Heal the Bay Blog

The Santa Monica City Council unanimously supported a resolution last night affirming individual environmental rights to clean air, water and soil, sustainable water and food supplies, and a climate unaltered by anthropogenic impacts.  Nearly 40 speakers ranging from high school and college students to environmental activists from Northern California spoke in support of the sustainability bill of rights.

The resolution, crafted by Santa Monica city staff in response to a draft ordinance recommended by the city’s Task Force on the Environment, commits the city to come back this summer with recommended legal changes to allow individuals to protect those rights.  Although the council vote only approved a resolution instead of a legally enforceable ordinance, the action puts the city on track to a process that provides individuals defensible environmental rights and extends protective rights to local natural resources.

Last night was a first step towards changing the dialogue on environmental protection in Santa Monica, and hopefully that shift in dialogue will move far beyond the city’s borders. The recommended legal changes to Santa Monica law will come to the city council at the same time as the third iteration (and third decade) of goals and metrics under Santa Monica’s Sustainable City Plan. We could see a draft as early as mid-summer.

We all have the right to clean air, water and soil, and corporate rights should never supersede these rights.  The time is now to move from just voluntary intentions to making these sustainability goals legal, enforceable obligations.

Can good design change the world? According to JUST DESIGN Socially Conscious Design for Critical Causes, a new book about communication design for the greater good, the answer is a resounding “Yes”!

Containing more than 140 stories of socially-engaged design the book showcases a diverse collection of projects, people and causes, such as trashionista Marina DeBris and Project H, the humanitarian design nonprofit.

JUST DESIGN author Christopher Simmons, principal creative director of the noted San Francisco design office, MINE, says he wrote the book because, “For many, doing good work that also does good in the world is part of the ethos of design practice.”

Learn more.

“The same nutrients that make your grass grow also will make algal blooms grow if they wash down the storm drains and into the waterways,” notes Susie Santilena, an environmental engineer in water quality at Heal the Bay.

The nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilizers that are so good for plants, may contribute to toxic red tides in the ocean and can make algae run wild in freshwater areas like Malibu Creek, creating dead zones as the green scum blocks sunlight and inhibits the growth of other plants and animals, Santilena says.

The algae even wreaks havoc when it dies, because it sucks oxygen out of the water as it decomposes, a process known as eutrophication.

“When you don’t have oxygen in your waterway, your marine life suffocates and you get fish die-offs because there’s no dissolved oxygen in your water,” she says. “And there are aesthetic issues—algae growth can create pond scum, which is just kind of gross to look at in waterways.”

So what to do? It’s tricky, environmental advocates say, because while organic fertilizers such as steer manure and worm castings have advantages that chemical fertilizers don’t share, both can create destructive runoff if they aren’t applied carefully.

Learn more.

On Jan. 11, San Luis Obispo County became the 15th community in the state to pass a ban on single-use plastic bags in an effort to encourage citizens to use reusable bags instead.

The California Grocers Association endorsed the proposal, as did representatives of local landfills, who said plastic bags are a problem for them. Approximately 130 million plastic bags are used each year in the county alone, and only three percent of those are recycled.

In an attempt to stop the ban in SLO County, the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition said after the meeting that it would file a lawsuit within 30 days, serving a “threat of litigation” to the board. The coalition issued a similar challenge when the Manhattan Beach City Council approved a bag ban in 2008, which ultimately failed in July 2011 when the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the city’s favor. The Manhattan Beach plastic bag ban goes into effect Saturday, Jan. 14.

Momentum for plastic bag bans has been building since 2007, when San Francisco became the first city in the nation to ban the free distribution of plastic bags. Other cities and counties across the country have followed, including Seattle, Portland, Ore., San Jose, Los Angeles County, and Washington, D.C. Smaller cities such as Santa Monica, Long Beach, Carpinteria and Fairfax have enacted some form of ban or limitation on the use of plastic bags.

The SLO County ban will apply to single-use plastic bags at supermarkets, pharmacies, convenience stores and big-box stores as part of an effort to get shoppers to start bringing in reusable bags. It is scheduled to go into effect on Oct. 1. 2012.

Heal the Bay has led the legislative fight to enact a bag ban for more than five years as part of its ongoing efforts to tackle plastic pollution in California seas and neighborhoods. Join us and take action.

Learn more more about the San Luis County bag ban.

Read about plastic pollution and its impact here.