Through Isabelle’s eyes
Her early career as an artist predicted the style of landscape architect Isabelle Greene.Time for a ‘moon shot’ effort over Los Angeles storm water
Passage of the proposed Los Angeles County Clean Water, Clean Beaches measure should usher in a sea change in which storm water best management practices are incorporated into all street work, not just watershed projects.Should “green streets” be streets?
The $270 million question soon to be put to homeowners by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works is: Will we pay an annual tax of $54 per parcel toward a basin-wide effort to clean at least some of the pollutants swept up in water as it flows from paved surfaces into the storm drain system, rivers and Pacific? This much is clear: We should. This much isn’t: Will we? And, even if we do, will it work before fines over Clean Water Act violations start kicking in and law suits begin?
$270 million a year sounds like a lot until you divide it between 88 cities, a spangling of watershed NGOs and the county Flood Control District. Even if divided proportionately to size of city, the sum starts sounding woefully inadequate considering that alone one storm water park opened in February that was wrought from an …
More rock for LACMA, please
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 …
The week that was, 12/19-25/2010
Detail of fishing net tapestry "Kalama 1" by Mary Babcock, part of "Hydrophilia" at Hawaii Pacific University. Click on the image to be taken to the university website.
“I think it’s seasonal. The nets seem to wash up during the winter.” — Artist Mary Babcock, maker of tapestries from old fishing nets, Ocean Meditations, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, December 19, 2010
Mexico will leave part of its Colorado River allocation in Lake Mead for the next three years, slowing the decline of the drought-stricken reservoir and possibly delaying the onset of water rationing in Arizona and Nevada. — Colorado River deal aids US and Mexico, Arizona Republic, December 21, 2010
Enough water poured from Los Angeles streets to supply well over 130,000 homes for a year. — In a region that imports water, much goes to waste, Los Angeles Times, December 24, 2010
… with our watersheds nicely saturated …
« go back — keep looking »North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
