Elysian Park – In a stunning display of incompetence and indifference, the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks (RAP) recently decided that the best way to care for a children's learning garden was to destroy it. Yes, RAP, in its infinite wisdom, ordered the destruction of a beloved, publicly funded children's garden. Originally established 25 years ago as the Elysian Park Community Tree Planting Project, this lush forest was home to the Northeast LA Forest School, which offers nature-based early childhood education programs in a cool green space that offers a haven from Los Angeles' vast hardscape.
It was a place where children's imaginations could fly free and nature was both playground and teacher. Located in one of the city's oldest and most iconic parks, the gardens were a wooded sanctuary where children could explore, play and learn about the natural world in a safe and stimulating environment.
The garden features a variety of native plants, trees, and shrubs that were carefully selected to reflect the local ecosystem and attract wildlife, including birds, butterflies, and pollinators. Listening to the gentle chirps of songbirds and spotting acorn woodpeckers brought joy and perspective to children and city-dwelling adults alike. Overall, the school was a cherished community resource, providing an important space for children to learn, grow, and develop a lifelong appreciation for nature.
Then in late June, contractors equipped with chainsaws and skid steers got to work. They cut down the forest like lumberjacks, felling hundreds of trees and shrubs and destroying the school's educational plaques identifying various plants. Predictably, local residents are outraged, labelling the fiasco as “ecocide” and demanding explanations.
Why was the Forest School for Children's Woodland Garden demolished? RAP claims they were simply following the Los Angeles Fire Department's “brush removal standards.” But in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, a LAFD spokesperson said they were “saddened by the approach that was taken in this brush removal.”
The problems began when RAP installed a metal shed next to the children's garden, triggering the fire department's Protective Space Policy. Protective Space Policy is intended to reduce fire risk in high-risk areas by maintaining vegetation up to 200 feet away from any structure year-round. But what RAP did was the equivalent of using a flamethrower to light a candle. Instead of carefully applying Protective Space protocols and maintaining the vegetation year-round, RAP hired a contractor to do a one-time removal job. This erroneous implementation of Protective Space unnecessarily destroyed hundreds of native trees and shrubs that had thrived for decades.
It is especially puzzling that RAP did not involve its own biologists to oversee the project during peak nesting season (February through August), which resulted in the destruction of bird nests and the discovery of dead red-legged hawk chicks in the rubble, presumably crushed by a skid steer without the driver realizing it.
Nesting season is marked by the appearance of fledglings and young birds in the understory of the forest because they remain near their nests for weeks until they are fully capable of flight and independent. This highlights the problems with relying on city arborists to manage more natural spaces. Arboriculture is an important discipline, but training focuses on caring for individual trees, often focusing on disease and branches falling on people and objects, and not on wildlife and the broader ecological relationships that sustain entire forest ecosystems. Failure to understand the complex interactions between species and their environments can undermine forest health and resilience, leading to unintended ecological consequences such as loss of biodiversity and the disruption of natural processes that occur when forests are bulldozed. At the very least, RAP should have had biologists conduct bird surveys before the work and oversee the work.
Outside of the Los Angeles hills, much of the habitat for urban wildlife is provided by urban forests. The term “urban forest” is used to refer to all vegetation within a city. It is most commonly found along streets and in landscaped parks. But nature also exists in less-manicured parks and around homes. We call these more natural places forests. While trees along streets, in parks, and in yards are important in cities, the benefits of forests outweigh them in terms of lowering ambient temperatures, providing shade, controlling stormwater runoff, providing habitat, and serving as stopovers for migratory birds. For these and many other reasons, forests are a critical, yet apparently overlooked, component of public health, social justice, and community well-being.
Green space is Los Angeles' most precious resource because of its scarcity, so management of these forests should be a priority. The City would be wise to recognize that our health, well-being, and resilience may be directly tied to our urban forests. Nature in cities is not a luxury, it is essential to the human psyche and is as vital to our lives as water and bread.
With the gardens destroyed, the Children's Forest School is looking for a new location. But Los Angeles is short on parks, ranking 74th out of 100 cities. Los Angeles' lack of wooded green space makes finding a suitable new location for the school a big challenge. Across Los Angeles, the loss of trees and natural green spaces and forests is happening piece by piece. A few trees here, a forest there, the Forest School Garden in Elysian Park. It's the death of green space by a thousand pieces. When habitats are carved up to make room for warehouses, large developments, or backyard ADUs, wildlife disappears too. The more we cut down, the less and less is left.
When a Los Angeles City Councilman says the city made a “big mistake by not communicating with the community groups that frequent the site” before launching the “Chainsaw Massacre,” you know something is terribly wrong. There's no hiding the hollowness of a city that claims to care about the environment while destroying the forest gardens where the next generation of environmentalists learned and played. Frankly, nature is not a priori, no matter how much city policymakers pay lip service to it. Soon the city will be looking for the next forest or grove to steal its heart.
(Diana Nicol is an ecological gardener and director of the Los Angeles Audubon Society. She transforms gardens into living protests to restore the natural beauty and sustainability of California's old-growth forests, and works with attorneys to protect land and communities to stop the unnecessary loss of trees and the destruction of California's remaining forests. To contact her, [email protected].