I am not sure why so many of us respond this way. I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that dogs are unpredictable and can bark loudly, sound being another sensitivity for me and most other autistics. When a dog approaches me, it inspires such anxiety that I cannot calm down for many hours afterward. My heart beats in my chest until I fear it is going to explode. My synapses flood with adrenaline, and I get unmanageably nervous. I cannot relax, no matter how hard I try.

This means that I often have to leave public spaces when dogs are present. It breaks my heart that I cannot participate in many summer outings with my family because of the ubiquitous presence of dogs. The constant presence of dogs outdoors is one more way in which my already circumscribed life as a person with autism has become even more circumscribed.

You might say my dilemma captures a clash between two ways of thinking about the public—not only the physical spaces we share but who is allowed access to them—one from pet lovers and another from the disabled. Both approaches are well-meaning: They seek to expand people’s horizons, and fiercely defend the rights of their subjects. Pets help us to see that our world is not just for human beings—we share community with all sorts of non-human beings as well. The disabled show that there are many different ways to be human, all of them valuable.

In an ideal world, all would be welcome. But at present, the situation is weighted toward pets and away from the disabled. The irony is that, according to prevailing laws, dogs are not allowed in many of the places that I end up having to leave.

Take, for example, the beach, which is my happy place. The rhythm of the waves helps me feel relaxed and grounded. The sound is so soothing that I do not have to wear the noise-canceling headphones that I keep glued to my ears almost everywhere else, including when I sleep. I can spend hours playing in the waves.

Los Angeles County law states that “A person shall not bring or maintain on any beach a dog or cat.” There are large signs on many Los Angeles beaches reminding people of this statute. Yet lots of people use the beach as a giant exercise area for their dogs. Moreover, they seldom leash their dogs, meaning their pets run at me, bark at me, sniff me, and climb all over me.

Another summer space I treasure is the farmers market. I love to stroll through the stands, checking out the produce. It smells enchanting and offers a vision of small, natural farms tended by real, friendly people—often there selling their own harvest, picked only hours before. One of my favorite summer joys is eating a fresh, ripe strawberry from these markets.

Here, too, California’s Health and Safety Code mandates that dogs be “kept at least 20 feet (6 meters) away from any mobile food facility, temporary food facility, or certified farmers market.” Again, prominent signs are posted at the entrance to every market. Despite this, dogs roam everywhere.

Another special place for me is the park near our apartment. It is one of the few open spaces close to where we live, and one of the few places I can ride my bike or go skateboarding when the weather is nice. Dogs have their own fenced run in the park where they are supposed to play off their leashes, yet owners insist on letting them run anywhere and everywhere unleashed. When dogs come up to me and want to play, their owners often smile as if it is cute. Instead, I have to leave—or risk a full-blown panic attack.

I am sure pet owners have no idea of the dilemma that they are placing me in. Since I cannot talk, I cannot even politely engage the violators. Instead, I am the one who ends up looking strange, having a giant meltdown in front of everyone. It feels unfair that the onus is on me to figure out how to cope, rather than on dog owners to show some basic consideration and follow the law. When my parents try to explain what is going on, they are typically met with hostility. To me, it is as though dog owners think that their pets have more rights than I do.

As Nicholas Kristof discussed in a recent piece in the New York Times, a majority of dog owners now consider their animals members of their family and spend an incredible amount of money on special food, clothing, and other products for them. It is beautiful that people love their pets so much. But it should not come at the cost of downplaying the needs of the disabled.

I recognize that there is a place in the discussion for service animals. Our neighbor is blind and uses a seeing-eye dog named Ellie. She is a very smart and well-trained animal, and she is always leashed when outside. Although Ellie still makes me nervous, I can manage—in part because she is so well-behaved, and in part because I recognize that her owner has a legitimate need to use her. As another disabled person, I realize that my neighbor needs her service dog to participate fully in public life.

Even though the ordinances outlawing dogs at the beach, in farmers markets, or in public parks were not passed with disabled people in mind, they have become de facto disability rights measures. They let disabled people like myself gain access to some of the few public spaces available. This is especially true in summer, when we all want to enjoy the outdoors.

I know that dog owners do not mean to exclude us, but through their carelessness, this is exactly what they are doing.

And I understand that I don’t have all the answers. One small step toward a solution might be to have lifeguards, farmers market managers, and park officials monitor peoples’ behavior more closely.

More meaningful change, however, will only come with a shift in perspective: recognizing the presence of autistic people and believing that we deserve a place in society. For much of our history, we have been locked away and institutionalized—out of sight and out of mind. We are only now emerging from the shadows to join the rest of you.

It would be a joy to step into public space without fear, knowing that my fellow beachgoers who have dogs have accommodated me so that I, too, can enjoy the idle dog days of summer.

The post I’m Autistic and Scared of Your Dog appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the end of 2023, four environmental groups sued the National Park Service and invoked the Wilderness Act to stop the replanting of trees following a catastrophic wildfire in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. Around the same time, the National Park Service announced that it aimed to invoke the Wilderness Act to limit the use of fixed anchors on Yosemite’s iconic big wall climbs.

How did a law created 60 years ago to protect nature in undeveloped areas come to do something else entirely—and, in the process, become counterproductive to its own goals? Today, the Wilderness Act of 1964 preserves nearly 175,000 square miles of public land in the United States, largely roadless expanses only accessible on foot or pack animal. We need to preserve such wild spaces more than ever: They are where threatened species and their habitats can best flourish with minimal human impacts.

But the California national parks where environmental stewards are applying to the Wilderness Act are neither remote nor roadless. Instead, the appeals to the Wilderness Act in those parks are part of a shift in approach to the law that may, in the end, run counter to its aims—and that needs to be rethought.

In addition to these cases, the Wilderness Act has increasingly been used to limit scientific research in protected areas. This includes research on habitats being ravaged by the effects of climate change and disease outbreaks that directly affect the biodiversity that the act seeks to protect. Many of the limited activities are essential to understanding the ecological and evolutionary processes needed to manage these lands in the future, but they are not permitted—or are permitted only in highly exceptional cases—under the Wilderness Act.

As conservation biologists, we work in remote natural laboratories around the globe. Dan Blumstein spends his summers studying marmots at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) near Crested Butte, Colorado. Crested Butte is a renowned recreation and nature tourism destination; RMBL is an internationally recognized research station that abuts the 283-square-mile Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness Area.

Over the past decade, the RMBL has started to host hydrological and atmospheric studies with staggering possibilities thanks to new, remote-sensing technology that can collect constant data. Small weather stations and sensors create increasingly precise models of the ground growth conditions and help us understand precipitation and snowmelt. Conducting these studies near Crested Butte, at the headwaters of the Colorado River, is essential to understanding the hydrological dynamics that ultimately provide water for 40 million people in the southwestern United States and northeastern Mexico.

However, Wilderness Act protections mean that scientists cannot establish weather stations, deploy semi-permanent sensors, establish remotely triggered cameras to monitor wildlife, permanently mark individual plants with small metal tags, or leave small, plastic rain gauges out on these lands. There is a process to request exceptions, but it is arduous—and the government almost always denies them.

Should there be research in Wilderness Areas, and if so, what degree of research-related impacts are acceptable? Should we, as a society, permit recreational use, but not science in these minimally impacted areas? The government must reevaluate how the Wilderness Act is deployed. We assert this not because we view natural areas as unimportant, but rather because we view them as essential resources that can help us manage biodiversity.

Human-driven change—an unplanned global experiment on the Earth—is happening everywhere in this Anthropocene era. We are living through a global experiment with the planet’s biodiversity. We urgently need wilderness areas with limited human impacts as safe harbors for the biodiversity we depend on. At the same time, it’s futile to pretend that those areas experience no human impacts at all.

Scientific research helps find solutions for restoring habitat and protecting biodiversity while managing the impacts of humans. This includes research on how human activities alter the traits and resilience of existing species. For instance, Thomas Smith researches how climate change will affect biodiversity in Central Africa as species have to move to new habitats or adapt to avoid extinction. He and others used genomics to identify where a given species would be best adapted to future, warmer climates. Then, they worked with conservation officials to select areas for new parks that would best protect species.

In the Anthropocene, we need the Wilderness Act more than ever before, in part because humans’ myriad assaults on the environment have increased the value of minimally impacted land. Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks welcome millions of annual visitors, and they serve an important—but entirely different—purpose than the areas the act protects, which are both repositories of nature and necessary places to study ecological processes.

When people—often with good intentions—invoke the act in ways that hamstring both effective federal management of public lands and scientific research, we’re left with the Wilderness Act being used as a bludgeon against effective natural resource management and a barrier to obtaining necessary scientific knowledge. As we face climate change’s unprecedented changes on our natural surroundings, we also have to rethink how we interpret the laws that protect those surroundings in novel and unexpected ways.

Aldo Leopold, the father of conservation biology, once said, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Leveraging the very best science and ecological knowledge gained from wild areas to become better stewards of our small planet is one way to help redress those wounds.

The post Is the Wilderness Act Still Protecting Nature? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Who owns your favorite park?

That might seem like a strange question. Many people assume that “we”—the public, the people—do. But from New York’s High Line to Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, parks in U.S. cities are increasingly managed, financed, and policed by private groups that have little accountability to the public. Just as many other services once seen as public goods—such as healthcare, schools, and water utilities—have increasingly become the property of corporations and wealthy financiers, public space, too, has been privatized.

Historians locate the origins of urban park privatization in 1970s New York City, when the city’s dire economic crisis spurred budget cutbacks of all kinds. These led to the establishment of the Central Park Conservancy and the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, both founded in 1980 with the goal of using private wealth to offset cuts to public funding for parks. The benefactors behind these organizations weren’t looking to aid all parks suffering from declining budgets—just those frequented by wealthy white people and tourists.

Two decades later, when the Friends of the High Line was founded in 1999 to rehabilitate a former railroad right-of-way on Manhattan’s West Side, having a private organization play a key role in the development of a park was neither novel nor controversial. It had become normalized, expected, and celebrated that new parks would involve the private sector.

When the High Line’s first section opened in 2009, it was toasted by critics and the public as a transformative urban park: it featured a unique mix of built and natural materials, and was situated three stories above city sidewalks. But the political and economic bases that made the High Line possible were equally transformative. The park marked the culmination of three decades of neoliberal changes to urban park governance, cementing the outsized role of private groups in park development, financing, and organization. Just as the High Line’s strange aesthetic mix of wild-looking plants and industrial relics set among a linear walking path has been widely copied, urban boosters across the U.S. mimicked Friends of the High Line’s strategy of mobilizing public-private partnerships to produce architecturally acclaimed green spaces.

In Chicago, park developers leaned on the Trust for Public Land, a national group that provides private funds and organizational support for privatized park projects, to build the city’s answer to the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail (also known as The 606). In Houston, where private influence has long held sway in urban development projects, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership relied on private funds for 91% of the initial funding for a linear postindustrial space along the city’s central waterway, including $30 million from ex-Enron billionaires Rich and Nancy Kinder.

There are more to come. Emboldened by the success of Buffalo Bayou Park, the Kinders have since granted $70 million to the Memorial Park Conservancy. In New York, billionaire High Line donor Barry Diller has taken a similar tack, battling various opponents to develop a $250 million privately managed park, Little Island, in the Hudson River.

Visitors to these shiny new parks might ask: So what? What’s so bad about a few architecturally brilliant parks being paid for with private dollars?

The problem with the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail/The 606, Buffalo Bayou Park, and other parks like them is that they aggressively accelerate an unequal parks landscape. The same cost-cutting of public parks funding that started in the 1970s advances today, and its effects most harm poorer communities and communities of color, where local private resources to offset defunding don’t exist to nearly the same degree. These inequalities deepen even further when we consider that private parks organizations wield their clout to direct public funds to underwrite upscale, privatized parks like the High Line, which received $144 million in public money for its construction. The racial and economic geography of private park investment keeps the spaces from being accessible to a broad public.

The parks’ privatized security deepens this inequality. Private managers like the Friends of the High Line and the Buffalo Bayou Partnership also get to decide park rules—rules that can and do differ from those of city-run parks. Focusing on the “quality of life” violations that viciously cleansed urban public spaces of homeless people in earlier decades, the gaze of private security frequently trains itself on the people of color and poor people who visit these spaces. Few of the tourists that the parks are designed to attract—able-bodied, middle-class, white—care or even know about this aspect.

Recently, private park boosters have moved forward with proposed improvements to parks in communities of color. In Chicago, this has taken the form of developing similar parks in Pilsen (El Paseo) and the Far South Side (Big Marsh) in an effort to make park-building appear equitable. In New York, organizers have initiated plans for Queens’s answer to the High Line, QueensWay, a project billed as “a gateway and introduction to New York City’s most diverse communities.” In Houston, the Kinder Foundation gave $3 million to the Emancipation Park Conservancy, private keepers of a local symbol of Black freedom and have recently announced a $100 million offering to expand Buffalo Bayou Park into the historically Black neighborhoods east of downtown. These developments appear to offer some measure of racial equity into urban park landscapes, but given that few new park plans are tied to affordable housing, there is little question that these new parks will drive up local housing values, potentially leading to the displacement of long-term residents of communities long starved for park access.

The trend of investment in parks recalls the political strategies honed by 20th-century master planner Robert Moses, who was the force behind decades’ worth of bridges, highways, and public housing in New York City and its surrounding areas. Moses recognized that rallying the public to support park projects was easy, because of the social goods that they represented (never mind that his parks were usually concessions connected to disruptive infrastructural projects like highways). Biographer Robert Caro writes that, for Moses, “parks symbolized something good, and therefore anyone who fought for parks fought under the shield of the presumption that he was fighting for the right—and anyone who opposed him, for the wrong.”

The symbolism of parks remains powerful today. Wealthy benefactors use parks’ collective image as public, universal goods to push through plans that do not benefit the public, but that serve the private coffers of real estate developers and corporations, and those—like the philanthropists themselves—who are invested in building the symbolic and cultural power of their respective city. As elites build new park spaces in their own image, they deepen inequality and shape cities’ public realms as consumerist and securitized, to be squeezed for every last drop of private profit.

The post How Public Is Your Favorite Public Park? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I wish our entire state was as broad-minded as the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area. The nearly 1,500-acre park, spanning both sides of the 60 Freeway in the city of South El Monte, isn’t just one of L.A. County’s largest and most popular parks. It’s a vision of what California might be.

These days, our state is a place of shifting rules and endless compliance, but you can do pretty much anything you can think of at Whittier Narrows, from boating to BMX biking, fishing to frisbee golf. Our state’s public places have become intensely designed and rigidly organized to keep different attractions in defined spaces, but much of Whittier Narrows is gloriously empty and unfussy. And while the richest people and places usually get the best stuff in today’s California, Whittier Narrows is an unparalleled gem in a working-class crossroads of greater Los Angeles.

Right now, Whittier Narrows feels especially glorious. California can’t stop itself from adding categories and qualifications, even when the task is as straightforward as giving everybody an essential shot in the arm. But Whittier Narrows is for everybody, all the time. You don’t have to make an appointment or wait in long lines to use it. You can get inoculated with all manner of rest and recreation whenever it works for you.

“A stroll through Whittier Narrows Park is never anything less than a walk through many worlds,” David Reid wrote in an essay published in the magnificent anthology East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte. “On any given day, the scent of carne asada barbeques wafts on a breeze that is suddenly interrupted by the scent of sunblock from a runner in full stride. The sound of buzzing model airplanes drawing figure eights above the canopy of trees is punctuated by the shots from the shooting range. Weekends are filled with rowdy soccer games and families flocking from distant corners of Southern California for reunions.”

Big family reunions are on hold and the ballgames have gotten smaller, but the park’s very existence also offers a tonic of optimism: Even dark moments in history can produce things worth celebrating. Whittier Narrows and its park also remind us that listening to regular people can sometimes produce pleasant surprises.

Whittier Narrows is a gap between the Puente and Montebello Hills through which the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel Rivers flow. The geology created a habitat for animals and plants, and a fertile site for people to grow crops. Its water was eventually eyed for urbanizing Southern California, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed building a dam in the narrows as part of a 1938 flood control plan.

But a citizens’ committee spent a decade fighting the dam, which would have threatened thousands of residences, multiple school districts, farms, oil wells, and an Audubon Society bird sanctuary. In 1948, a local congressman named Richard Nixon brokered a compromise that moved the dam site about a mile, preserving some businesses, homes, the bird sanctuary, and other recreational land.

It was a decidedly mixed victory. The dam, completed in 1957, would still displace about 2,000 people, who were not compensated. The bird sanctuary—and nearby trails, lawns, and a lake—were handed over to county parks in 1970.

Whittier Narrows Park has since grown, in size and offerings. It’s ideal if, like me, you have three finicky children who never want to do the same thing. On our visits, we have gravitated to the three lakes—North, Center, and Legg—which are home to watercraft from rented pedal boats to model speedboats for racing. We’ve picnicked, walked and biked the trails around the lakes, and climbed on the large sea “creatures” on the shore, including a two-headed dragon and an octopus. These are distinctive and playful sculptures made by the Mexican artist Benjamin Dominguez; he also produced the inventive slides and play structures of La Laguna Playground in San Gabriel and Atlantis Play Center in Garden Grove.

We’ve thrown frisbees around the massive disc golf course on the park’s east side, which nearly extends to a second freeway, the 605. We’ve enjoyed the shade of the many large trees (including California live oaks, sycamores, and pines) around the baseball and softball fields west of Rosemead Blvd., a quieter spot these days with organized sports mostly shut down by the pandemic. And there’s still so much we haven’t checked out—like the shooting range, the horse center, the nature center, the military museum, and the urban farm.

The best thing about the park is the mix of people. You’ll encounter folks of all races and ages, the majority of them Latino, reflecting the demographics of the greater El Monte area. The atmosphere is friendly and welcoming.

Regional parks like Whittier Narrows, with their something-for-everybody approach, increasingly feel out of fashion. With land scarce, we give all the attention and accolades to smaller, prettier, highly designed parks in tight urban spaces. And the middle-class and working-class families served by Whittier Narrows or El Dorado Regional Park in north Long Beach or by Hansen Dam Recreational Area in the San Fernando Valley lack cultural power in a Southern California increasingly divided between, and defined by, rich and poor.

Which is another reason why Whittier Narrows should be celebrated. Today, in densely populated and pandemic-devastated Los Angeles County, such large parks, with plenty of space to spread out, are a lifeline.

One downside of having a lot of space is that large parks are fighting off proposals to take parts of their land for development. The wonder of Whittier Narrows is that it is appreciated enough that people want to expand it.

In December, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers offered to lease another 47 acres of land in the dam area for a park expansion. L.A. County responded by saying it might acquire the land outright. County officials disclosed three possible concepts for this park expansion—creating an entertainment venue for fairs and food festivals, adding full-sized soccer fields, or building a large cricket field and complex.

It’d be fitting if Whittier Narrows somehow manages to incorporate it all.

The post A Park for Everyone Offers a ‘Vision of What California Might Be’  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In its own contradictory ways, Griffith Park is a reflection of Los Angeles itself. The park gets more annual visitors than Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, and millions of people have seen the park in films and television, but you’ll still find long-time Los Angeles residents who have no idea where it is, what’s in it, or how to get there. Griffith Park is both an urban oasis and an untamed wilderness, a manicured garden and smoldering chaparral slope. It is a home for hikers, stargazers, cyclists, golfers, equestrians, train enthusiasts, Shakespearean actors, drum circles, museum patrons, kayakers, dog walkers, people walkers, environmentalists, developers, gardeners, charlatans, anarchic trail-runners, secret handshake practitioners, ghost hunters, eloteros, zookeepers, dreamers, and everyone in between.

Its best-known building—on a park cliff above Hollywood Boulevard, where it’s often easier to see a star on a sidewalk than in the night sky—is the nation’s third-oldest planetarium, which has been educating the public about our place in the cosmos for generations. Near the park’s northern and eastern boundaries runs the Los Angeles River, once this famously drought-prone city’s primary source of water. This river was first feared, then despised, then dammed and forced into a concrete tomb—only to be loved again and, in the future, set free.

Even the park’s namesake donor, Griffith J. Griffith, who gave more than 3,000 acres in 1896, is himself a story of contradictions, wrapped in scandal and philanthropy, attempted murder and successful generosity, regressive ideas about people and progressive ideas about parks.

The park’s 70-mile network of trails can be explored on foot, wheel, or hoof. As a journalist and hiker, I’ve produced a guidebook of 30-plus Griffith Park hikes, with photos I took myself. I hope you have as much fun discovering the park as I continue to do.

The post Griffith Park, a Place of and Apart From Los Angeles appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Riddle: When is a miracle also bound to be a disappointment?

Answer: When the miracle is a project of the state of California.

A case in point is the recent opening of the Los Angeles State Historic Park, an event that contains many miracles.

Miracle one: It’s a large (32 acres) park—with broad grassy fields large enough to fly a kite or hold a big concert, buildings with community meeting space, and a signature bridge with selfie-ready views of the downtown skyline—in the densely crowded center of park-poor Los Angeles. Miracle two: It was built on a historic rail and industrial site that required costly soil decontamination and was originally planned for business redevelopment, before the intervention of the state saved it for parkland.

Miracle three: The state’s woefully underfunded parks department built this park with public funds. Miracle four: The park didn’t die during a 16-year odyssey that coincided with a crippling recession, multiple budget crises, and an accounting scandal inside the parks department.

So why do all these miracles add up to disappointment? Because, for all its wonders, the Los Angeles State Historic Park still lacks many elements of a great park.

Just getting the park opened in the face of obstacles required many compromises, not the least of which was a reduced $18 million price tag for a park that was once planned as a $55 million facility. In a state where it’s so hard to do anything impactful, doing something truly world-class is next to impossible.

The story of the park mixes the above miracles with missed opportunities. The park represented, in the words of one state press release, a “once-in-a-century” opportunity for California. The state park could reshape a transit-connected parcel that extends from Metro rail’s Chinatown station to the Los Angeles River.

The park still may achieve that kind of status (more on that later). But the park that opened this spring, with a big ceremony that included Gov. Jerry Brown, is missing very basic things.

Like shade.

In a warming city, there are no shade structures, and small, newly planted trees provide little relief from the blistering sun. Many of the features of the original plan for the park, first advanced a decade ago, haven’t materialized. The park’s current configuration contains none of the elaborate gardens or fountains (a victim of the drought) or railroad-influenced design elements that were part of earlier plans. There isn’t a children’s playground. And the park, which is supposed to be a community asset, is open for limited hours—8 a.m. to sunset—and is cut off by fencing and the Gold Line trains from the two thoroughfares it borders, Broadway and Spring Street.

My first visit, with my three young (and quickly bored) sons, left me angry. Here again was the California disease: We dream big, but our ambitions aren’t matched by dollars or management follow-through. If this park—with so many champions, from high state officials to local activists—can’t be better, what hope is there for the many plans around California to create new and dynamic public spaces?

This is not merely about a state government with a dysfunctional budget system, and byzantine planning and regulatory processes. Rich folks in New York ponied up millions in donations to make the High Line (a $152 million project) brilliant. Chicago and its philanthropists devoted $475 million to Millennium Park, which is of a similar size to the L.A. State Historic Park. Why haven’t our rich people and corporate interests stepped up and done something grand here?

The answer to that is a very long story about a lack of cohesion, generosity, and imagination. (I still carry a torch for architect Thom Mayne’s 2006 idea for the park property: Move Dodger Stadium to the park space, and instead create an even grander park where the stadium now sits, paid for by selling some development rights.) Instead, the state parks department—with a budget under so much stress that it nearly had to close dozens of state parks in recent years—had to perform a cut-rate miracle. Couldn’t billionaire Eli Broad have sold off a few pieces of his art collection to add more to this park?

Despite such frustrations, let’s stay positive. What’s not done is not done. And the good news is that there’s still time and opportunity to make the experience of this park truly great.

Already, developers are starting to transform the industrial space around the park into resident-friendly locations. There’s a brand new nonprofit friends group that should support the park. An in-park restaurant and a new water wheel project from artist Lauren Bon and the Annenberg Foundation are on their way. There’s plenty of space to add a children’s playground, shade structures, and a bridge over the Metro Gold Line tracks to connect the park with people who live along the Broadway corridor. Perhaps hours could be extended to something that matches the life of the neighborhood—6 a.m. to 10 p.m.

“Now that the park is open, you have the canvas from which to create the future,” says the tireless Sean Woods, superintendent for the Los Angeles sector of California State Parks, who has been working on the park since its 2001 beginnings.

All that will require is more money—and the miracle of Californians taking full advantage of an opportunity to do something great. Until that happens, enjoy the park, but bring lots of sunscreen.

The post L.A.’s New State Historic Park Is Both a Miracle and a Missed Opportunity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This summer, 32 parks around Los Angeles—many located in South L.A.—will stay open until 11 p.m. on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

This is Summer Night Lights, one of L.A.’s most popular programs. As you can see in Mike Kotowski’s video of the first Summer Night Lights of the season at Ross Snyder Park, children and families enjoyed the new playground and played soccer games on three newly resurfaced fields long after dark.

Summer Night Lights has its roots in South L.A. As Rev. Jeff Carr recounts in his piece for Zócalo’s South Los Angeles series, Summer Night Lights was launched in the summer of 2008 with a focus on gang prevention. The goal was to reclaim public spaces, especially parks, for all. Programming, including sports and the arts, was designed to appeal particularly to young people ages 10 to 15, who are the prime age for gang recruitment, according to research.

While gangs remain a problem in South L.A., they have become less visible and neighborhoods are safer. Parks in particular have been revived, as USC scholar Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo writes in this Zócalo essay. And Summer Night Lights endures as a highlight of an L.A. summer.

The post How Playing in the Park After Dark Unifies South L.A. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Cloud watching” is not just a data point for researchers like myself, it’s also a critical moment for Marlon, who had recently been “on vacation” (a local euphemism for being in prison) and had come to the park to gather his thoughts. Something about listening to the wind rustle tree leaves and staring at the clouds drew him to the park.

Many civic leaders and organizations are working to make more parks and community gardens in South Los Angeles, but in my sociological research, I’m trying to figure what actually brings people to these places. How do people use these sites to create a sense of place and belonging? What are some of the social benefits?

Los Angeles is said to be the most park-poor big city in the nation. But in reality, there is lots of beautiful open park space here—it’s just located far away from the neighborhoods where it’s needed most. Griffith Park, with over 4,000 acres of natural wilderness areas, hiking trails, shady picnic areas, and recreational facilities, remains distant from the low-income urban neighborhoods where most African Americans and Latinos live. The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is even more distantly located.

Of particular concern is South Los Angeles, a sprawling metropolis of its own, spanning across 45 square miles, much of it lacking tree canopy and green spaces where local residents may gather.

The City of Los Angeles and L.A. County, aided by non-profits and philanthropic efforts, have been trying to create more parks. Starting with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s plan to add 50 parks and continuing with L.A. County’s current Parks Needs Assessment study, public agencies, sometimes assisted by non-profits and supported with private funding, are making progress—building new parks and improving the infrastructure, especially in poor communities where people of color live.

But what’s going on at the parks and community gardens that already exist in those neighborhoods?

For over a year now my students and I have been going to public parks and community gardens located in Watts, the historic South Central Avenue district, and the Vermont Square-Slauson neighborhoods. For months, we visited at different times of day, and different days of the week, recording our observations. Finally, I selected four sites where we are conducting conversational, audio-recorded interviews with park users and community gardeners.

So far, we’ve found that the men of South L.A. are going to the parks and community gardens, in part, for these meditative, therapeutic moments, for solace and sanctuary, to get healthy, to have fun with friends, and to enjoy close-up encounters with plant nature. We’ve also seen that there are far more men and boys than women and girls using the public parks and the largest community gardens.

Why? First, there’s still a fear factor. In the aftermath of deindustrialization in the 1980s and 1990s, public parks and streets in South LA became violent, dangerous spots. Crime is now down, gang violence has subsided, and today one is much less likely to come across gang fights than in the past. But fear remains. Growing up in South LA, many youth were explicitly instructed by their parents to avoid the parks, and this is especially true for women and girls.

In an ideal world, women and girls would feel free to be here too, but our gardens and parks reflect society, and we have a society where women face sexual harassment and unfair domestic burdens, restricting their activity at parks and community gardens. Many women also don’t think these parks are safe.

In another series of interviews conducted with community residents, a number of women told me they prefer to drive to parks in more affluent neighborhoods to jog, power walk, or take their kids to the playground.

When women and girls do come, it’s typically in the company of children and family. This is an extension of domestic duties—supervising young children on playgrounds, watching kids at soccer or baseball practice, or attending a family picnic. Some of the parks feature recently installed exercise equipment, and you might see a mother and daughter or two friends using the equipment. But the indoor Zumba classes that have proliferated in storefronts and rec centers around South L.A. seem to be more popular alternatives for women’s exercise.

Not only are the parks sites of conviviality and relaxation primarily for men and boys, but the big expansive community gardens in Watts—Stanford Avalon Community Garden and the Greater Watts Community Garden—are also predominantly male. At these sites, there are some women who are very dedicated, talented gardeners, but they are fewer in number, Men over age 55 predominate.

When I ask the male gardeners why there aren’t more women tilling the soil, they say the women are tied up with looking after kids, and cooking and cleaning, or that the women are lazy and don’t want to do the work. It does take substantial time and hard labor to cultivate here. Some of the garden plots span 1,500 square feet, and that takes lots of muscle, dedication, and time to do the work.

We were surprised to find that men are using these green spaces to create therapeutic moments of tranquility and time for reflection. One Sunday afternoon as I traipsed around Stanford Avalon Community Garden, I noticed Jose, whom I had interviewed several months before, sitting in silence by himself at the back of his plot, eyes-downcast. Now in his 40s, Jose was born in Mexico and started working in L.A. factories full-time at age 14. He now works in construction six days a week. On Sunday he dedicates all day to his garden, where he grows a spectacular array of vegetables including squash, chile, corn, Swiss chard, and strawberries. On this particular afternoon, he had finished with the hard labor of turning soil, and he sat in Zen-like solitude, intently and skillfully de-thorning nopale cactus paddles, preparing these as food gifts for relatives. Growing food here, he told me, allows him to express his “amor por la tierra,” his “love of the land,” and these quiet moments watering, weeding, or de-thorning nopales bring him peacefulness.

Just south of this garden, also below DWP power lines, African-American gardeners, the majority of them men over 60, are growing vegetables from heirloom tomatoes to a wide variety of collard greens, feeding themselves, family, and community members, and finding tranquility and connection in the process. As 63-year-old James explained to me, he enjoys the “freedom of mind,” he finds at the garden. “It’s like yoga, but it’s more physical,” he explained. “It gets me that sanctuary, that freedom of mind and free thought.” He said he takes pleasure in giving away about 95 percent of what he grows.

The public parks and community gardens of South L.A. are also places where men can experience themselves as responsible family men, a claim that can be tenuous for some. At the parks, fathers can take their kids to soccer games, baseball practice, or family picnics, and at the community gardens, they can grow food for their family members. There are many activities t hat draw men and boys together too, including sports, skate parks, drum circles, playing dominoes or cards, or just hanging out and enjoying one another’s company.

The right to congregate in public outdoor spaces in the city has not always been a given for African-American and Latino men in South L.A. neighborhoods. Many have faced danger on the street or police harassment. Relaxing at the park feels like an achievement, both for the individual and the community. The street violence and crime that ruled South L.A. a couple of decades ago has now declined. Sure, there is still danger, and men, especially younger men, need to negotiate threats and turf disputes at the public parks.

Even Crip-controlled parks can serve as healing sites. Charlie, a 55 year-old veteran of violence on mean streets, prison, and military service, found a comfort zone in such a park. “We all started outside,” he said. “I feel like everybody needs to have a space for green. If you can’t breathe, then it’s some place you don’t feel comfortable…That’s what we come out here for.”

Moments of chill and relajo—that’s what the men of South LA are finding in green spaces. This speaks to the power of plant nature, to the therapeutic aspects of being outside, where you can “blow off steam,” inhale fresh air, and touch soil with your hands, or like Marlon, hit the pause button to gaze as a cloud rolls by.

While urban planners, public health officials, and park advocates have publicized the role of parks and community gardens in combatting obesity and diabetes, maybe we also should recognize the parks and community gardens as assets for improving overall mental health and well-being too. After decades of divestment in parks and gardens, the people of South LA need the new and improved green spaces they are starting to get. Everyone does.

The post How South L.A.’s Parks Help Men Heal appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My secret? I was playing FootGolf, which involves kicking a soccer ball into extra-large holes placed on regulation golf courses. This new sport, spreading fast in California, is one of the more promising answers to a full-blown statewide challenge: what to do about our glut of golf courses?

In California, golf is not a matter of fun and games. For more than a century, the sport has helped define our state’s landscape, its tourism economy, its leisure culture, its real estate market, and the finances of hundreds of California cities with municipal courses. Today, golf is still a $13 billion California industry—that’s 10 times bigger than the legal side of a more talked-about (and also grass-oriented) business, cannabis.

But golf has had a very bad decade, with the number of golfers declining by nearly 20 percent nationally (with similar declines in California and other golf-saturated parts of Europe and Asia). The number of golf courses, after increasing for 60 consecutive years, from 1946 through 2005, is also dropping, with golf clubs and municipal courses shutting their doors.

This decline is posing new questions because California’s growth and land use have been so tied to golf. The game was a big part of the leisure culture that Californians created as a challenge to America’s tired Puritan ethic and as a lure for millions of people to relocate here in the 20th century. As the California booster Charles Fletcher Lummis wrote, “We are destined to show an astonished world the spectacle of Americans having a good time.”

Large regions of the state—notably the Coachella Valley and Monterey Bay—fashioned themselves as leisure destinations, and created some of the world’s greatest golf courses. After the Second World War, golf courses were used to promote new housing developments around the state. In the 1950s, the Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage, one early such developments, allowed Ford to use its name on a new car model, which in turn inspired a classic Beach Boys song about a fun-loving girl driving her daddy’s automobile. Does it get any more Californian than that?

While playing golf feels like an individual pursuit, this growth in the game was heavily subsidized, through tax laws that fueled development and by local governments that saw public golf courses as an essential amenity, like parks and playgrounds. That investment seemed like a good one in the 1990s when an Orange County kid raised on municipal courses—Tiger Woods of Cypress—became one of the world’s most popular athletes, inspiring a younger, more diverse generation to take up the game.

But then came 2006, and California’s housing crisis crashed the global economy. Just like that, the whole world turned hard against California golf. The middle class that sustained so many golf courses suddenly didn’t have the money or the jobs or the time to take up such an extravagant pastime. Successful golf course owners—like Donald Trump, who owns a club open to the public in Palos Verdes—catered to the wealthy (Trump charges as much as $280 a round), the only people gaining in the current economic recovery.

Golf is now a social face-to-face pasttime in a world that prefers digital communication, a slow game based on courtesy in a fast-paced society that has forgotten its manners, and a Republican-leaning game at a time when the Republican party is cracking up. Trends in fitness also work against golf, with many Californians seeking less relaxing exercise, and slimmer, more muscular bodies than you find on golf courses.

“The thin athletic body now represents leisure and privilege in the way that a plump well-fed body represented leisure and privilege,” says Utah State historian Lawrence Culver, author of Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and The Shaping of Modern America. Today, he adds, “there are arguments for having golf courses, but not in the number we now have them. It’s an expensive and expansive form of outdoor recreation.”

With fewer customers playing fewer rounds—and higher water bills during the drought—golf courses across the state have struggled. A few dozen have closed, and dozens more could shut down.

But replacing a golf course is a quandary. Some struggling courses are close to industrial sites or airports, and remain useful as buffers. It would make sense to turn golf courses into desperately needed housing, or into public parks in the many California communities that lack such spaces. But California rarely makes sense. And regulations and politics make such conversions difficult and expensive.

In the meantime, golf course operators are doing everything they can to find new uses for their courses. Around the state, you’ll see everything from concerts to film shoots to car and dog shows on golf courses. Some courses have hosted events for young singles, often on Friday or Saturday nights, that combine hitting golf balls with video games, shows of golf technology, and drinking.

One of the better innovations is FootGolf, which is being popularized by Roberto and Laura Balestrini of the Palm Springs-based American FootGolf League. More than 150 golf courses nationwide added FootGolf last year, and I tried it out one morning at an 18-hole par three golf course in Arcadia, in the San Gabriel Valley.

The course had added separate tees and small greens, with 21-inch-wide holes, off to the sides of its usual golf greens. At the pro shop, I handed over a $15 green fee to a young course employee named Jordan Godfrey, who happens to be America’s national FootGolf champion. He carefully explained the rules—kicking a size-5 soccer ball in as few kicks as possible from the tees into the big holes—and warned me not to damage the well-manicured regular golf greens by kicking off of them.

I had a great time. Without a bag of golf clubs to carry, I jogged around the course in 45 minutes. The three real golfers on the course greeted me warmly and let me play through. And I narrowly avoided falling into the giant holes when fishing my ball out of them.

My only mishap came on the damp fifth tee, when I fell as I kicked the ball 50 yards down the fairway, landing hard on my bottom. That’s never happened to me playing regular golf. But no great California transformation is without its risks.

The post California Wants to Improve Its Golf Game appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Similar diversity deficits exist across most of our park systems. For example, the National Park Service workforce is only 5 percent Latino, a paltry representation. And that lack of diversity among rangers is, unfortunately, matched by a lack of diversity among the people who visit the park.

While we often think about parks as places for preservation—and they are—I am convinced that the parks’ ability to change and to reflect the country’s diversity is the defining issue for the future of the nation’s public lands. In this as in so much else, California is our best hope for the future.

California parks are rich in natural splendor and cultural heritage. The state’s 279 parks preserve nearly 1.6 million acres of winding coastlines and pristine wilderness, and offer more than 15,000 campsites and 4,500 miles of trails for the public to visit and explore. They also preserve historical places that tell California’s story, including the famous Hearst Castle in San Simeon and the Watts Towers in Los Angeles. They are protected—not just for this generation but for many generations to come.

Anyone who has stood amongst California’s towering redwoods, hiked the desert landscape, or experienced the stunning mountain vistas knows that nature is transformational. As a park ranger, I heard stories from people who found inner peace, and walked away with a sense of responsibility and awe for our natural treasures.

Yet, among these stories, what always stood out to me were the voices that were missing.

A survey commissioned by the National Park Service in 2009 found that only 28 percent of African-Americans and 32 percent of Latinos had reported visiting a national park in the last two years, compared to 53 percent for whites. Similarly, a visitor survey found that Latinos represent only 11 percent of Yosemite visitors, even though they represent 38 percent of the population in California.

Unfortunately, the California State Parks system doesn’t track visitor information, but during my time as a ranger it was obvious that many are being left out of this quintessential experience. The diverse California we see in our communities is not the California you see in campgrounds and on hiking trails. That needs to change.

Diversity matters for several important reasons. We need every Californian—and every American—to be a champion for our parks systems. When budget cuts loom, resources for parks are typically first on the chopping block—and in California, cuts have led to the closing of parks and reductions in hours and maintenance. Such devastating impacts can be prevented if every resident feels a sense of ownership over our parks and commits to advocating for their protection.

Additionally, California parks belong to everyone, and everyone should have access to the great power of the outdoors. Californians have proven that they are willing to step up when park resources are needed. Over the last decade, voters approved almost $10 billion in statewide, park-related bonds, with polls showing overwhelming support from Latino and black voters.

Last year, a commission created by Governor Jerry Brown published the Parks Forward recommendations aimed at increasing access to the outdoors. The report outlines reforms to modernize state parks and aims to have the demographics of park visitors reflect those of state residents by 2025.

To reach the report’s ambitious goals, several immediate steps are necessary.

We need to make park staff more diverse so that visitors from all walks of life see themselves as part of the parks experience. The California Department of Parks and Recreation assembled a transformation team that will be responsible for implementing the vision of a modern parks system, and they have indicated that it will be a priority to hire staff that reflects the demographics of the state. They will also hire people from different professional backgrounds, so that biologists, management professionals, and community outreach experts, among others, can infuse the department with new ideas for connecting with California’s diverse communities.

We can no longer expect people to find their own way to the outdoors. One promising demonstration project will bring in outreach specialists to partner with local organizations to get residents who don’t traditionally visit state parks into our parks, both urban and wilderness. In Los Angeles, the department has partnered with organizations such as Latino Outdoors to invite first-time campers to new popular overnight events at Rio de Los Angeles State Park. In his proposed budget, Governor Brown committed almost $700,000 to pilot this idea in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

The department also needs to scrub outdated rules that can discourage people from visiting. For example, state campgrounds only allow for eight people and two cars per campsite. That’s a huge deterrent for people seeking space for multi-generational family events or group activities.

The parks of the future need to become social gathering places. Surveys and research indicate that people want to picnic, play, congregate, and explore in the outdoors. Providing these opportunities can be as easy as installing more benches and reconfiguring campsites to accommodate bigger groups. But understanding that our parks are not currently serving the needs of all Californians is the first step in making them welcoming spaces for all.

I’ve been around long enough to know that if recent momentum does not generate meaningful action, change may never come, and the result could be dangerous for some of our state’s treasures. California can once again be the nation’s trailblazer and help welcome the changing face of our state and country to enjoy the great outdoors.

The post Why We Need More Latinos to Hit the Trails appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.