Heal the Bay Blog

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.

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.

Heal the Bay CEO Ruskin Hartley goes back to school with a weekend trip to Malibu Creek.

Science is cool, but laboratories are cooler. I always enjoyed being in the lab at school. I liked watching chemicals react as they are mixed together. Or recording how the intensity of a laser beam changed when passed through saline solutions of different strength. After many years away, I was back in the lab this weekend with Heal the Bay’s Stream Team. And just as in my school days, the time proved both fun and informative.

Since 1998, scientists and volunteers at Heal the Bay have been monitoring water quality throughout the Malibu Creek watershed. Tracking nutrient and bacteria loads on a monthly basis in more than a dozen different locations. Earlier this year, we released the State of the Watershed report based upon this long-term dataset with detailed recommendations on how to improve water quality throughout the watershed. One thing that is critical is continuing the monthly monitoring work.

I was part of the small team — mostly volunteers — that went out last Sunday to collect and analyze water samples. It was fascinating to be part of the whole process, from field measurement through to the laboratory work. We measured temperature, pH and conductivity in the field and collected samples to determine nutrient loads and bacteria count back in the lab.

It was great to see different parts of the watershed. From the relatively undeveloped headwaters, through the main-stem that flows through neighborhoods, to the lower reaches impounded behind an old dam that is now choked with sediment. But what was really fun was being back in the lab to process the samples. There’s something very therapeutic about the detailed and replicable work to process dozens of samples to unlock their secrets. Adding a little of this and watching the clear water turn to purple to indicate the presence of nitrates. Or diluting the samples and encasing them in plastic pouches so the bacteria can incubate overnight and then be counted.

The results clearly show that how we live on the land has a big impact on the quality of the water. Agriculture, development, roads, sewers, septic – they’re all connected and leaves their  markers behind in the water. Water that to the untrained eye looks clean. But the lab tells a different story.

If you’re interested, why not sign up for one of Heal the Bay’s training sessions and become a citizen scientist helping unlock the secrets of this watershed? You’ll be helping out and having a lot of fun at the same time!