Whilst many companies and universities rush to desert their local weather targets, range commitments and small-d democratic values for concern of reprisal from an more and more authoritarian Trump administration, you would possibly suppose an environmental group based mostly in progressive West Los Angeles, no less than, would maintain agency to its ideas.
Alas, you’d be mistaken.
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The Bay Basis — a high-profile nonprofit that works with authorities officers to guard and restore one among Southern California’s most beloved pure sources, Santa Monica Bay — has been quietly scrubbing references to local weather change, environmental justice and variety initiatives from working paperwork and its web site.
A web page on the Bay Basis’s web site that beforehand defined how local weather change is affecting the watershed — as seen on the Jan. 21, 2025, model of the web page, obtainable by way of the Web Archive — was rewritten to delete all references to local weather. The group additionally eliminated its Justice, Fairness, Range & Inclusion web page, which had beforehand pledged its dedication to “fairness and inclusion throughout race, gender, age, faith, id, and expertise.”
Additionally alarming: a draft work plan offered final month to the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Fee.
Earlier than the Environmental Safety Company doles out federal funding for Santa Monica Bay restoration, it should approve a piece plan written yearly by the fee and the Bay Basis, then submitted to the EPA.
Usually it’s a easy course of. However with President Trump and his science-denying appointees making an attempt to carry again cash for something associated to local weather or environmental injustice — regardless of clear proof that the planet is warming, and that low-income households and other people of colour are particularly in danger — this 12 months, adjustments to the draft plan recommend that the protectors of Santa Monica Bay determined they couldn’t threat incurring Trump’s wrath.
Outdoors of a listing of acronyms, each use of the phrases “local weather change” on this 12 months’s draft plan has been struck via with a single black line. Additionally axed: a plan to “assist efforts of deprived communities to attain wholesome habitats, implement inexperienced infrastructure, and scale back air pollution.”
Final 12 months’s work plan, in the meantime, featured a bit on fairness in underserved communities.
On this 12 months’s plan, it’s nowhere to be discovered.
“That is most likely solely the start. We’re solely slightly greater than a month into the [Trump] administration,” stated Walter Lamb, a neighborhood environmental activist, who introduced the deletions to my consideration.
“This sends a fairly wonderful message, {that a} native restoration fee that has local weather change written proper into its mission would scrub it proper out of its work plan,” he added.
Tom Ford, chief government of the Bay Basis, handles younger white abalone on the Aquarium of the Pacific in Lengthy Seaside in 2019.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Occasions)
I requested Tom Ford, the Bay Basis’s chief government, for an evidence. He gave me an easy reply: Underneath Trump, he stated, there are “new guidelines by which federal funding is made obtainable” — and so they don’t permit spending cash on local weather initiatives, or packages that assist range, fairness and inclusion (DEI).
“We’re stepping in line,” Ford stated.
The place to start with such a terrifying confession?
To start out: Underneath the U.S. Structure, the chief department enforces the regulation. However Congress writes the regulation. And the judicial department interprets the regulation, settling disputes between Congress and the president.
After I requested Ford to again up his declare that Trump pressured the group’s hand, he despatched me a Jan. 27 memo from the White Home price range chief. The memo ordered a wide-ranging spending freeze, particularly calling out “using Federal sources to advance Marxist fairness, transgenderism, and inexperienced new deal social engineering.”
The factor is, two federal judges have issued preliminary injunctions blocking the spending freeze, in response to lawsuits claiming the president has no authority to dam cash permitted by Congress. Final week, a choose wrote that the freeze “basically undermines the distinct constitutional roles of every department of our authorities.”
Ford additionally despatched me a memo from the U.S. Workplace of Personnel Administration stemming from Trump’s order to finish DEI packages at federal companies. That order, too, has been quickly blocked by a federal choose.
Ford addressed criticisms of the Bay Basis’s choices at a public workshop final month. He stated he and the nonprofit have been “feeling the burden of those challenges which can be being put in entrance of us.”
“None of this has been straightforward on us. And I definitely don’t anticipate it to be straightforward on anyone else,” he stated.
I’m sympathetic, to an extent. The Bay Basis depends on federal grants for the overwhelming majority of its funds.
Bay Basis workers study progress on a dune restoration venture at Level Dume, on the north finish of Santa Monica Bay, in 2021.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Occasions)
However that is how democracies wither and die. Tutorial specialists are more and more warning that when critics muzzle themselves, it’s a clear signal of rising authoritarianism. It’s occurring now within the U.S., with examples as diverse as billionaire media executives killing opinion items vital of Trump and environmental nonprofits referring to the Gulf of Mexico because the “Gulf of America” as a result of Trump has decreed it have to be so.
Yale College historian Timothy Snyder, creator of the bestselling e-book “On Tyranny,” has drawn an important lesson from his intensive analysis into Nazi Germany and different authoritarian regimes: “Don’t obey prematurely.”
“A lot of the energy of authoritarianism is freely given,” he writes. “In occasions like these, people suppose forward about what a extra repressive authorities will need, after which provide themselves with out being requested. A citizen who adapts on this manner is educating energy what it might do.”
That’s precisely what the Bay Basis is doing. Identical to all the opposite companies and establishments that ought to be standing up for local weather progress and democracy and the downtrodden, it’s selecting threat aversion — and welcoming Trump and Elon Musk to escalate their assaults on science and fundamental human decency.
Jon Christensen, a UCLA environmental historian, stated it’s particularly necessary for California to face sturdy.
“If we are able to’t stand by our decades-long commitments to addressing local weather change [when] we’ve spent billions of {dollars} on it, and if we are able to’t stand by our decades-long commitments to fairness, who’s going to?” he requested.
However even right here, some officers are caving to Trump.
After a number of months groveling to the president in hopes of ultimately securing federal reduction for wildfire-ravaged Los Angeles County, Gov. Gavin Newsom has began gabbing with MAGA leaders on his new podcast. Within the first episode, he reneged on his previous assist for the LGBTQ neighborhood, saying it’s “deeply unfair” when transgender girls take part in girls’s sports activities — mirroring a key speaking level of Trump’s presidential marketing campaign.
A number of Democratic politicians, to their credit score, spoke out towards Newsom’s dangerous remarks.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first podcast episode featured MAGA provocateur Charlie Kirk, proper.
(Related Press)
However when members of the general public spoke up in regards to the deletion of fairness and local weather commitments eventually month’s restoration fee assembly, fee board members stated nothing in response to them.
After I reached out to board member Bruce Reznik, although, he was sympathetic to either side. Reznik, government director of advocacy group LA Waterkeeper, advised me he understands why the Bay Basis “appears like they don’t have any alternative however to appease this administration.” He additionally hopes to see extra nonprofits, corporations and neighborhood leaders “arise towards these absurd and draconian directives.”
“It’s infuriating that we’ve a federal administration the place nonprofits working in the direction of a extra simply and resilient society need to concern retaliation only for doing their jobs,” Reznik stated in an electronic mail.
Hopefully, Reznik and different board members will insist at a future fee assembly that employees restore local weather change and environmental justice initiatives to the work plan. If Trump’s EPA insists on testing the bounds of the Structure and tries to withhold federal funding, the fee ought to take it to court docket.
No matter occurs subsequent, Ford stated the Bay Basis remains to be dedicated “to range, to equal alternative and a tradition of belonging.” These values are essential to mapping out the way forward for Santa Monica Bay, partially due to the lengthy historical past of race- and class-driven exclusion and displacement alongside the California coast.
And though Ford wouldn’t guarantee me that the group will nonetheless be enthusiastic about local weather change explicitly, he did say that ocean acidification, sea stage rise, worsening drought-flood whiplash and rising temperatures — among the foremost local weather change results on Santa Monica Bay — shall be entrance and middle in its packages.
I hope that’s true. However UCLA’s Christensen has his doubts.
“With out written commitments, we simply have casual guarantees, and too usually no accountability,” he stated.
A single nonprofit can’t flip the tide of authoritarianism by itself. However traditionally, self-censorship and science denial don’t result in good locations. As a substitute of obeying prematurely, the Bay Basis ought to set an instance.
ONE MORE THING
Dodgers left fielder Trayce Thompson tries and fails to catch a house run hit by the Padres’ Wil Myers through the Nationwide League Division Sequence at Dodger Stadium in October 2022.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Occasions)
After I wrote a column final 12 months calling on Dodgers proprietor Mark Walter to drop 76 gasoline proprietor Phillips 66 as a Dodger Stadium advertiser, I had no thought whether or not my thought would get any traction.
The Dodgers nonetheless haven’t acted on my suggestion. However this week, one among California’s prime politicians, state Senate Majority Chief Lena Gonzalez (D-Lengthy Seaside), embraced my pitch. In a letter to Walter, she urged him to finish all sponsorship offers with oil and fuel corporations, writing that “persevering with to affiliate these companies with our beloved boys in blue just isn’t in our neighborhood or the planet’s greatest curiosity.”
Extra particulars right here in my story for The Occasions. The Dodgers didn’t reply to my request for remark.
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