The shady politics of urban greening
Posted on | August 13, 2019 | 8 Comments
Glare alone creates the long shadows of Los Angeles. So squinting was inevitable when the city announced the appointment of arborist Rachel Malarich as its “first-ever” forest officer. According to the announcement by Mayor Eric Garcetti, as part of the administration’s Green New Deal, the new forest officer will plant 90,000 new trees in two years. These in turn are expected to provide 61 million square feet of shade in underserved areas.
Glare defines Los Angeles. So squinting was inevitable when the city announced the appointment of arborist Rachel Malarich as its “first-ever” forest officer. Her job, part of the city’s Green New Deal, is to plant 90,000 trees in the next two years. Creation of an estimated 61.3 million square feet of new shade in tree-poor communities is to be done just as the city weans itself from half of its imported water, with a lion’s share of savings expected from landscape irrigation budgets.
Read moreBecause, gazing
Posted on | May 27, 2019 | No Comments
Why unpave a townhouse garden instead of using it as a parking pad? The view from the window, according to this photo series of a conversion in South Baltimore.
Why science, not money, should matter on June 5th
Posted on | May 29, 2018 | No Comments
California’s June 5 gubernatorial primary stands to be a crucial turning point in the more than two-decade-old bid by by Cadiz, Inc to mine Mojave Desert groundwater for sale to coastal Southern California cities. This is less an endorsement of people who appear to be adequate candidates – Delaine Eastin, John Chiang or Gavin Newsom – than a warning. To this water-watcher’s eyes, a Villaraigosa win would be a staggering setback for unbiased government science in setting a course for California water policy. Read more
In praise of Altadena Hiker and Karin Bugge
Posted on | March 29, 2018 | 25 Comments
Karin Bugge
Granted, it was odd that Jeanne Moreau would be in front of my house in northern Altadena that afternoon in 2011, but there she was, standing in the street not ten feet away, regarding me with a slow, crooked smile unfolding beneath her sunglasses. Barely visible between parked cars, there was a black Labrador retriever by her side. Who knew that the star of Jules et Jim was a dog person?
“Sit, Albert.”
Or that Jeanne Moreau’s dog was called Albert? Pronounced the American way?
Pushing hair from my eyes and pocketing the reading glasses needed in the garden to differentiate rye seedlings from blue-eyed grass, I clambered to my feet to realize, no, it wasn’t Jeanne Moreau. Some other wild beauty had stopped to make sure that the lady prostrate next to her iris bed was weeding, not dying. My rescuer, whose fine hair was escaping in wisps from what remained of a loosely knotted bun was, it turned out, Karin Bugge, a noted local blogger. The creator of Altadena Hiker was doing what she did on so many afternoons: dodging cars with Albert on the steep and sidewalk-less last blocks of Fair Oaks Avenue before the road disappeared into the winding mountain paths of the Angeles National Forest.
That first meeting with Karin won’t stop replaying in my mind this week as friends struggle to absorb news of her death at what her close friend, reporter Kelly Russell, guesses was only age 58.* Having known Karin in person a little, and having read her a lot over the last seven years, she stands unique in my experience of friends and fellow writers. In my imagination, she somehow never lost that first meeting’s sense of mystery and allure. Rather, it increased. Read more
Trump’s Cadiz relies on complicit Democrats
Posted on | September 5, 2017 | 3 Comments
As US Senator Dianne Feinstein, California Governor Jerry Brown and his Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom lined up behind California State Assembly Bill 1000 last Friday, it looked as though the blue state synonymous with Trump resistance had finally driven a stake through the heart of a Mojave groundwater mining project only viable because of 45th administration sleaze.
And yet, it hadn’t.
Rather, the fifteenth project on Trump’s infrastructure list, an eye-poppingly absurd private scheme to pump billions of gallons of groundwater from the Mojave Desert for export to Orange County, appears to have been saved by two up and coming Democrats, State Senate President pro tem Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles) and State Senator Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens).
Thanks to the committee chaired by Lara, the environmental protection bill went from near sure passage to somewhere between life support and dead in appropriations.
By contrast, by late Friday night, the Trump-backed Cadiz Water Project was soaring on the NASDAQ. Read more
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