A creative commons for school gardens
Good Magazine today announced the five finalists in its school garden design competition. Click on this shortlisted entry by Joseph Sandy of Arcadia, California to see all of the designs. Before giving you the account of competition organizer and Good writer Alissa Walker, a note. As a judge in the competition, it was thrilling to see the thought and creativity that went into 40 submissions. It was perhaps even more exciting to be involved in such a beautifully conceived competition, which set guidelines that should be achievable by any campus. Kudos in this department is probably due to Mud Baron, Green Policy Director for LAUSD Board Member Marguerite LaMotte, and a man who has seen first hand what works and what doesn't, then set out to promote and popularize the best approaches. From Walker's announcement: Finalists will attend a one-day workshop with landscape architect Mia Lehrer to refine their proposals.
High good, low bad: Mead in June 2010
'Colossus' author Michael Hiltzik speculates that Los Angeles Times proprietor Harry Chandler was behind the Hoover administration's hiring of architect Gordon B. Kaufmann to streamline and simplify plans for Boulder (eventually Hoover) Dam. "Early in 1931, Kaufmann began hacking away at Reclamation's architectural scheme (above)," writes Hiltizk, "which was burdened with such neoclassical gingerbread as pediments, elaborate balustrades on the dam crest, and columns capped with bronze eagles." Click on the image to be taken to the Reclamation page about Kaufmann, who also collaborated with the bureau on Parker and Shasta dams.
There is a telling quirk to most US maps of the Colorado River: They stop at the Mexican border. The river’s once-mighty delta and the Sea of Cortez rarely figure.
Save a few forays south, this delineation holds true in the recently published book “Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century“ by Michael …
Everything’s broken
"La Dragona del Jardin" in the Echo Park garden of Larry Nichols and Rob Kibler. Photo: R Daniel Foster (reproduced with permission). Click on La Dragona to be taken to Foster's story "A smashing success" in the Los Angeles Times.
By now you may have read that the Governor of California and a good number of state legislators want to spare voters the trouble of considering an $11bn bond measure to pay for the package of water bills that they passed last November. After describing passage of the bills as “historic” and “herculean” last fall, the same men who told us that it had to be done because our water supply was “one earthquake, one flood away from collapse” have now decided that disaster can wait. We’re not scared enough to pay what it will cost to plan for it. For details, go to Aquafornia. My own …
The week that was: Fracking special
To read about how advances in hydraulic fracturing technology led geologists and energy companies to believe that a previously uneconomic source of natural gas might be tapped in the Marcellus Shale and Appalachian Basin, click on the map to be taken to an overview from Geology.com
Josh Fox’s documentary “GasLand,” broadcast last Monday on HBO, planted the suggestion that as former Vice President Dick Cheney was waging his “war on terror” in the wake of 9/11, his energy task force set America on a path capable of poisoning the drinking water supply of New York City, along with that of Pennsylvania, Delaware, parts of Ohio and West Virginia.
In May 2001, the report of the National Energy Policy Development Group gathered by former Halliburton CEO and then Vice President Dick Cheney concluded, "Most new gas wells drilled in the United States will require hydraulic fracturing." Click on the
The Dry Garden: Coyote mint
Paradise is at once so attainable and so far away.
This column was going to be about how the most immediate and affordable thing that Southern California homeowners could do to reduce our collective dependency on fossil fuel would be to rip out lawn. But events in the Gulf of Mexico are too crazy-making to be sure that it wouldn’t be the garden-writing equivalent of picking a fight at the dinner table. So this column is about coyote mint. Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.…
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