A California beach is going wild again, and it is still yours
Santa Monica Beach is one of the most manicured stretches of sand in the world, groomed flat by machines for decades. Now the city and The Bay Foundation have finished rewilding eight acres of it, letting native dune plants take root and the wind build gentle hills where everything was once smoothed away. The beach stays open and the towels still fit. As the project team puts it, it is still your beach, only better.
The results speak softly and carry far. The young dunes buffer the coast against storms and rising seas, and they have already welcomed back the western snowy plover, a small threatened shorebird that had not nested in the Los Angeles region for nearly seventy years until it chose the first restored patch. With the city, the foundation and UCLA now expanding the dunes toward thirty acres, one of the world's busiest beaches is quietly becoming a living one again.