On a late May morning, a vast field of invasive yellow mustard grass swayed gently in the cool ocean breeze.
To the east, there’s downtown Culver City and, in the distance, the smog-shrouded San Gabriel Mountains. To the west, the channelized Ballona Creek drained into the Santa Monica Bay.
The Ballona Wetlands — an ecological reserve on L.A.’s Westside, bordered by Marina del Rey, Playa Vista and Playa del Rey — are the second-largest chunk of open space in L.A., second only to Griffith Park. They’re also a refuge for native birds such as great blue herons and hooded orioles, as well as thousands of birds that migrate every year along the Pacific flyway.
These 577 acres are also L.A. County’s largest remaining coastal wetlands.
“In the city of Los Angeles, we’ve lost 95% of our coastal wetlands. This is it. This is the last one we have,” said Scott Culbertson, executive director of nonprofit Friends of Ballona Wetlands. “It needs to be restored.”
The public has limited access to the 577-acre Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve near Playa del Rey. Efforts to restore the area have been ongoing for more than two decades.
Healthy wetlands can absorb carbon in the atmosphere and buffer coastal communities from flooding. They support a diverse array of birds and plant species. Across the world, calls to protect them are growing as human-caused climate change accelerates.
Despite the potential, the Ballona Wetlands have been the subject of one of Southern California’s longest running environmental battles.
Nearly 20 years after the wetlands were designated by the state as an ecological reserve, there’s still no timeline for completing the plans to restore them, and public access to the green space remains significantly limited.
The history
Thousands of years ago, this stretch of coast was sand dunes and wetlands that sprawled deep into the L.A. basin, shifting with ocean tides and winter floods. For much of the year, Ballona Creek was a meandering stream, lined by sycamore and willow trees. Dozens of Tongva villages dotted the area.
The wetlands’ destruction began in the 1820s, when rancher Augustin Machado settled the area to graze cattle. Machado’s Mexican land grant stretched from Culver City to Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica. He called it “Rancho La Ballona.”
Augustin Machado’s ranch house in what is now Santa Monica.
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Courtesy L.A. Public Library
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After the Mexican-American war ended in 1848, white settlers took over the land. By the 20th century, a new electric railway was bringing throngs of visitors from the growing city of L.A. to the beaches.
The oil boom was no boon for the Ballona Wetlands. A view down a Ballona Creek channel circa 1937, when oil wells lined the banks of the Venice Oil Field, located south of Venice, in what is modern day Marina del Rey.
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Herman Schultheis
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L.A. Public Library
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Then, before World War II, millionaire Howard Hughes bought the land for an aircraft factory. By the 1960s, the development of Marina del Rey paved over 900 acres of the wetlands. Portions of today’s ecological reserve became a dumping ground for all that dredging.
The fight to save the wetlands began in the 1970s, when the development of Playa del Rey threatened to pave over what was left. By then, only environmentalists stepped in to save what now remains.
In the early 2000s, the state purchased the land for $139 million.
Since then, environmental groups have been at odds with each other and the state about how best to restore the land. And the state lacks funding for a project whose cost has skyrocketed.
Today, a scourge of invasive plants
Meanwhile, the area is inundated with invasive plants — especially yellow mustard grass.
“That’s the sort of the thing that drives people to say, we need to do something,” said Walter Lamb, president of nonprofit Ballona Wetlands Land Trust. “You look out and you see all these invasive weeds, just a huge field of mustard.”
Walter Lamb, president of the nonprofit Ballona Wetlands Land Trust, in Area A of the ecological reserve, where vast fields of invasive mustard grass dominate the landscape.
But underneath and between all that, there are natives. Lamb pointed out a low-lying green shrub called alkali heath. Its small succulent-like leaves appear to sparkle in the sun.
“What’s really making the glisten is the salt,” Lamb said. The plant absorbs and excretes the salt, causing the shine. “It typically grows in wetlands, and it can do that because it’s salt tolerant.”
Alkali heath is a native plant that thrives in California wetlands, but it’s being crowded out by nonnatives like the crown daisies flowering in this photo.
Right next to it though, are more invasives. Lamb pointed to a sprouting weed with long green leaves and yellow-green round buds.
“This is a plant called euphorbia terracina. This is probably one of the worst invasive species we have here at the Ballona Wetlands,” Lamb said.
Several local nonprofits, including Friends of Ballona Wetlands and Lamb’s land trust group, are part of ongoing efforts to remove these invasives.
Those weeds and the history of tidal flows and salt versus freshwater marshes in the wetland are reasons for long-running — and often tense — debate about the best way to restore Ballona.
Anahy Hernandez with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife clears a walking path of invasive plants in Area A of the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve.
What the future may hold
Restoring a wetland is no easy task — the very definition of restoration is an ongoing debate.
Removing invasives requires a lot of labor and can disturb nesting birds. Restoring the wetlands to what it was thousands of years ago would require significant bulldozing and dredging, which could harm migratory and native bird species, reptiles and other animals, critics argue.
This part of the Ballona Wetlands has fewer invasive plants and is healthier overall, but the state has proposed dredging in this area to connect these marshes to the ocean again. Currently, they are non-tidal marshes, fed mostly by runoff.
“There’s always some objection to whatever anyone does in Ballona,” said Erinn Wilson-Olgin, regional manager for the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, which manages the wetlands. “It’s not uncommon for these projects to take a really long time to get done because of opposition and different opinions.”
Other wetlands in the region, such as Bolsa Chica in Orange County, also took decades to restore, and still require a lot of maintenance and heavy engineering.
In 2004, the state Coastal Conservancy estimated developing Ballona’s restoration plans would take three years at a cost of about $2 million.
A great snowy egret, a native bird, flies over several species of ducks in a non-tidal seasonal marsh in the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve.
In 2025, though, there’s still no timeline for completing the planning process. The state has spent about $15 million on planning so far and estimates the full cost of the restoration could well exceed $200 million.
“We see no credible path for this project ever being built,” Lamb said.
Lamb and allies argue that worsening climate change, such as sea level rise, have made the plan moot.
His group was one of several that sued the state in the latest lawsuit about Ballona’s restoration (environmental groups have brought at least a dozen over the years).
In 2023, a judge narrowly ruled in the group’s favor, saying the state’s plan was mostly sound but failed to account for certain flood risks. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which manages the wetlands, is seeking funding to revise its environmental impact report.
Ballona Creek flows into the Santa Monica Bay in May 2025.
Lamb and his allies would like to see the state abandon plans to dredge a healthier part of the wetland so that it can once again be connected to ocean tides. They argue that plan could harm plants and animals that rely on seasonal rains and brackish water. It also would require federal approval, which could further delay the project.
“The only path forward we see is for [the California Department of Fish and Wildlife] to design a more manageable project that provides better mitigation against sea level rise, avoids the need for costly federal approvals, and protects existing habitat for threatened species,” said Lamb.
The Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve is a 577-acre protected area. But it’s full of invasive plants.
Others say this latest debate is another unnecessary delay.
“The science issue is settled,” said Culbertson, of Friends of Ballona Wetlands, the longest-running grassroots group focused on the wetlands. “The courts have, even under appeal, determined that the science is solid. There’s no more suing on the science.”
His group supports the plan as it stands.
The Fish and Wildlife Department told LAist it hopes to get funding to update and recirculate the environmental impact report for public comment by the end of the year. If approved, the restoration effort will take years more.