ALOUD: Moore / Childs / Deverell
Posted on | June 12, 2012 | No Comments
Philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore at ALOUD, Los Angeles Public Library. Photo: Gary McCarthy.
The Los Angeles Public Library is offering a free podcast of last week’s “Aloud” lecture “Reflections on Moving Water” with philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore, essayist Craig Childs and historian William Deverell.
A snippet, from Moore: “In my mind it’s water that helps us understand that this blue green world is all one deeply interconnected, deeply interdependent, beautiful and mysterious whole thing. And that the flourishing of all the parts depends on the flourishing of the whole. It’s water that teaches us we that are all part of this homeland. And who are we in this beautiful world? 
Expo Line plants: Think first, proselytize later
Posted on | June 4, 2012 | 10 Comments
Should this be developed as a wildlife corridor?
UPDATED Many of the same people whose passion and stamina forced Los Angeles City Council to adapt a low-water garden for City Hall are now campaigning for Phase Two stops of the city’s Expo Light Rail Line to be landscaped with native plants. Their movement, called LANative, has a website, a petition, and, most recently, support from an impassioned article in the Huffington Post.
Fellow travelers in the native plant movement, forgive me, but I can’t sing with the choir on this one. I can’t see how most of the powerful arguments for natives at City Hall to do with water efficiency, beauty, sense of place, pollinator benefit, run-off capture, leading by example etc. necessarily apply to a railway, which is less a garden setting than a fierce border twixt track and asphalt, steel and concrete.
In fact, as Phase Two of Expo Line construction presses forward, the most logical question might be: Why landscape around trains at all? Click here to keep reading
High good, low bad: Mead in May 2012
Posted on | June 1, 2012 | 2 Comments
Click on the cover to be taken to the "Aloud" program at the Los Angeles Public Library, where "Moral Ground" editor Kathleen Dean Moore will be part of a panel on western water on June 6, 2012.
Spoiler alert. It’s low bad for the monthly Mead report. The largest reservoir in the United States, which serves Southern California, Southern Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico, was at 1,119.38 feet at the close of May, 2012. That’s lower than it’s been for seven months, a mere 44 feet and change above a level that will invoke shortages in Arizona and Nevada. But! Now that doomsayers like me are all cheered up at any opportunity to remind wastrels with lawns, “We told you so,” it emerges that there is a more constructive voice in town. As clarification, it merits adding that the town is Los Angeles and the voice is that of philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore.
On Wednesday, June 6th, Moore will be among the panelists at the Los Angeles Public Library’s “Aloud” program. The theme: “The Elemental West: Reflections on Moving Water.” Invoking wild streams is a risky choice for an event in Los Angeles, where “moving water” is far more likely to be a ribbon of sprinkler run-off in a gutter than a stream. But if anyone can strike authentically elemental notes, it’s Moore. For those of you who haven’t heard of her, the Oregon State University professor of philosophy is editor of “Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril,” a collection of essays by contributors as various as Archbishop Tutu, Bill McKibben and Gary Snyder on what it will take to prompt us to act on conclusive science that climate change is real and our water systems are in collapse. “Yes, global climate disruption is a technological issue that calls for our smartest and most far-sighted innovations,” she argues. “It is a scientific issue, calling for brave and honest research. It is an economic issue, calling for good thinking about meaningful, life-sustaining work and true wealth. It is a political issue, one that will inevitably involve contest and demand compromise. But we believe that climate change is fundamentally a moral issue, and it calls – it begs – for a moral response.”
In order to embrace conservation, we have to first decide, in Moore’s words, that “it’s wrong to wreck the world.” Anyone interested in conservation should be at the Los Angeles Public Library on June 6th at 7pm. For details click here.
Tags: Colorado River > Kathleen Dean Moore > Lake Mead > Los Angeles Public Library
God, lawn and me
Posted on | May 24, 2012 | 21 Comments
Sitting on the kitchen table is a rebate form from the local water company that I can’t bring myself to sign. Admittedly, a tidy slug of cash would be welcome for having replaced a toilet with an aquarium-sized tank with a low-flow version, and for having smothered and replaced a water-hungry backyard lawn with a mix of food and native plants that require a fraction of the water and provide many times the benefits. But even touching the rebate form feels corrupt. What kind of person expects to be paid for an act that is the opposite of sacrifice? Click here to keep reading
More rock for LACMA, please
Posted on | May 22, 2012 | 4 Comments
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art compares the Levitated Mass to the construction of the Pyramids. After captivating the world’s press by parading the 340-ton boulder from Riverside to mid-city Los Angeles last winter, the latest news is that the museum is about to officially declare its rock open for visitors. Irony of ironies, just as our collective gaze is once again drawn toward this $10m publicity stunt, roughly 20m cubic yards of the kind of rock that can’t be levitated has built up around the headwaters of LA’s paved rivers. In contrast to the Levitated Mass, it’s not getting much press while the infrastructure that holds it can and should rightly be compared to the Pyramids. This is the flood control system of 14 dams and 162 debris basins that form what historian Jared Orsi describes as “a Maginot line” between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Los Angeles basin. It is the product of the headiest days of 20th century engineering, in part the work of General George Washington Goethals, the man who oversaw construction of the Panama Canal. And this flood control system on par with the Panama Canal and Pyramids is failing. Click here to keep reading
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