Heal the Bay Blog

We’re still glowing from a sunny Tuesday morning on the beach with a group of third graders from Parthenia Elementary School in North Hills.Yes, a late autumn sun contributed to the color in our cheeks, but the lasting glow comes from the generous assistance to our field trip programs provided by the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation and Duke’s Malibu.

The foundation and the iconic surfside restaurant support our Lunch n’ Learn initiative, designed to help foster a love of the ocean in students from the region’s underserved areas. The students’ transportation to the beach and the gift of a book for each child were provided through the foundation’s Fairy Godmother Grant program. After a morning of science-based ocean exploration, the kids were treated to a lunch hosted by Duke’s – with Hula Pie for all!

Meanwhile, Santa Monica Pier Aquarium volunteers do an amazing job at helping us keep our marine science education center spotless and volunteer Lennie Shelton took that responsibility above and beyond last week to give some of our artifacts a thorough cleaning. Set in super thick resin, the preserved skeletons and invertebrates had become so scuffed it was impossible to see what they were. Lennie gave these vital teaching tools a proper buffing – and he’s taken a second set home to buff out as well. Many thanks for the extra effort, Lennie!

Ruskin Hartley, Heal the Bay’s chief executive officer, says the L.A. Aqueduct changed the world. But now we must change.

A century ago, Los Angeles was largely reliant on the water that fell in its own backyard. Then Mulholland opened the canal gates and the people of L.A. took what they had been given.  Rain and snow from the eastern Sierra mountains could now flow under gravity to fuel the growth of suburban Los Angeles. It was then and is now an engineering marvel.

It’s all too easy to see this as a bad thing.  After all, as water flowed south the Owens Valley and Mono Lake suffered. I went there earlier this summer and saw the toxic dust clouds myself. The lake levels are down and the natural system is suffering as a result of all the water that is shipped south to this day.

At the same time, that water has changed the world.

Really.

I grew up in England in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a long way from Los Angeles. But L.A. loomed large in television shows, popular culture, and fast food.  And the world tried to emulate it.  It is not a stretch to say that the Hollywood dream machine was built on the back of water from the Owens Valley.

And that’s where the problem comes in.  Classical economic theory would have it that a rational person chooses the option that maximizes economic return. Well that water diverted from the Owens Valley has created an awful lot of value down here in Southern California and around the world. Some might argue that it is greater than the value of all the fish and critters that lived in the Owens Valley.  So in theory if we had it over, we’d do it all again. Personally, I think that a simple economic approach is short-sighted and ignores the intrinsic values of nature that cannot (or should not) be monetized.

Because there is no going back, the challenge is where we go in the next 100 years. Realistically, we are going to continue transferring water from the Owens Valley (and Colorado and Bay Delta). The promise ahead is to do it in a way that helps L.A. and the Owens Valley, Colorado Basin and Bay Delta recover. One way to do this is to make better use of our water resources here in Los Angeles.

And that brings me to Heal the Bay. We’ve been focused on water quality in Santa Monica Bay for 28 years. We’ve also focused not only on water quality, but water supply as well. The two are inextricably linked. Our science and policy team has been working with local municipalities to mobilize public support for a stormwater funding measure that would build green infrastructure throughout the county. Capturing and reusing stormwater helps reduce water pollution, helps develop local water supplies, and in turn reduces our dependence on imported water. So it’s good for our bay, good for the Owens Valley, good for the Colorado River system, and good for the Bay Delta.  I am sure it makes economic sense. But it also just happens to be the right thing to do.

Ruskin Hartley, Heal the Bay’s CEO, says trees in the Valley hold some valuable clues.

I’m slowly exploring more of the greater Los Angeles area. Recently I drove over the mountain in Topanga to the San Fernando Valley. Before the switchbacks, a sign and pull-out pointed me toward the Topanga Overlook. Turns out people have been stopping here for as long as cars have been on the road. Early in the morning, the air was still clear. The overwhelming impression looking north was of a green valley punctuated with grey tower blocks, with desiccated hills beyond.

But it hasn’t always been this way. There’s a great interpretive sign at the Overlook that shows what you would have seen about 70 years ago. As I expected, the space looked more open. Back then farms and rangeland filled the Valley. But what really struck me were the trees. I expected to see the change in the built environment. But not the trees. (It’s telling that Encino, one of the Valley’s more notable communities, is named for the Spanish word for oak.)

As people moved to the Valley they brought the trappings of modern suburbia with them. Freeways. Strip malls. Tract homes. And trees.

Trees are great. Don’t get me wrong, I spent the better part of the last 15 years protecting them. But trees don’t thrive in arid environments. I have no idea what the proliferation of trees has done to the water budget for the Valley. But I do know that the vast majority of the water used to sustain them is imported from far away. Both the suburban sprawl and the trees are testament to that. Obviously, trees in the Valley aren’t the root of our water issues in L.A., but they do symbolize our complicated relationship to our surroundings.

Over the recent decades, Angelenos have embraced water conservation, reducing consumption while our population continued to grow. However, we’ll need to do more if Los Angeles is to secure a reliable water future. We’ll have to get smarter at retaining, recycling and re-using local water. That way we can retain our trees and ensure the future of our cities.

Heal the Bay is working with local communities in South Los Angeles to build urban pocket parks that both clean up stormwater and put it to beneficial uses to irrigate parks that people can enjoy. You can learn more about our Healthy Neighborhoods initiative here.

Signage at the Topanga Overlook.

(Historic oak image courtesy of CC Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries)

Mark Gold, the former president of Heal the Bay, is part of a team at UCLA that released today a comprehensive policy brief about abating the never-ending stream of plastic marine litter. He serves as associate director of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, which released the study in conjunction with the university’s School of Law. Here he shares with us some of its findings:

An estimated 20 million tons of plastic litter enter the ocean every year. And plastic trash has been known to impact more than 600 species of marine life.  Recent EPA estimates of the economic cost of marine litter range in the $500 million a year range — an average cost of over $13 per person per year. Despite the scope and scale of the plastic pollution problems in the ocean, international law and policies have been largely ineffectual in stemming the continued growth of the problem.  Some of the most remote places on the planet have major plastic pollution problems. 

Despite the dire and growing problem, there are numerous success stories locally and around the world.  Many nations have banned single use plastic bags and over 10 million Californians live in plastic bag free cities.  Over 100 other cities have banned single use foam packaging.  The European Union has enacted extended producer responsibility programs that have greatly reduced plastic waste.  Some 10 states in the United States have bottle and can redemption fee programs that capture over 70% of the waste generated from those beverage containers. And California is planning to follow the Los Angeles region’s lead in passing a zero trash policy to reduce or eliminate trash in urban areas that goes to our rivers, beaches and coastal waters after a major rain.

 However, even with the development of numerous global and international marine trash reduction laws, policies and plans, the plastic pollution problem continues to grow.  The report authors analyzed the legal shortcomings in these international legal mechanisms and made a list of the top ten actions that need to be undertaken to solve the crisis. 

The top recommendation is to develop a new comprehensive international treaty with strong monitoring, assessment, programmatic funding and enforcement mechanisms.

 Additional potential actions include:

• creation of an “ocean-friendly” product certification program
• regional and national bans on the most common and damaging types of plastic litter
• expansion of extended producer responsibility programs that provide an economic incentive for manufacturers to manage plastic waste sustainably
• creation and implementation of certification and tracking programs for fishing and aquaculture operations
• establishment of funding sources for marine litter remediation through product redemption fees and shipping container fees at ports.

No individual action will solve the plastic marine litter crisis, but swift implementation of the recommendations on a global scale could finally stem the tide of this critical environmental problem.

The full report can be accessed here.

Joel Reynolds, the NRDC’s Western Director and Senior Attorney and a longtime ally of Heal the Bay, offers a guest blog post about the good work being done by Team Marine at Santa Monica High School.

One summer night in 1971 in Riverside, California, when I was still in high school, I learned to drive a stick shift in a Volkswagen beetle, fearlessly loaned to me for that purpose by one of my friends — undoubtedly without his parents’ permission.

Could I have converted that gas-powered car to electric? Not a chance. But even if I could, I never would have understood why that might be a good idea, much less why our collective fate might depend on it.

It’s a different world today. At least if you’re one of a group of dedicated and environmentally-savvy students called Team Marine at Santa Monica High School in Southern California.

Last month, after four years of work, they not only completed the conversion of a donated 1971 Volkswagen beetle from gas to all-electric, but when they turned it on, the car started up and it ran, as planned, just like the gas-powered car I had borrowed 42 years ago — but without the air pollution.

Under the direction of Santa Monica High School science teacher and team coach Benjamin Kay – a one-man force for environmental education if ever there was one – Team Marine received the donated VW in 2009 and then proceeded to raise money from a host of sponsors, acquire the parts, learn the technical knowledge required, and then convert the car by replacing its combustion engine and gas tank with an electric motor and 30-kilowatt hour lithium iron phosphate battery pack.

And that isn’t all. The team has also created an electric vehicle instruction manual, educational materials, and multi-media presentations that are designed to raise awareness about climate change, ocean acidification, energy conservation and carbon-reduction strategies. Over the next several months, the students will conduct local tests to showcase the VW’s anticipated 100+ mile range, maximum freeway speed, and zero to 60 mph time.

This is both an astonishing technical feat for a group of high school students and an extraordinary accomplishment in environmental education. But more than that, it is an act of environmental leadership from a generation of young students that, like it or not, are going to inherit the greatest environmental challenge the world has ever known – and have to solve it.

Climate change is a challenge of global proportions. But it is also an opportunity. In the words of the world-renowned whale scientist Dr. Roger Payne, “[t]he environmental crises we face provide us with the most singular opportunity for greatness ever offered to any generation, in any civilization.”

If one measure of society’s progress is environmental understanding and activism, the students of Team Marine are light-years ahead of where I was at their age. And that’s very good news for all of us.