The Dry Garden: Boxy
Posted on | March 11, 2011 | No Comments
Natalie Saavedra (3rd grader) at San Jose-Edison Academy School Garden in Covina, CA. Photo: Emily Green
Most people, save Atlantic magazine’s resident contrarian Caitlin Flanagan, agree that school gardens are a good thing. They encourage experimentation, critical thinking and healthful eating. Done right, they raise parental participation in schools. At their best, they’re as cute as a third-grader grubbing for worms.
Too often, however, teachers are defeated from the outset by the burden of installing and then maintaining a garden in addition to a classroom.
Click here to keep reading about a workable new model for schools in “The Dry Garden” in the Los Angeles Times.
Japan quake, fifth strongest in world since 1900, leads to a Pacific-wide tsunami
Posted on | March 11, 2011 | No Comments
Click here for estimated arrival times on the North American coast of a Pacific-wide tsunami generated by an 8.9* magnitude earthquake near the east coast of Honshu, Japan. Click here for warnings and advisories for the US Pacific Coast. The highest surges are predicted for north of Point Concepcion. However, in Southern California, stay away from the ocean. Most importantly, click here for the Red Cross as it readies to send aid to Japan, and here, if you can bear it, to be taken to a photo essay in the Los Angeles Times revealing the scale of the Japanese catastrophe the morning after what now ranks as the fifth strongest* quake recorded since 1900.
*Updated post. 3/14/2011: The US Geological Survey joined its Japanese opposite number in recalibrating the quake as having been magnitude 9.0. Click here for the announcement. The recalibration makes it a tie for the fourth largest quake in the world since 1900 and largest recorded in Japan.
Unpaving paradise
Posted on | March 9, 2011 | 5 Comments
This photo essay tells the story of a successful effort between 2003 and 2007 to intercept a re-paving project at 24th Street School in West Adams, Los Angeles. The bid: stop replacement of old asphalt with new asphalt and instead seize the opportunity to introduce teaching gardens, shade, play equipment and freeway buffering into the schoolyard. What military strategists call “mission drift” led to it also involving a full-blown garden teaching program. Click here to keep reading
The Dry Garden: Streetwise
Posted on | March 4, 2011 | No Comments
It was spotting a pumpkin identified as a gourd that prompted Leigh Adams to write John Lyons. She was (and is) an expert in gourd-craft as well as the artist-in-residence at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden. Lyons, whose website carried the photo of the pumpkin, was (and is) a garden designer and regular lecturer at the Arboretum. Yet until Adams wrote, they had never met. That was two years ago. They now joke that they are “as much in love as a non-couple could be.” And they have a baby, a four-month-old garden that is brimming with art, native sages, fruit trees and irrigated by rainwater harvested from the street.
Click here to keep reading “The Dry Garden” in the Los Angeles Times.
Cadiz update
Posted on | March 3, 2011 | 3 Comments
The Santa Margarita Water District has announced notice of preparation of a draft Environmental Impact Report of what is now being styled as the “Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project,” a formerly discredited Mojave Desert groundwater mining scheme rejected by the Metropolitan Water District in 2002. Its resurrection, this time with a clutch of small water companies fronting it, has much the same players in the background, not least of them Keith Brackpool, the brazen good time boy of the Manhattan Beach Country Club, horse racing aficionado and close friend/former employer of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. For the history of a plan to extract 50,000 acre feet of water a year from the Mojave Desert and then to use public facilities to wheel the water to public agencies at cost to public lands and public purse, click here.
For the former environmental review, which describes the same plan in which little more than euphemisms and acronyms have changed, click here.
Public scoping meetings are scheduled for Wednesday, March 16th at 4 pm at the Santa Margarita Water District, 26111 Antonio Parkway Rancho in Santa Margarita and Thursday, March 24th at 6pm at the Joshua Tree Community Center, 6171 Sunburst Street, Joshua Tree, California.
Among many questions forming: Which agencies will be participating and which have been sidelined by the politically connected backers of this project — in short, how the proponents of this blatant mining scheme intend to thread the regulatory needle this time?
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