Heal the Bay Blog

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.

Heal the Bay CEO Ruskin Hartley discovers Compton — and that a river runs through it.

At first glance it looked like a backdrop to an apocalyptic movie. To many engineers it’s a flood control channel. To some Southland residents it’s a place to pitch a tent and call home. Or a place to dump garbage too big for your trash can. But as I looked more closely I began to see a river, with life still flowing in and through it.

Turkey vultures and hawks soared overhead while egrets, waders and herons picked their way up the channel feeding on tiny fish. Where the sediment built up, reeds and plants started to take hold and an ecosystem had begun to assemble — enriching the simple concrete channel and introducing an element of nature’s chaos.

I was standing at the confluence of the L.A. River and Compton Creek.

Compton Creek is the last major tributary to the Los Angeles River, and where I stood marked their merger, before they flowed into the Bay a few miles downstream. It was my first trip out to the river since I joined Heal the Bay three and a half weeks ago. I am used to watershed tours — having led visits in Northern California to some of the most beautiful primeval coast redwood and giant sequoia forests in the world. But this urban river was all new to me. And I soaked it all up as staff from Heal the Bay’s Healthy Neighborhoods, Healthy Environment program gave me a tour of the watershed and communities they’d been working in for the past decade.

The goal of the Compton program is pretty simple — letting people know that there’s a river in their neighborhood that drains to the Bay and empowering them to protect it. For a decade we’ve been working alongside teachers, community groups and local nonprofits on projects that connect them to the river that for too long society has turned its back on.

One hundred years ago this was one of the braided channels of the Los Angeles River. For the worst part of a century, it has been engineered and re-engineered to carry flood water as quickly as possible from the streets to the ocean — picking up trash and pollutants from city streets along the way. Finally in 2010, after years of advocacy by many groups, the EPA designated the L.A. River as a “navigable waterway” of the United States. That marked a turning point, with the flood channel becoming a river once more. It would now be subject to protections under the federal Clean Water Act. Of course, the ducks and birds and animals that had used the river were oblivious to that.

There’s a lot of work underway around the river to clean it up and bring people down to its banks. And what’s good for the river is ultimately good for the health of the Bay. I’ll be learning more about all of that in the coming weeks and months. Yesterday was a chance for me to begin the process and to start to understand what watersheds are like in the context of a highly urbanized city.

If you’d like to get involved in Heal the Bay’s work to connect inland communities to their watersheds, considering attending one of our volunteer trainings.

Zipping a zipper is something everybody knows how to do, but what if you wanted to build an elaborate machine to creatively, artistically, turn this task into a fantastic feat of engineering?

Teams of high school and college students have done just that, and entered their curious contraptions into the L.A. region’s inaugural Rube Goldberg Contest. The machines will be on display Nov. 9 at the Santa Monica Pier as part of a daylong S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) event hosted by Heal the Bay and presenting sponsor Time Warner Cable’s Connect a Million Minds.

The first-ever event known as S.T.E.A.M. Machines will offer a variety of interactive science, technology, engineering and math activities using art as the medium and fun as the common denominator. This day of innovation also includes tasty treats by Peddlers Creamery: artisan quality ice cream and non-dairy frozen delights churned by bicycle power; they are products that have to be seen – and tasted – to be believed.

Join S.T.E.A.M. Machines at the east end of the Pier from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. to check out the Rube Goldberg machines in action, alongside a kaleidoscope of innovative exhibitors. Paint by numbers on a grand scale with Time Warner; Trash For Teaching will stage a make-your-own recycling machine station; try games galore courtesy Two Bit Circus and Marbles the Brain Store; and Pacific Park will present a thrilling physics lesson (think roller coasters and the Pacific Wheel). The S.T.E.A.M. theme continues at Heal the Bay’s Santa Monica Pier Aquarium, beach level just beneath the Carousel – with an underwater ROV and a screening of the awesome Whale Fall Video.

Don’t miss this opportunity to play, learn, and celebrate the art of the mechanical.

Matthew King, Heal the Bay’s Communications Director, recounts a harrowing moment at today’s Storm Response Team cleanup.

I fought the First Flush, and the First Flush won. Well, at least temporarily.

This morning, I joined Heal the Bay’s volunteer-driven Storm Response Team at Santa Monica’s Bay Street Beach to help pick up ocean-bound debris unleashed by the season’s first downpour. As Communications Director it’s my job to take photographs of the toll that pollution takes on our shorelines. A picture is worth a thousand words when it comes to getting people excited about urban runoff, which courses through city streets, catch basins and stormdrains and then dumps trash onto some of L.A.’s most popular beaches (see below).

I found myself tiptoeing through the muck near the Pico-Kenter stormdrain to get a perfect shot of a soiled plastic bag perched atop a black-and-white soccer ball. Unfortunately, I took a misguided step and suddenly found myself thigh deep in a sickening sludge of brackish water, clumpy sand and very dirty trash.

A moment of panic hit as I began sinking deeper into the ooze. It felt like being in one of those cartoons you saw as a kid, when the hero gets trapped in quicksand. Just as I was about to whimper for help from my colleague Meredith, I thankfully hit hard ground. With a creepy slurping sound, I was able to extricate my leg from the quagmire and find solid ground. I was wet and I stunk, but I was safe.

Thankfully, the dozen or so other participants who came out from 8-9 a.m. escaped misfortune. Our group filled about 10 enormous garbage bags, stuffing them with the usual litany of depressing trash items: cigarette butts, plastic water bottles, fast-food wrappers, Styrofoam cups, snack-chip bags, straws, coffee cup lids, you name it. In all, we collected about 60 pounds of trash that otherwise could’ve migrated to the sea.

Considering that a single storm can pump as much as 10 billion gallons of runoff through L.A. County stormdrains, it’s not that surprising to see so much trash on the shoreline after rainfall. Still, after writing about pollution week in and week out at my job, it’s instructive and sobering to see all that trash in its not-so-natural setting. One post-storm cleanup will get you immediately rethinking your daily consumer habits.

Kudos to Heal the Bay board member Lisa Boyle for coming out to help, after dropping her child off at school. Lisa is an outspoken and tireless advocate against plastic pollution, so it was inspiring to see her walking the walk as it were and getting dirty with the other volunteers. I also was impressed with a friendly woman named Leslie Rockiteer, who was all set to go on her morning run by the beach. She saw the TV news trucks filming our group and then decided instead to grab some gloves and help us remove debris.

A few intrepid volunteers also joined our efforts along the rocky banks in Playa del Rey, removing a significant amount of derlict fishing gear in addition to clumps of cigarette butts and plastic detritus.

If you want to join us next time, we will be deploying the Storm Response Team as needed through the rainy season. Sign up and you’ll get an email with locations and details hopefully with 24 hours’ notice. If you can’t get to the beach, do your part and please remind friends and co-workers to kindly dispose of trash properly before it gets into the stormdrain system. It’s the single biggest step we can take in our everyday lives to keep our shores clean.