LOS ANGELES - Pedro Hernández, California State Program Manager for GreenLatinos, issued the following statement following the harassment of two Los Angeles County park staff at Whittier Narrows.
“Yesterday’s harassment of two Latino Los Angeles County Parks staff at Whittier Narrows Recreation Area is an unacceptable continuation of ICE’s activities. This incident is not isolated; there have been multiple reports of harassment involving state natural resource agency staff operating clearly marked vehicles. This disturbing trend represents an attempted reversal of years of advocacy that have worked to make equitable park access a priority in California.
But we will not go back. All Californians—regardless of background—deserve to feel safe in our parks and in their communities, free from intimidation or fear. Despite these actions, GreenLatinos will continue to work to ensure our communities and green spaces remain safe, welcoming, and accessible for all.”
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GreenLatinos (NOTE: GreenLatinos is ONE WORD) is an active comunidad of Latino/a/e leaders, emboldened by the power and wisdom of our culture, united to demand equity and dismantle racism, resourced to win our environmental, conservation, and climate justice battles, and driven to secure our political, economic, cultural, and environmental liberation.
FRESNO, California. - Pedro Hernández, California State Program Manager for GreenLatinos, issued the following statement following the U.S. House of Representatives’ approval of a package of three appropriations bills that fund the bulk of the federal government’s environmental protection and clean energy programs, including the Commerce–Justice–Science, Energy and Water Development, and Interior and Environment measures.
“The U.S. House of Representatives’ passage of this package of three appropriations bills is an important step toward protecting essential programs and staff that directly affect the health and economic stability of Latino communities across California. Bipartisan action to reject the most severe proposed cuts helps ensure that Congress—not the Trump administration—directs how taxpayer dollars are spent.
For Latino communities that have long borne the brunt of pollution and chronic underinvestment, advancing and safeguarding federal funding is not optional—it is critical. These investments support historic preservation, public lands, clean air and water, resilient infrastructure, and improved public health, while helping to address legacy environmental injustices. As this package moves to the Senate, it is essential that lawmakers continue to uphold strong funding levels and enforce guardrails that prevent the misuse or withholding of resources our communities depend on.”
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About GreenLatinos
GreenLatinos (NOTE: GreenLatinos is ONE WORD) is an active comunidad of Latino/a/e leaders, emboldened by the power and wisdom of our culture, united to demand equity and dismantle racism, resourced to win our environmental, conservation, and climate justice battles, and driven to secure our political, economic, cultural, and environmental liberation.
In a move that’s sending shockwaves through conservation and cultural preservation communities, President Trump has unveiled his proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2026—a “skinny budget” that outlines his administration’s top priorities. This plan is a roadmap to unravel six decades of environmental progress.
This budget, far from being a neutral financial document, signals an aggressive shift in priorities. Protecting our natural and cultural heritage is undermined by its aim to deregulate, extract, and abolish the federal government’s responsibility to ensure environmental health for all. Each of these impacts disproportionately harms Latinos and the environment we and our animal relatives rely on.
Nature and Heritage on the Chopping Block
Trump’s budget proposal doesn’t mince words when it comes to cutting funding. Entire programs face elimination, and core agencies are being reshaped with a narrowed focus. Among the hardest hit:
🔎 Spotlight: The Historic Preservation Fund
One of the most alarming proposed cuts is to the Historic Preservation Fund (HPF), which faces a $158 million reduction—nearly wiping it out.
The HPF plays a vital role in protecting America’s irreplaceable heritage. It provides funding to state and tribal historic preservation offices, supports the preservation of African American, Indigenous, and other underrepresented heritage sites among more histories of national importance, and ensures that future generations can access these stories and places.
The administration argues that many of the projects it funds are of “local significance” and already have matching funds from state or private sources. But this justification dangerously overlooks the federal government's unique role in preserving nationally important but locally situated history—including landmarks of the civil rights movement, tribal cultural sites, and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Without the HPF, hundreds of preservation efforts across the country could be delayed, downsized, or canceled entirely. It's a devastating blow to the very fabric of our shared national story.
Federalism or Abdication?
While the budget emphasizes “federalism”--a system of government in which power is divided between the federal government, states, Tribal nations, and territories–and a return to “core missions,” critics argue that this is a euphemism for abandoning federal responsibility in managing public lands and resources. By pushing more responsibilities onto states, tribes, and local governments—often without adequate funding—this plan creates a fragmented, under-resourced system of environmental and cultural stewardship.
Programs deemed “non-essential” or “of local interest”—such as small national park sites or community recreation initiatives—are deprioritized in favor of projects with narrowly defined national significance.
At the heart of the budget is a deregulatory agenda that favors energy development, timber production, and mineral extraction over conservation and sustainability. For example, some key budget changes include:
Programs that provide technical conservation support to farmers and ranchers—crucial for sustainable land management and affordable food production—are on the chopping block.
What’s at Stake
The total estimated impact to programs aligned with GreenLatinos’ Public Land Program priorities alone is nearly $5 billion. That number climbs signicantly higher when you include broader cuts to climate and ecological initiatives.
This is more than just a budget proposal—it’s a stark reflection of the administration’s inhumane values, and a call to action for anyone who cares about the future of our environment, public lands, and cultural history. Contact your members of Congress today and urge them to fight for fully funding these programs and agencies ensuring community health and prosperity.
As Congress takes up debate over this proposal, the stakes couldn’t be higher. The future of the our natural world and irreplaceable cultural heritage—hang in the balance.
This October I was invited to speak at the UC Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative Fall Symposium to discuss environmental justice and water access in California’s San Joaquin Valley. As a lifelong resident of the Valley and graduate of UC Berkeley, it presented an opportunity to connect my professional expertise with my valuable lived experience.
Now more than ever, places like California’s San Joaquin Valley provide insight into understanding the US Southwest and the challenges posed by intense water insecurity - resulting in many cascading impacts for people, the environment, and the economy.
To this effect, the San Joaquin Valley is a land of extremes.
The San Joaquin Valley exists in the very center of California where it serves as the state's most fertile and agriculturally productive regions. Most of the nation’s agricultural produce is grown here but this same food system is the heart of severe environmental injustices which disproportionately affect the region’s significant Latino population, which makes up nearly 50% of the total population in the region’s eight counties.
Despite record agricultural productivity, many San Joaquin Valley residents suffer from severe economic hardship, limited access to healthcare, and inadequate housing which only further exacerbate the impacts from air pollution, water contamination, extreme heat, and pesticide exposure.
As somewhere with extreme conservative political leanings in a state that is widely known as a liberal paradise. While the Valley faces unprecedented water and agricultural stressors, it remains an unparalleled pillar of California’s ethnic diversity and biodiversity. And in the face of injustice and environmental collapse the San Joaquin Valley is home to some of the most innovative nature-based solutions and social justice champions including but certainly not limited to Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
Yet, this region of extremes is largely invisible to the general population.
WATER: SOURCE OF LIFE, CAUSE OF CONFLICT
The extremes in question can be understood through the history of water.
San Joaquin Valley hydrology is governed by its headwaters located eastward toward the Sierra Nevadas, home of the world-renowned public lands such as Yosemite National Park, and stretches west to the coastal mountains. From north to south, concrete lined canals deliver surface water to the water-scare southern California.
Historically, annual floods produced a vast network of wetlands and created the Tule Lake - the largest body of freshwater east of the Mississippi. Centuries of flooding and uninterrupted water flows seeped through the soil to replenish the subsurface with deep groundwater reserves. It was once the case that floods would inundate the region so profoundly that many could boat as far as the San Francisco Bay area. Even the state capital of Sacramento was flooded in 1862.
Yet through the onset of white settlement in the mid-to late 1800s, the hydrological foundation began a seismic shift towards ecological collapse. Fertile soils were the draw of government-sponsored westward settlement. Genocide of indigenous tribes and new technology changed the San Jaoquin Valley’s hydrology forever.
Rivers were rerouted, land was privatized, and large-scale, extractive corporate agriculture converted wildlife habitat on such a magnitude that many claim it is this region represents the “largest human alteration of the Earth’s surface”. Some studies further estimate that the San Joaquin Valley has lost over 90 percent of its grasslands, wetlands, floodplain, and riparian woodlands.
The resulting disconnected habitats drove several species into extinction, and continues to imperil existing wildlife including, but not limited to,the Fresno Kangaroo Rat, Kit Fox, and Delta Smelt. The region also serves as a critical segment of the Pacific Flyway, hosting 60 percent of the wintering waterfowl and 20 percent of the waterfowl population in the entire United States.
Growing Crops and Growing Inequities
The confluence of issues have resulted in the environment and communities of color, Latinos in particular, being impacted most severely today.
All of this came to a head following two decades of consecutive droughts in the twenty first century where dozens of disadvantaged unincorporated communities and the remaining slivers of habitat went without water. The shortage of surface water supplies fostered an intense over-dependence on groundwater leading to never-before-seen rates of depletion and the literal sinking of the valley floor at a rate of an inch per year.
The economic inequality of the region exacerbated the inability to locally develop drinking water infrastructure such as new, deeper wells and water filtration systems. In addition to the general unavailability of water, it was later shown that drought also contributed to disproportionate impacts of water pollution. In the context of modern water scarcity challenges Latinos were affected first, affected the hardest, and affected the longest. Predominantly rural Latino communities like Cantua Creek are stressed by water infrastructure debt, polluted drinking water, and inhumane unaffordable water prices for years.
Moreover, the drought worsened the Latino community’s disproportionate lack of access to healthy, resilient green spaces and to the many benefits of nature. The Hispanic Access Foundation has found that Latinos and other communities of color in the US are three times as likely to live somewhere that is “nature deprived” than white communities. The extreme lack of water, municipal water restrictions, and increased cost of water exacerbated the “nature gap” across the region.
The aforementioned habitat conversion resulted in “park poor” communities that were surrounded by agriculture and other facilities that have caused a net loss in biodiversity such as Fresno’s Amazon Distribution Center. Latinos and people of color disproportionately reside in these communities due to the historic redlining that occurred in the region. Many communities were explicitly identified as areas to withhold investment in basic community infrastructure such as drinking water systems, housing, and community parks as was the case in the 1971 Tulare County General Plan and the 1972 Kern County Housing Element.
Because there are a lack of parks and protected public lands on the San Joaquin Valley Floor, peoples’ homes and yards were the only green areas available but many yards went fallow and dry throughout the drought.
Furthermore, even the region’s public lands, which have the highest forms of federal environmental protections were adversely impacted by the drought. The headwaters of the Sierra Mountains were drought-stricken, resulting in water being absorbed into the mountainside that would otherwise reach the valley floor under normal conditions.
Down on the valley floor where pockets of the National Wildlife Refuge System offer a last stand for imperiled species, the wells that refuges rely on to maintain their wetland ecosystems could not reach the declining groundwater levels. National refuge water demand was out competed by farmers and under-prioritized by California’s water rights system which meant that they also were not receiving their federal water allocations.
REIMAGINING SOLUTIONS
As desperate as the challenges may seem, there remain many examples of innovative solutions that have set precedent across the country.
It was San Joaquin Valley residents that led statewide efforts to address the disproportionate impact of water insecurity on Latinos by creating the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund - the nation’s first drinking water funding program which will implement California’s “Human Right to Water”. Many of the same advocates were instrumental in the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in the California legislature which was also the nation’s first effort to prevent adverse impacts from the overuse of groundwater supplies.
San Joaquin Valley residents were integral in setting national precedent for nature protection through advocating to ensure California was the first state in the nation to advance the 30x30 movement to address the climate and biodiversity loss crisis by conserving at least 30% of lands and watts by the year 2030. This has contributed to various national monuments being expanded and the creation of the first state park in over a decade within the San Joaquin Valley.
Additionally, there are many organizations such as Latino Outdoors and Justice Outside who act to promote local outdoor enjoyment and environmental policy influence among underrepresented communities and connect workers to environmental sector employment opportunities, most notably through the Outdoor Educators Institute which has a Fresno area cohort.
In the land of extremes, a dark history turns toward an increasingly bright future.
While many of the injustices faced nationally by Latinos are found in the San Joaquin Valley, many of the solutions to these issues are found in the GreenLatinos’ updated Latino Climate Justice Framework (LCJF). For the next four years, the LCJF will guide GreenLatinos’ strategic national and state-level advocacy to advance our mission of environmental liberation for all marginalized communities.
WHY WILDERNESS?
At the heart of the word “Wilderness” is a call to action to preserve America’s most threatened ecosystems.
The Wilderness Act of 1964 created one of the strongest and most durable types of U.S. land protection. Under this legislation, wilderness areas can be created to preserve an area where nature prevails. In the 60 years since its passage, the National Wilderness Preservation System has grown to include over 800 wilderness areas, totaling nearly 112 million acres across 44 states.
Central to many Latino cultures and traditions is a sacred relationship with la naturaleza. Plants, animals, insects, fungi, rivers, valleys, mountains, hills, grasslands, lakes and more have shaped who we are and our stories. By identifying and designating Wilderness areas and Wilderness Study Areas, our more than human relatives whom we depend on for our wellbeing receive the respect that they deserve in public land management policy. Places significant to Latino histories and cultures with wilderness characteristics can be added to the National Wilderness Preservation System, creating more places where our stories are told.
In order to cultivate a vibrant, effective and diverse movement para las áreas silvestre, GreenLatinos proudly joined the National Wilderness Coalition (NWC)!
THE INAUGURAL NATIONAL WILDERNESS WEEK
From September 9-11, 2024, the NWC convened nearly 60 advocates from conservation organizations, grassroots groups, and Tribal members Washington D.C. for three days of events and meetings with congressional offices to say “wilderness is essential”. Our call to action was simple: protect the Wilderness Act and find partners to grow a vibrant, diverse and modern wilderness movement.
In DC, the National Wilderness Coalition hosted over 30 meetings with members of Congress; hosted an insightful roundtable of the current challenges faced by wilderness advocates throughout the country; and awarded our first Congressional Wilderness Champion Awards to Senator Martin Heinrich (NM), Representative Melanie Stansbury (NM), Representative Diana DeGette (CO), Representative Joe Neguse (CO), and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (AZ).
The NWC Fly-In was the first of many events which will support the relationships needed to win on our issues, and cultivate elected and appointed public officials who champion equitable efforts for the preservation of wilderness.
OUR PAST AND FUTURE
Latinos experience some of the highest rates of cumulative pollution and nature deprivation. We are underrepresented in the federal land administration workforce. Our stories and histories are not equitably preserved and represented across public lands. This myriad of issues is heightened by constant challenges to the responsibility of the American public to steward nature. In 2024 alone, the federal agencies charged with administering public land and water have been under threat of severe budget cuts and a virtual impasse largely due to obstruction from the House of Representatives. The urgency to conserve nature and provide people necessary resources to be stewards has never been greater.
Since its inception there have been some clear problems with how the Wilderness Act has reinforced a Euro-Western belief that humanity is separate, and not a part of, nature. For example, the definition of wilderness as defined in this historic bill is an area, “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Many have interpreted this language as a reinforcement of historic policy which dispossessed native people of their home places.
To be sure, the national movement to protect nature has not been inclusive, or representative of all who depend on the integrity of these places–especially Tribal nations and Indigenous communities who represent those who have been visitors and dwellers upon all lands under the domain of the United States including public lands.
But in a short time, numerous justice-centered movements have shaped the way conservation gets done in the U.S. and territories, resulting in significant improvements for a national conservation movement that is led by and benefits everyone. Under the leadership of Secretary Deb Haaland alone our nation has benefitted from these actions and others which advance Tribal nations and Indigenous communities’ stewardship of lands and waters.
The 60th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act marks the beginning of a new chapter for the role of Wilderness Areas in accomplishing our national goal to restore, connect and conserve 30% of U.S. land and water by 2030 through a collaborative and inclusive approach to conservation.
GET INVOLVED
There is much work to be done. If your organization is interested in learning more about the National Wilderness Coalition and the GreenLatinos Public Land Program, contact us at [email protected] and [email protected].
