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Recently, a growing community of individuals, agencies, institutions, and organizations have turned their attention to the plight and promise of Diablo Range.

As development pressure grows, an ever-widening coalition of advocates are rallying to make this hidden gem the next big conservation success story in the Golden State.

The First Annual Diablo Range Convening

The most recent sign of progress was on June 5 in San Juan Bautista, when over 150 Diablo Range friends and neighbors joined together for the first annual Diablo Range Convening.

The gathering brought together local tribal representatives, landowners, land trusts, recreationists, local politicians, state and federal agency representatives, students, scientists, lobbyists, writers, zoo employees, photographers, water managers, and others—with an interest in the Diablo Range.

Most did not know each other, but were here to learn, form bonds, build community, and start to develop a common vision and path forward.

I’ve spent over 50 years of my life and conservation career working for the Sierra Club on state and national campaigns to protect large landscapes from Alaska to the California desert. The grand scale and compelling ecological necessity of this campaign present an exciting opportunity for us all.

I’m all in. And I have excellent company.

The Biggest Landscape-Level Opportunity to Protect Biodiversity in California

“The Diablos might be the country’s most anonymous mountain range,” said Joseph Belli, a conservation biologist and author of The Diablo Diary.

“For most people, the Diablo Range is something to look at briefly on the way to someplace else, an entire mountain range hidden in plain sight.”

Yet this little-known and underappreciated mountain chain is on the verge of becoming California’s next big land-conservation focus. The range is 3.7 million acres in size—five times the area of Yosemite National Park.

It stretches across 200 miles of inner coastal hills and mountains, from the Sacramento River’s Carquinez Strait in the north to the Antelope Valley in Kern County.

A substantial percentage of the better-known and celebrated Sierra Nevada, Cascades, California desert, and California coast undeveloped lands have received various forms of protected status.

In contrast, only 28 percent, a little over 1 million acres of the Diablo Range, has some level of conservation protection, and a lot of it is concentrated in the northern section.

“The most amazing thing about the Diablo Range is its size, astounding biodiversity, and how intact it is.

“The other most amazing thing is that a conservation project of this scale and importance is still possible in California,” observed Seth Adams, the Land Conservation Director of Save Mount Diablo and a primary force behind the emerging campaign to protect the range.

Ecologists and conservation biologists see the Diablo Range as a hotspot and sanctuary for rare, threatened, and endangered species and therefore the biggest landscape-level opportunity to protect biodiversity in California.

Even though it is surrounded by almost 10 million people in the cities along the coast and the Central Valley, only a couple thousand people inhabit the interior of the range, scarcely more than at the end of the 19th century.

That wildness has enabled California condors, San Joaquin kit foxes, tule elk, yellow-legged frogs, and blunt-nosed leopard lizards to continue to survive despite being driven to near extinction by colonization and land development elsewhere in their historic ranges.

Valentin Lopez, the Chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, declared at the start of the meeting that he and his ancestors had been waiting 250 years for an event like this where “we can talk about protecting the sacred and cultural sites of our ancestors.”

While his tribe and the dozens of other Indigenous tribes have lived in and around the Diablo Range for thousands of years, they were brutally rounded up, murdered, and displaced by colonial forces and only now are being recognized as the rightful original stewards and occupants of these lands.

One crucial and important feature of the emerging land conservation initiatives is that the federal, state, and local efforts all now recognize the essential need to involve and fully consult the tribes (both recognized and unrecognized) in every step of the process and to draw on traditional ecological knowledge as well as modern science when considering land management and protection strategies.

Working up and down the Diablo Range to Restore the Land and Wildlife

Throughout the day, stories were shared about efforts up and down the range to protect and restore the land and its wildlife.

• A young man from Patterson working with others to defeat a proposed reservoir that would flood out his boyhood backyard in scenic Del Puerto Canyon.
• The new mayor of Hollister, who was elected on a platform to slow the growth that was covering the surrounding orchards with subdivisions and clogging the roads with commuters from Silicon Valley.
  A collection of students, scientists, landowners, and tribal representatives seeking to restore the Pajaro River corridor.
• Staff from the Fresno Chaffee Zoo, who have been breeding endangered blunt-nosed leopard lizards and are now releasing them back into the wild in the Diablo Range on an annual basis.
• California condor recovery researchers and volunteers, whose efforts have led to the dramatic recovery of the population and the wild birds now taking exploratory flights all the way north to Mount Diablo from Pinnacles National Park and the Big Sur Coast.
• Representatives of the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority and the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County working to establish wildlife crossings and corridors to connect the Diablo Range and the Santa Cruz Mountains.
• A Sierra Club leader who has worked with the Bureau of Land Management and others for over 50 years to explore, enjoy, and protect the scattered and ecologically fragile federal public lands in the Diablo Range.
• A citizens group—Protect San Benito—that has banded together with allies to enact a county-wide ban on oil and gas fracking, defeat proposals to be the dumping ground for Silicon Valley’s garbage, and enact a new law requiring a vote of the people before approving any large-scale conversions of agricultural open space to suburban sprawl.
• Efforts by Save Mount Diablo to protect a wildlife corridor across Altamont Pass so that the greater Mount Diablo wild lands complex is not cut off from the rest of the Diablo Range to the south in this slim seven-mile-wide chokepoint.

Diablo Range Public Lands at Risk!

This convergence of Diablo Range advocates became all the more urgent in the days after it was held. As I write this, the US Senate is moving to adopt Donald Trump’s budget reconciliation bill.

This bill had tucked away in it a proposal to sell millions of acres of federal public lands to generate revenue to offset the tax breaks that the Trump Administration plans to offer to the wealthy and big businesses.

The sales, which would have included offering up 86 percent of the Bureau of Land Management public lands in the Diablo Range, could have transferred to developers more than 200,000 acres.

The lands at risk included the highest peak in the range—San Benito Mountain—and two wilderness study areas in the Panoche Hills as well as other wild public lands that are critical to the survival and recovery of endangered species.

This devastating plan to sell off public lands was removed from the budget reconciliation bill earlier this week, however, US Senator Mike Lee, the proponent of the plan, says he will keep pushing the sale of public lands forward.

The remoteness and relative obscurity of the Diablo Range public lands cannot protect them—the range, and the rest of California’s priceless public lands, will need a big public outcry to protect them from those who are willing to sell off our common heritage for tax breaks for the rich.

Reasons for Hope and Optimism

There were many reasons for hope and optimism at the convening.

At the urging of scientists and conservationists, the state of California has adopted legislation to commit to protecting 30 percent of its lands and coastal waters by 2030 (30×30).

It’s also drafted up a roadmap for how to do so, which includes an emphasis on the Diablo Range.

Even if the Trump Administration pulls back from federal commitments made during the Biden Administration to also implement 30×30, the state has no plans of abandoning this vital effort.

To demonstrate that commitment, Meghan Hertel, the Deputy Secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency for Biodiversity and Habitat, spoke to the convening.

She explained the need to continue the progress made to date while emphasizing diversity, equity, and inclusion; public access; and bringing tribes in at every step of the process.

She pointed out that there will need to be 4.8 million additional acres of land in protected status in the state to meet the 30×30 goal. At least 1 million acres of that goal could be due to additional Diablo Range protection campaigns.

The passage of the $10 billion Proposition 4 California Climate Bond measure in 2024 was also a cause for celebration. A significant portion ($80 million) of it is dedicated to the San Andreas Corridor/Inner Coast Range program (which largely includes the Diablo Range).

But participants were quick to point out that this money is insufficient and needs to be used as leverage to attract other long-term reliable “durable funding” from a variety of sources to match and extend the state-level support.

Andrea Mackenzie of the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority urged the audience to think beyond the 30×30 goals and diversify the funding far beyond Prop. 4.

She pointed out from her long experience that to succeed we will need to adopt a multi-benefit campaign and message, “simultaneously looking at biodiversity, connectivity, water resources, climate, adaptation, resilience, agriculture, and equity and access.”

At the same time, the secret sauce to success will be to build partnerships and community that are ongoing and durable.

This convening was just a first step, of getting to know each other and know we are inspired by others and not alone. We are the nucleus of a growing, loving, and mutually supportive movement.

One veteran of successful land conservation campaigns wisely suggested that “conservation doesn’t happen until all the stakeholders are actually hugging each other.”

In other words, it’s not enough to convene annually and then return to our isolated efforts. We need to become friends.

As the Protect San Benito host committee handed out locally grown chard, kale, walnuts, cherries, strawberries, and summer squash, you could feel that love and community growing. And with that parting, we left with produce and hope.

As a wildlife biologist and environmental activist, Bruce Hamilton has been making “good trouble” for over 50 years. Joining the Sierra Club in 1977, he’s served in several positions including Deputy Executive Director and led the development of their policies and programs, working tirelessly to protect and promote the natural world, wildlife, wild places, indigenous rights, and climate justice. Today, he works with Third Act’s organizing team to help volunteers build the necessary skills to make more “good trouble,” and with Save Mount Diablo on their groundbreaking Diablo Range campaign.

Header photo by Stephen Joseph