The week that was, 9/13-19/2009
Burn scar from the Los Angeles Station Fire, September 16th, 2009. Photo: NASA. Click on the image to be taken to the Earth Observatory.
Most expenses are never assigned to the bottom-line costs of wildfire. — Comment piece in The Oregonian
By Saturday [September 19th] the arson-caused fire that claimed the lives of two firefighters was 93% contained and had cost nearly $84 million to fight. More than 700 firefighters remain on the fire lines. — Los Angeles Times
Although up to 15 percent of the city of Los Angeles’ water comes from local sources such as the Angeles National Forest, other neighboring communities in the San Gabriel Valley rely on the forest watershed for most of their water. — TreePeople press release
…
Watershed weekend
ACCORDING to the California Coastal Commission, last year more than 70,000 volunteers collected more than 1.6 million pounds of trash from beaches, lakes and waterways on Coastal Clean-up Day. They hope to best that this year on September 19th.
To volunteer or find future events, click here.
Or click here for a listing of Los Angeles-area watershed organizations from the Santa Monica Bay Foundation.
For Friends of the Los Angeles River, click here.
To find out about inland river clean-ups from the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, click here.
Or click here to be taken to a Watershed Wise Magazine tribute to Heal the Bay founder Dorothy Green.
Finally, if you missed it, click here for Ilsa Setziol’s account of her day on the bay in search of blue whales. She didn’t find one. She found two.
…
The Dry Garden: A visit with Susan Gottlieb
Buckwheat in the garden of Susan Gottlieb. Photo: Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times. All rights reserved. Click on the florets to be taken to the Los Angeles Times Dry Garden column
They say that beauty comes from within, but in the case of Susan Gottlieb, it seems to come from the world around her. She is, at 67, not pretty, not handsome, but storybook beautiful. The former nurse has such an Alice in Wonderland-like grace and lightness that as she hops around her 1-acre garden in Beverly Hills, enchantment sets in.
Is she quite human?
Her husband, lawyer Daniel Gottlieb, chuckles thinking back to when he first showed his bride-to-be the house in the late 1980s. “She looked at the back said, ‘It’s all covered with ivy. There’s nothing for the birds.’ I said, ‘Can’t the birds make do with ivy?’ ”’
By 1990, the ivy was on its way out …
Rambling LA: At sea and agog
Click on the whales to be taken to the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuaries page on blue whales. Photo: NOAA
By Ilsa Setziol
THE DINOSAURS are gone. So too the mammoths, saber-toothed cats and short-faced bears. Even California’s mascot, the grizzly, no longer roams the state. Megalopolis has replaced megafauna. Yet the largest animal ever still graces the California coast. This summer, I went looking for it.
…
Trouble in paradise
LOS ANGELES awoke fractious today, at least in the press. Los Angeles Department of Water & Power bills are arriving and a North Hollywood couple using an average 748 gallons of water a day, five times the Los Angeles County norm (150 gallons per day, down from 181 a year ago) is so mad, they wrote a seven-page letter to Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez.
For Lopez, the couple’s outrage was a jumping off point. Lopez himself is fantasizing about seeing Mayor Villaraigosa shot aloft by a geyser from one of the City’s seemingly endless water main breaks.…
« go back — keep looking »North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
