Topline:
In the shadow of last month's York Fire in California's Mojave National Preserve, almost nothing is left amid the rocks and sand, except the charred carcasses of Mojave yuccas, Joshua trees, and chollas.
What's next: Scientists are not waiting to see what the desert becomes. They're actively intervening with an ambitious years-long project to replant some 4,000 Joshua trees at Cima Dome.
Keep reading... for details on the efforts so far and how you can participate.
"The Country since leaving the Colorado has been a dry rocky sandy Barren desert." – Jedediah Smith, 1826.
Early western explorers who ventured into the Mojave Desert, like Jedediah Smith, often mischaracterized it as a barren landscape, devoid of life.
Yet a closer inspection of these sweeping landscapes reveals soil-hugging carpets of springtime flowers, native grasses and fragrant shrubs, alongside the more obvious cacti and succulents.
Where the desert lives up to its stereotype is after a wildfire.
In the shadow of last month's York Fire in California's Mojave National Preserve, almost nothing is left amid the rocks and sand, except the charred carcasses of Mojave yuccas, Joshua trees, and chollas. The soil is a mottled brown and black, and some plants have been reduced to mere silhouettes of char on the ground.
The moonscape is the result of a fire that burned quickly and widely, engulfing roughly 130 square miles of the preserve – including picturesque Caruthers Canyon, a boulder-strewn spot popular with campers.
"Caruthers Canyon is the prettiest place we had. It was a beautiful little pinyon-juniper forest up there," says Debra Hughson, who is the preserve's deputy superintendent. "When the pinyon-juniper burns, it doesn't come back. Not in my lifetime. Not in your lifetime. Maybe never."
This latest wildfire comes as a reminder of the unpredictable future facing some of the desert's most iconic residents. Warmer, drier temperatures are already stressing the preserve's spindly Joshua trees. Models predict those warming trends will leave Joshua trees with fewer suitable places to live. Scroll forward in time, Hughson says, and their range shrinks: "It melts like an ice cube on a hot sidewalk." On top of that, in recent years wide-ranging wildfires are also pushing the succulents into greater peril.
"They're already living on the edge," Hughson says. "What we're doing here globally is we're cranking up the temperature, and here we're also cranking down the rainfall, the precipitation." Joshua trees, she explains, are having a hard time keeping up with such swift climate changes. "Then you get a major stressor like this, that just erases the chalkboard."
What she means is the park's dense Joshua tree forests may never come back after a fire. A grassy savannah might rise up to replace them, with a few Joshua trees scattered throughout as a reminder of what once was.
Nowhere is that potential future on greater display than along Morning Star Mine Road, which cuts across the northern reaches of the preserve. On one side of the road there is a Joshua tree forest so dense it looks like a green wall at a distance, with a rich understory of drab greenish-gray bushes. On the other side there's a graveyard of blackened Joshua trees with sun-bleached buds. The ground is mostly bare, aside from patches of grass, and the color palette is black, white and shades of tan.
The road was a firebreak during the 2020 Dome Fire. Flames destroyed an estimated 1.3 million Joshua trees on Cima Dome, an area that was once the park's grandest example of dense Joshua tree woodland. The area's relatively high elevation was supposed to serve as a sort of sanctuary – a climate refuge where Joshua trees could continue to thrive amid hotter, drier conditions elsewhere in their range. Then, the fire came – an unexpected destabilizing force that casts that long-term trajectory into question.
Hughson trained as a geologist. She talks about the future of the Joshua tree and what might happen at Cima Dome as if she still assesses these seismic ecological changes at the tempo of geologic time. "In the end," she says, "the desert is going to tell us what it's going to be and it's going to show us what it's going to be."
Scientists are not waiting to see what the desert becomes. They're actively intervening with an ambitious years-long project to replant some 4,000 Joshua trees at Cima Dome.
Biological science technician Erin Knight walks through a graveyard of dead Joshua trees, near the remains of an old cattle operation called Valley View Ranch. Some of the plants have toppled to the ground. Others still stand, but they're falling to pieces; the branches that once stretched up to the sky now dangle and sway eerily in the desert wind.
"Kind of our own little chandelier here in the desert," Knight jokes.
Small chicken wire cages are scattered throughout the grove. This is where volunteers have planted baby Joshua trees, in hopes of resurrecting the century-old giants that perished here. Knight crouches down near one of the cages, and checks a numbered tag.
She says this seedling was planted on Nov. 6 last year, and a volunteer named it Bratislava — the capital of Slovakia. Unfortunately, this one's dead, as are many others at this site. In fact, in the two years this project's been underway, 80% of the roughly 1,900 Joshua trees planted in the burn scar of the Dome Fire have died.
"Unfortunately, restoring Joshua trees is more of an art than a science, and sometimes it works out really well and sometimes it doesn't," Hughson says. Some of the baby Joshua trees have been eaten, especially those without a cage. Others die of thirst, though volunteers and scientists at the preserve make their best efforts to water the baby seedlings.
"There's been hundreds and hundreds of volunteers that have participated. We even had a camel train packing water into these," Hughson says. Restoration work in the desert, she explains, is not for the faint of heart.
"It's a tale of failed experiments," Hughson says. "Go look at the literature on restoration in the desert, especially the Mojave Desert. And OK, 'Well, this didn't work.' Another paper on, 'Well, that didn't work.' 'OK, well, we tried this, and we failed miserably.' And the stories of success are very rare."
Still, hundreds of these Joshua tree seedlings have survived. Knight's colleague Ryan McRae found one nearby. It's only a few inches tall, and looks like the top of a baby pineapple. Knight looks up its name, and says it's called "Lychee."
It's still tiny, and McRae points out one of the huge challenges of restoring a forest with two-inch-tall seedlings. "These Joshua trees only grow about 1.5 to 2 inches per year. So if you can imagine a 10-foot-tall tree or so, you can get an idea of how many years or decades it would take to get to that height." At a conservative 1.5 inches per year – it would take at least 80 years to return this area back to the way it was before the fire.
"We probably won't see it in any of our lives," Knight says.
Kelso is an old railroad town in another corner of the park near a giant field of sand dunes. Behind a 1920s schoolhouse, there's a small beige building with two bright teal doors reading BOYS and GIRLS. There's no sign from the outside, but the GIRLS room is now a makeshift field lab.
"This is our seed lab," says Christina Sanchez, a seed technician. "This is where we're sorting all of the Joshua tree seeds, and where we store them before they go to the nursery." The nursery is a facility near Lake Mead, where rows of pots contain baby Joshua tree sprouts, ready to be transplanted into the wild.
Sanchez pulls over a big bucket, full of cream-colored Joshua tree fruits she and her team have collected. She takes one out and shakes it: "Sounds like a little rattle," she says. The seeds are about the size of roma tomatoes, but they're brittle and hard. She breaks one open with a crack, and reveals the black hockey-puck-like seeds inside.
A curious contraption that looks like a cross between an ant farm and a pinball machine hooks up to a shop vac blower. It's a seed cleaning machine, and when Sanchez switches on the blower, the seeds flutter through the chutes inside.
From here, she'll dump the viable seeds into big jars, labeled with the collection site, and put them in a big chest freezer. The freezer is already half full of jars brimming with some 300,000 Joshua tree seeds.
"This is the future of the species," Sanchez says. "This deep freezer here, this is holding our future."
Many of the Joshua tree seedlings planted so far have died, raising the question whether collecting and storing seeds is a gesture of hope.
"We're going to lose a species if we don't try," she says. "We just gotta keep trying."
Debra Hughson acknowledges that the replanting effort is just a "drop in the ocean," given the massive losses of Joshua trees here in recent years. "That's a few hundred we've managed, in a landscape that had 1.3 million," she says. "So you can do the math."
Numbers aside, Hughson expresses skepticism that people really have much of a role in "rebuilding" wilderness. "I don't think that wilderness areas can be built. They can be designated, but nature created it," she says. "We seem to be capable of destroying it ... but we can't create something that we don't really even understand."
Even so, the replanting project continues in October. The goal is to get 2,000 more Joshua trees in the ground over the next two years, and as before, the preserve is relying on wilderness-savvy volunteers. That human aspect, Hughson says, might be one of the most compelling reasons to do what seems very difficult, if not near impossible, on an ecological scale.
"It makes us feel better. You know, psychologically, there were a lot of people that got a lot of good feelings and satisfaction from helping with the Joshua tree planting," she says. "And to try to help makes you feel better about yourself and more hopeful about the future. And that in itself is a valuable thing."
Volunteers are needed to plant Joshua trees on weekends this October.
Park officials say to participate you need to have
Sign up form: October 2023 Cima Dome Joshua Tree Planting
Topline:
Huntington Beach nonprofit Bolsa Chica Conservancy is fundraising to replace equipment damaged in recent coastal flooding. It's anticipating the need for more repairs, as the flooding forecast around Thanksgiving and Christmas could be even worse.
What was damaged: Bolsa Chica Conservancy’s executive director, Carissa Macias, said that despite its efforts, a pump used for its aquarium shorted out due to water damage and needed to be replaced. (The aquarium houses a tide pool, various fish species and a shark.) The conservancy has since replaced the pump and taken measures to protect the surviving equipment.
Future risk: The organization’s Interpretive Center, which hosts its aquarium and exhibits about the region’s ecology, is in a modular trailer-style building. “The threat that we are concerned about is that if we get enough water flow underneath the buildings and saturating the soil underneath the buildings, that it's going to compromise the stability of the buildings,” Macias said. Regardless of whether that happens, Macias said she expects supplies will be needed to divert floodwater and make more repairs.
Why it matters: Current forecasts show that high tides in late November could be up to 7 feet — higher than those seen in October, without taking into account other factors that could make the tides even higher. Macias said that traditionally, their buildings haven’t been affected by coastal flooding other than water getting into some parking spaces.
About the organization: The Bolsa Chica Conservancy is an educational nonprofit that aims to protect over 1,300 acres of coastal habitat that offer up-close views of some 200 species of birds. The conservancy offers free programming to teach people about wetlands of Southern California, nearly two-thirds of which have been lost to development and parking.
How to support: The conservancy said it may need volunteers in the weeks ahead, but the best way to help is by donating, which you can do here.
Topline:
Dan Shimell, an attorney and a new face to local politics, is Santa Ana’s next mayor after an unexpected win against incumbent Valerie Amezcua.
Why it matters: Aside from Shimell, progressives Sandra de Anda and Isuri S. Ramos are also projected to win City Council seats, deepening the Santa Ana City Council’s progressive bench.
Read on … for what this race says about Santa Ana politics.
Dan Shimell, an attorney and a new face in local politics, is Santa Ana’s next mayor after a shocking win against incumbent Valerie Amezcua. His win has become one of the most surprising upsets in Orange County’s general election and marks a shift for a city that previously elected its first Latina mayor.
Amezcua congratulated Shimell on social media late Monday night after the last round of election results nearly doubled Shimell’s lead. As of Tuesday night, Shimell held a 5-point lead over Amezcua. Amezcua did not respond to LAist’s requests for comment.
“It has been the honor of my life to serve the people of Santa Ana,” Amezcua said in a post. “Together, we have accomplished great things. We invested in our neighborhoods, expanded opportunity for families, and strengthened the services that make Santa Ana home. Our work was never about one person. It was about all of us moving this community forward.”
Aside from Shimell, progressives Sandra de Anda and Isuri S. Ramos are also projected to win City Council seats, deepening the Santa Ana City Council’s progressive bench.
A flashpoint in Amezcua’s re-election campaign was during the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that rattled much of Southern California, including Santa Ana, Orange County’s only sanctuary city. The raids sparked protests that drew a heavy law enforcement response from Santa Ana police, including rubber bullets and tear gas.
In Amezcua’s first public response, she accused protesters of inciting chaos and violence. She later walked back her comments in a city statement, saying most protesters were demonstrating peacefully and that she did not support the raids.
Shimell told LAist he thinks Santa Ana voters, especially young and first-time voters, went to the polls to vote for those who can't.
“Those who have been or might in the future be impacted by immigration policy and enforcement,” Shimell added. “Taking a bold stance on immigration and police accountability seemed to resonate with voters I spoke with, and stood in stark contrast to the [police]-backed candidates who remained largely silent on those issues.”
Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento served as mayor of the city from 2020 to 2022, and his current district includes Santa Ana. Sarmiento told LAist that the results were surprising but reflected the change voters want to see in their elected officials.
“I think the underlying message is that money and establishment conventional politics no longer is the formula to success in a campaign in the city,” Sarmiento said. “It's really the influence of people and voters over money. That's really the theme here.”
Santa Ana City Councilmember Thai Viet Phan told LAist that the race results were somewhat surprising — but spoke to a larger trend.
“[In] the election results throughout the country … you saw a very leftward shift, with not just candidates but also just how voters voted,” Phan said. “I think that was reflected here in Santa Ana on the council.”
Shimell raised about $28,500 in his campaign for mayor. Amezcua raised more than $75,000 and received more than $200,000 in outside support — more than half of that came from the Santa Ana Police Officers Association.
Mike Moodian, a public policy professor at Chapman University, told LAist that in many ways, the races capture the zeitgeist of Santa Ana.
“Here we saw that there was a police union-backed group, and there was a resistance to that,” Moodian said. “People might have seen the incumbent mayor as part of a police union-backed establishment."
He explained that voters may have looked at Shimell as a fresh face who can represent more people and that the city is experiencing a deeper progressive shift.
“I find the residents of Santa Ana tend to be much more involved and engaged in local politics than most other cities in Orange County. So you also have a well-informed, engaged citizenry that showed up, and the voices were heard in Santa Ana,” Moodian said.
Moodian said Amezcua may have lost support from some voters because they were unsatisfied with her response to immigration enforcement.
Ballots are still being counted. The OC Registrar of Voters posts updates every day, except Sundays, at 5 p.m. Election results will be certified by Dec. 3. You can find updates on key measures and other races here.
Topline:
South Asians, especially those in the Little Bangladesh ethnic enclave, are celebrating Nithya Raman’s election as mayor of Los Angeles.
Invisible constituents: Nazmul Chaudhry, the owner of Deshi Food, a restaurant and grocery store in Little Bangladesh, says they are happy for Raman’s election because no other mayoral candidate has spent time in the historic ethnic enclave the way she did this fall. Mayor-elect Raman is of Indian descent and an immigrant. When she takes office, she will be the first South Asian mayor of Los Angeles.
Overlooked concerns: For seven years, Chaudhry has been trying to get a city official’s attention to fix the cracked sidewalk in front of his store. Nothing has been done about it. He hopes Raman will finally get it done.
Shift away from identity politics: Raman’s Indian background was a feature of her campaign, but it was “not the central thesis,” said Sara Sadhwani, associate professor of politics at Pomona College. “ When the economy is bad, identity slips away as the top issue on someone's mind,” she said.
For seven years, Nazmul Chaudhry has been trying to get the city of Los Angeles to fix a broken sidewalk in front of his store.
Chaudhry owns Deshi Food, a restaurant and grocery store in Little Bangladesh. Before I could even begin our interview, he led me to the front of his store to show me the sidewalk that pedestrians sidestep and electric scooter riders slow down around.
He said he’s tried to get the attention of city officials, but nothing has been done.
He’s hoping that will soon change. He said then-candidate Nithya Raman spent time in the historic enclave just north of Koreatown this fall, talking with community members about their problems. For the first time since he moved to the United States in 1989, Chaudhry is excited about a mayoral election.
“Everybody's happy because we've never seen anyone [come] like that directly to us,” Chaudhry said.
Mayor-elect Raman is of Indian descent and an immigrant. When she takes office, she will be the first South Asian mayor of Los Angeles. Chaudhry is proud of that distinction. But what means more to him is that Raman spent time walking the streets of Little Bangladesh, visiting businesses and speaking to community members about their concerns. Chaudhry said that, because of that, he asked all his customers and family members to vote for Raman. At dinner parties, Chaudhry said, Bengalis would share how they were excited to vote for Raman in this election.
In the Little Bangladesh area, vote returns to date show Raman with a 2-to-1 margin over Mayor Karen Bass.
"Hopefully she's gonna take care of the city," Chaudhry said.
His business has been hit hard after federal immigration raids ramped up in Southern California. People are afraid to leave their homes for fear of being taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And for those who do come to his store, he said, they are met with increased prices because of tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump's administration on imported goods.
"Everybody's suffering actually these days," Chaudhry said. “If you see, Nov. 3 is a huge change because people [are] fed up."
Chaudhry also said city services don’t do a good job keeping the streets clean. So he takes it upon himself to pick up trash in front of his shop.
A few weeks before Election Day, Raman posted a social media video from Little Bangladesh addressing the trash along the street.
His relatives in New York told Chaudhry that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also of Indian descent, has “changed the whole city.” He’s hoping for some of that change in Los Angeles when Raman takes office in December.
While Raman’s Indian background was a feature of her campaign, it was “not the central thesis,” said Sara Sadhwani, an associate professor of politics at Pomona College and a senior researcher with AAPI Data.
In 2020, when Kamala Harris, also of Indian descent, was running for vice president, Sadhwani said, she conducted research on Indian Americans who wanted to see more representation in politics. In 2024, some of them turned away from Harris.
“When the economy is bad, identity slips away as the top issue on someone's mind,” she said.
Identity politics, Sadhwani said, was important in 2008 when the nation elected the first Black president, Barack Obama.
“ We're ushering in a new political generation of millennials and Gen Z; diversity is just expected at this point amongst a vast majority of Americans,” she said, highlighting how at the last census more people identified as multiracial.
Nationally too, Sadhwani said, thec ountry is seeing a shift. South Asians have gone from “model minority” to “governing minority.”
”The old script was that for Indian Americans, for South Asians, that being that quiet professional is what success meant,” she said. “When we look at Raman and also Mamdani, they're fighting for executive power in very visible, very messy city politics, and they won not by following the rules, but they won by challenging the status quo.”
That idea resonates with Faizah Malik, managing attorney for housing justice at Public Counsel and a former L.A. City Council candidate.
“When we were growing up, our parents said, ‘Just keep your head down, go to school, get educated, make a nice life for your family, and that's it,’” she said. “Politics was not really part of the conversation, but I think what we're seeing is that we can run for office, we can win by being our full selves.”
This is an exciting time, she said, for “South Asian political empowerment,” with Raman set to join Mamdani in leading the country’s two largest cities.
Malik said that, as a housing advocate, she cares about Raman’s fight “to build more housing around the city that people can afford, her fight to keep renters in their homes, to prevent homelessness, her fight to try and really solve our homelessness crisis but also be efficient with our public dollars.”
Nikita Chaudhry, an actor and political organizer, wants to see Raman revitalize L.A.’s film industry, “to call the city the home of Hollywood again.”
“Having that kind of representation and knowing that it exists is really exciting because I think and hope it will activate South Asian Americans of all ages to get more involved in their communities,” Chaudhry said.
Raman's and Mamdani’s victories were years in the making, Chaudhry said: from organizing in their communities to holding other elected positions to engaging voters who are otherwise ignored by elected officials. And she hopes that it will inspire other South Asians to become more involved in their communities.
“If you're feeling activated, if you're feeling excited, that's great," she said. "Take that energy and the time and the skills and the specificity of what fires you up towards your local organization, towards your neighborhood, towards your community.”
Topline:
As the race to represent L.A.’s Council District 9 remains too close to call, candidate Estuardo Mazariegos’ campaign has accused the campaign of Jose Ugarte, the front-runner, of potential ballot tampering.
The allegations: The Mazariegos campaign made the accusations Monday, saying it had filed a complaint with the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. They alleged that representatives for the Ugarte campaign had collected voters’ ballots to drop off without signing the appropriate line identifying the individual who returned the ballot.
What happens now: Mike Sanchez, a spokesperson for the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, said his office had forwarded the news release to the District Attorney for review.
What election law says: Sanchez pointed to the California Elections Code, which says that a “ballot shall not be disqualified solely because the person authorized to return it did not provide on the identification envelope their name or signature.” Under California law, a voter can authorize another person to return their mail-in ballot — an approach also called ballot harvesting.
Read on…for the Ugarte campaign’s response.
As the race to represent L.A.’s Council District 9 remains too close to call, candidate Estuardo Mazariegos’ campaign has accused the campaign of Jose Ugarte, the front-runner, of potential ballot tampering.
The Mazariegos campaign made the accusations Monday, saying it had filed a complaint with the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. In a press release, the campaign alleged that representatives for the Ugarte campaign had collected voters’ ballots to drop off without signing the appropriate line identifying the individual who returned the ballot.
In one case, Mazariegos’ team accused Ugarte campaigners of filling out a ballot on a voter’s behalf without her knowledge of who she was voting for.
“Taking people’s ballots, filling them out, and not following legal voter assistance guidelines in a district that has faced so much disenfranchisement is disgusting,” Mazariegos said in a statement.
Mike Sanchez, a spokesperson for the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, said his office had forwarded the news release to the district attorney for review. He also pointed to the California Elections Code, which says that a “ballot shall not be disqualified solely because the person authorized to return it did not provide on the identification envelope their name or signature.”
Under California law, a voter can authorize another person to return their mail-in ballot — an approach also called ballot harvesting.
Justin Levitt, a professor of constitutional law at Loyola Marymount University, told AirTalk Tuesday that there is no legal limit on the number of ballots an individual can turn in on others’ behalf, so long as they aren’t being compensated per ballot returned.
“Even if there were some sort of administrative wrongdoing, as long as there's no indication of fraud with the ballot itself, those ballots will all be counted,” he said.
Levitt said, however, that signing a ballot and then handing it to someone else to fill out would be illegal.
“ To the extent that there are allegations now that the DA may investigate, I suspect that's what they'll be focusing on,” Levitt continued.
The Mazariegos campaign also sent a collection of photos to the press, including one of a campaigner, USC student Amir King, returning a stack of ballots at a ballot drop box.
Ugarte’s campaign responded to the accusations by pointing to a post by King on Instagram in which he accused the Mazariegos campaign of bullying him and making false claims about him.
“Why is he attacking me? For participating in our democracy, as is my right under California state law and for helping others participate in democracy, as is their right under California state law,” King said in the post.
As of Tuesday morning, just under 300 ballots separate Ugarte and Mazariegos, with 44,000 ballots left to count in L.A. County. It’s not clear how many ballots in Council District 9 are left to count.
