Esmeralda Marie Pineda was camping with three friends in the Northern California wilderness on Aug. 25 when she told them she wanted to go home to Sacramento. She was gone when they woke up the next morning, NBC News reports. “So, her friends went searching for her during that day, and couldn’t find any signs whether she had made it out,” said Sgt. Dustin Moe of the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office said. Deputies found the 24-year-old on Friday, “severely dehydrated and emaciated” and in need of immediate medical attention after 12 days in the wilderness. Pineda was airlifted to a hospital for treatment.

“She was able to pick her head up and kind of wave at us when we were driving in the area,” Moe said, per KCRA. “It’s just shocking what the human body can endure for that long period of time.” Pineda had last been seen near the middle fork of the Yuba River and Sweetland Creek, officials said. The area is “treacherous in nature and required skilled Nevada County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue volunteers to repel into and out of the canyon to look for her,” the statement added. Pineda was found at the top of the river canyon, indicating that she’d made a steep climb, sheriff’s officials said. There are no trail systems in that area, “so people just generally don’t go down there,” Moe said. (More search and rescue stories.)

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A mother in California lost her daughter to the foster care system in 2016 after she wouldn’t support the then-14-year-old girl identifying as a boy. 

“I lost my husband, but this was worse than losing my husband, because I had my rights taken away,” the mother told The Daily Signal.

Years later, the daughter regrets attempting to transition, and her mother warns other parents against allowing minors to make irreversible changes to their bodies.

The mother of two, whose husband had died years earlier, was accused of emotional abuse for forbidding her teenage daughter from binding her chest and wearing male clothes. Her daughter was taken from the family and placed in a foster home for a few months.

“It was incredibly hard,” said the mom, who asked to remain anonymous to protect the privacy of her daughter. “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

The Daily Signal reviewed Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services documentation in which a social worker, referring to the then-14-year-old with he/him pronouns and a male name, details the daughter’s time in foster care, her accusations of emotional abuse against her mother, and her later renunciation of the claims.

The mother had to hire lawyers to regain custody of her daughter and clear her name of the abuse charges. The charges would have disqualified her from continuing to pursue a career as a Christian counselor.

After a few months in a packed foster home in a dangerous neighborhood, the daughter asked to come home. She admitted to lying about the abuse, saying that she got the idea to accuse her mother of abuse from people online who said that was the ticket to getting away from her family.

“The process of getting her back, it was pretty difficult,” the mother said.

“She even admitted it to me later that she was influenced by people online who said you need to get out of your house if she’s not going to let you do what you want to do,” she continued.

The mother hired two attorneys to get her teenager back and clear her name. She said she felt like Child Protective Services was looking for reasons to tear her family apart.

“It was not about reunification,” she said. “It was more about, what can we do to this family to destroy them?”

After the daughter returned home, she called social workers on her mother a few more times, accusing her mom of abuse for refusing to buy her male clothing. The mother received a California Child Abuse Central Index (CACI) violation for declining to take her daughter to a program at the Los Angeles LGBT Center for LGBTQ+ youths ages 2-25 called Rise.

“I wasn’t feeling like that was really helping her, going to that center, because even when she was going to the center, I found that she was connecting with other kids, and her demeanor was even worse, even more rebellious, even more defiant,” the mother said. “I made the call. I’m not going to drive you there. And that’s when the social worker wanted to interview me, and because I didn’t do that, I immediately got a second hit for emotional abuse.”

“I just found it really crazy that they could deem that as emotionally abusive, just trying to discipline your child,” she continued.

At age 17, the daughter admitted to getting a prescription for testosterone from a therapist behind her mom’s back. She took it for a few days, but she told her mom she felt God was telling her to stop.

The mom said she couldn’t have gotten through the difficult time without her faith community. She left California a few years ago, partially because of how her parental rights were disrespected there.

“Once this was all resolved, I thought I had to get out of California, as much as it was home to me, and still is, to some point,” she said. “I didn’t feel safe there raising my daughter anymore.”

This is not the first time the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services has taken a daughter away from her mother over transgender ideology. DCFS placed 16-year-old Yaeli Martinez in foster care after her devout Christian mother, Abby, expressed concerns over her daughter “transitioning” to a boy.

The government accused Abby Martinez of abuse and permitted her only brief meetings with her daughter weekly. Yaeli committed suicide three years later.

“My daughter was murdered by gender ideology,” Martinez said in a testimony before the California Senate Judiciary Committee in 2023.

The anonymous mother told The Daily Signal that in states like California and Minnesota, to which the family has since moved, “a parent does not have the rights to parent their kid or guide them from things that could be potentially harming.”

“It’s very concerning because parents’ role is to guide their children the best they can in a healthy manner,” she said, “and giving a 14-year-old those rights, it doesn’t make sense to me.”

The mother referred to a May 2023 bill signed by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—currently running as the Democratic vice presidential nominee—that allows kids to travel to Minnesota and receive medical interventions without parental knowledge or consent and to a 2013 California law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” in schools.

In mid-July, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed Assembly Bill 1955, which barred school districts from requiring that parents be informed of their child’s gender identity. 

The mother told The Daily Signal she was very concerned about the health risks of chest binding. She told her daughter it could permanently damage her body. Chest binding can cause tissue and rib damage, hormone imbalances, and breathing issues.

According to the mother, social media played a huge role in her daughter’s decision to identify as a boy.

“I think if there wasn’t social media, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” she said. “There’s just so many things that they can get into through social media and the internet.”

Although the road has not been easy, the mom and daughter—now 22 years old—have a good relationship now.

“She regrets it, what she put me through,” the mother said. “She’s sorry that she did.”

Now, the mother urges other parents in similar situations to limit their children’s phone usage, find support systems, and never give up on their families.

“Just keep fighting,” she said. “That’s what I did. I just kept fighting.”

An Inland Empire city has approved a development project 450 feet away from the third oldest known living organism in the world — a sprawling, shrub-like oak tree that is more than 13,000 years old.

While environmental groups and some city council members argued that scientists are only “guessing, at best” on the development’s potential impact on the tree, the Jurupa Valley City Council ultimately approved the project in a 3-2 vote.

Those in favor said they believed the project had taken adequate steps to protect the world’s oldest oak tree and that the development was unlikely to damage it.

Read more: One of Earth’s oldest known plants takes center stage in California development battle

An accompanying conservation plan would convey the 30-acre rocky outcrop that hosts the Quercus palmeri , or Palmer’s oak, to a Native tribe. The Kizh Nation, Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians, has agreed to care for the land.

However, another Native tribe says the tree lives on its homeland instead, and that it has been blocked from participating in negotiations.

“This is a really hard decision but this is a responsible project that will bring benefits to all,” Councilmember Leslie Altamirano said after hours of emotional public testimony.

“The best part is that we have the opportunity to make precedent here and to give land back to the first peoples. So I want to make sure that, in my lifetime, I was able to do that,” she said before voting yes on the project. “So tonight, I’m going to stand with the Kizh Nation.”

The room broke out into applause.

“We understand the Jurupa Oak’s significance and have always been committed to its preservation,” said Brian Hardy, a representative for the developer, Richland Communities. The plan, which is supported by the Kizh Nation, “will provide protection that doesn’t exist now or in the previously approved project. We’re pleased that the City Council understood that and voted to approve the project,” he said in a prepared statement to The Times.

The project calls for the construction of almost 1,700 homes, and a light industrial park. A coalition of environmental groups is concerned that the pavement could create a heat island effect that would further stress the tree, which is already living in extreme conditions. They also worry that the development could deplete or contaminate the tree’s water source, or damage the tree’s root system.

In response, the city ordered additional root and heat studies in June. Environmental consultants concluded that heat effects would be minimal — hundreds of feet separated the tree and any parking lots, they said, and the developer planned to take measures to keep the pavement cool.

The consultants also said that the roots neither extended to the construction site nor did they reach any groundwater that could be affected by the development.

“I think we’ve got a pretty good picture of where the oak gets its water from and an estimation of how deep the roots go,” said Michael Tuma, the principal biologist at FirstCarbon Solutions, which has led environmental impact studies for the project. “There’s some other arguments that the opposition has come up with that are getting further and further away from reality and what’s backed by science.”

Biologists decided against mapping the tree’s root system, which would require invasive measures that could damage or kill the tree. Instead, they based their estimate on past studies of similar trees.

Read more: California is home to millions of urban trees. What happens when they die?

Without conclusive data, the coalition wants the city to preserve more land for the tree by cutting back on the light industrial buildings and business park planned in its vicinty.

“All of us, the coalition members that are concerned about the tree, we are not opposed to the development project,” said Tim Krantz, the conservation director of the Wildlands Conservancy. “We are only concerned about the areas immediately adjacent to, and uphill from the oak.”

A botanist from UC Riverside noticed the tree in the late 1990s. It struck him as a fish out of water: The oak was growing in a spot much hotter and drier than the species’ typical habitat.

He and a colleague hypothesized the tree might have first sprouted during the end of the last ice age, when the climate was much cooler. In a 2009 study, they determined the oak to be roughly 13,000 to 18,000 years old.

The tree has survived by producing genetically identical sprouts, or cloning, for millenia. This means the tree’s original trunk is long gone, but its genome persists. One of the paper’s authors compared the tree to the Ship of Theseus — a mythical vessel that has been entirely rebuilt with new parts.

Nonetheless, the tree has been a fixture of the landscape since mastodons and saber-toothed cats last roamed Southern California. For the Native tribes in the area, the oak played a central and sacred role in seasonal ceremonies and everyday life.

In a plan formulated by the developer, the city and the Kizh Nation, the plot of land surrounding the oak will be conveyed to the tribe before construction closest to the tree begins. The tribe will also be given $250,000 to conserve the land.

However, the Shiishongna Tongva Nation, Corona Band of Gabrielino Indians, says that the land is their homeland and that they’ve been excluded from deliberations with the city.

The oak is a “sacred ceremonial site for our villages in particular,” said Laura Jaime, tribal cultural anthropologist for the Shiishongna Tongva Nation. “We follow the Santa Ana river, so this goes back to time immemorial that we’ve been aware of this sacred ceremonial space.”

Since the land is now privately owned, they’ve been forced to hold ceremonies elsewhere — likely since the early 1800s, said Jaime.

Read more: Ever see a star explode? You’re about to get a chance very soon

The city sent out a request for input on the project to a handful of Native tribes in 2015 and 2019. But, due to the strain of the pandemic, the Shiishongna Tongva Nation did not have the resources to participate, Jaime said.

Since then, the tribe has reached out “via email correspondences to the city, to the various departments, the planning commission, and the city council for that matter,” said Jaime. “We were subsequently ignored.”

Environmental groups, working closely with the Shiishongna Tongva Nation, will likely continue this battle in the courts.

Since the Kizh Nation identified the tree as a cultural resource, the city was legally required to keep information regarding the tree confidential, including its exact location. This has prevented outside biologists and experts from seeing key environmental studies, including how construction vibrations would impact the tree.

“It’s kind of the classic developer strategy of creating an us versus them situation,” said Krantz of the Wildlands Conservancy. “In this case, between the two tribes themselves.… It’s downright devious.”

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.