Stacked behind Los Angeles like an outsized Hollywood film backdrop, the San Gabriel Mountains exert a magnetic force. The pull is strong on a warm Saturday in early March, when I join what feels like half the city to wander the boulder-filled wash at the mouth of Eaton Canyon, a verdant cleave in the foothills. That attraction to the places where concrete dissipates into dirt and sagebrush, streams and oaks, has only amplified during the coronavirus pandemic. Time in nature is suddenly an urgent necessity, the best way to tend to our well-being amid the turbulence.

So it was a fitting time for the Great American Outdoors Act to debut. The bill, which senators introduced in early March and which became law in early August, provides over $9 billion to start fixing the maintenance backlog at federal lands like national parks and forests. And it guarantees full funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), the longstanding federal program that directs fees from oil and gas drilling to land conservation and recreation development.

The law that established LWCF in 1964 made it possible for Congress to eventually take in $900 million for parks and open spaces every year. But the program, which has benefited Eaton Canyon and many more locations in the San Gabriel Mountains and across the nation, has been allotted its full funding by Congress only twice since Lyndon B. Johnson signed the program into law.

A fully funded, permanently authorized LWCF has been the top policy goal for Trust for Public Land for three decades. Making it happen was a colossal endeavor that required a diverse, visionary coalition of allies—from nonprofits to small-business owners, legislators to concerned citizens—working across decades to fight for one of the most important conservation wins of our lifetime.

While he’d scrapped to purchase his own access points over the years, Arnold knew that once logging began closer to the river, it would affect the immersive natural experience that had first drawn him to the area—and that kept his customers coming back. He sought a way to protect those views and open up crucial public access. Arnold began talking with the park’s superintendent about tapping the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and soon became one of its loudest advocates. “It’s the fuel that will continue to make this park grow and mature,” he says.

Now an estimated 60,000 paddlers float the Gauley each year, and all of the public access points, including three secured by Trust for Public Land, were funded by LWCF. Thanks in large part to this recreational tourism, Fayette County escaped the hardship that plagues much of southern West Virginia in the wake of coal mining’s decline. While LWCF helped bolster his community’s livelihood, it wasn’t pure economics that drove Arnold’s advocacy. “If you have something that’s diamond class, you better take care of it,” he says. “And here, Congress had passed something that was supposed to do that, but the money was getting jerked around.”

“It’s going to be something that people can look back on in a hundred years and say, ‘Wow, that was visionary.’”

Happy Haynes, executive director of Denver Parks and Recreation, knows firsthand the importance of increasing close-to-home outdoor access. She grew up in the city; her own story of connection to the land began at a neighborhood park she used as a shortcut while walking to school. The nearby Rocky Mountains, however, seemed a world away—just as they do for many Denverites who lack the transportation necessary to visit them, or live in communities without much green space of any kind.

LWCF has helped Denver shrink its park access gap, creating places like Montbello Open Space Park. Once a vacant lot tucked between an industrial area and a low-income community, today it’s a native prairie landscape that features an outdoor classroom, a climbing boulder, play equipment, and trails. Trust for Public Land drew funding from LWCF to create the park, in partnership with Environmental Learning for Kids, a nonprofit that connects youth with experiences in science and outdoor learning.

Haynes envisions a future in which young people start connecting with nature as soon as they walk outside, and grow into adult stewards of those same places. She’s advocated for full LWCF funding to realize that dream. “Having that long-term vision, continuity, connectivity, and predictability with the funding allows us to think big,” she says.

These diverse but unified voices rang clear. Congress voted in 2015 to extend LWCF for three years; when the fund expired again in 2018, the coalition kept the pressure on Congress, until legislators voted to permanently authorize it in February 2019.

Still, it would be another year before Congress addressed full funding. Senators introduced the Great American Outdoors Act on March 9, 2020; though temporarily sidelined by the pandemic, it passed the Senate on June 17 and the House a month later. The bill—and full funding for LWCF—was signed into law on August 4.

California Representative Nanette Diaz Barragán hopes that more of that money flows into cities. She cosponsored legislation which provides LWCF funding to create outdoor access in densely populated areas that need it most. “It’s my belief that regardless of where you live, regardless of your zip code, you should have access to open space, you should have access to clean air,” she says. “In so many communities of color and low-income communities, quality parks and green spaces are considered a privilege when they should be a right.”

Pastor Martin Martinez is a member of Por La Creación, a public lands advocacy program rooted in faith-based stewardship whose members spoke up for LWCF. Growing up in eastern Los Angeles County, he sought refuge from difficulties at home in nearby San Gabriel Canyon. As an adult, he returned with his congregation to worship, conduct baptisms in the San Gabriel River, and lift their voices in song, feeling the reverberations of the canyon walls as the mountains sang back.

Martinez knew the healing power of the mountains; he saw it not only in himself, but in the young people he mentored as a youth pastor, many of them gang members, whose resolves softened in nature’s embrace.

Like so many people I talked to who’ve given years of time, creativity, and energy to achieving the long-held goal of a permanent, fully funded LWCF, Martinez is savoring this victory and reveling in the power of his community showing up and making themselves heard.

“It was a tremendous blessing for us to say, ‘Wow, we spoke out,’” Martinez said. “‘We did something and it created the change.’”