At the northern edge of Los Angeles city limits, there is a 300-acre piece of wild land. It is home to oak trees and sagebrush, year-round water, gullies and streams and mountain lions. It is the ancestral homeland to the Gabrielino-Tongva and Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians. It is now slated for imminent development into a luxury gated community called “Canyon Hills”. This project memorializes a thriving ecosystem in an effort to not only preserve the land, but also to question what we value most in the face of the climate crisis.

If construction begins, it would mean the destruction of mature sycamore and oak trees, it would mean grading some ridges down by over 80 feet, it would mean paving over countless streams and waterfalls, and it would mean years of noise and pollution in the community. In a city that is in the middle of a housing and homelessness crisis, where an average of nearly 6 unhoused community members die every day, another gated development of single-family homes is unconscionable.

In the system we are all operating under, land like Canyon Hills only holds value as a place for potential development. This system is enormously successful at creating wealth, but it simply isn’t possible to continue working with if we have any intention of mitigating the worst outcomes of rising global temperatures. I am inspired by the work of Richard Misrach, who uses beauty as a means to interest people in an underlying story. I want this work to function as both a memorial to an immensely beautiful place and a catalyst for people to imagine what a more inclusive and sustainable land ethic might look like. A land ethic that looks at these ridges and canyons vibrating with life and places just as much value on their continued existence as the potential profit that could be extracted from them.

I have hiked and fallen and crawled through this place for over a year, desperately trying to materialize its light into physical negatives. I might not be able to stop the land from being destroyed, but at least I can bear witness to its sublime beauty while it still exists.