Blogs

This Earth Day marked the 40th anniversary of my first tree planting. To celebrate, I decided to up my personal commitment by taking public transportation and my bike to various events across the city. Seeing so many community celebrations gave me a lot of encouragement and hope. I chose to be a living banner for the occasion, wearing my TreePeople tee-shirt and hauling a three-foot-tall oak tree in my bicycle saddle bag.

The first thing I did was put my bike on the front of the MTA bus (every bus in Southern California now has a bicycle rack). After I removed the tree from blocking the driver's view and brought it on board, he gave me a thumbs up and mumbled his approval for my Earth Day observance.

I transfered to another bus, and this time I left the tree on the bike attached to the front of the bus (pictured above) which generated a bit more Earth Day awareness buzz and thumbs up from passersby. And so onward to a sampling of LA's celebrations.

Why should we care about dirt? With more than half the people on earth living in cities, what’s the big deal about something we work hard to keep out of our homes and streets? As it turns out, dirt – the earth’s living soil - is a huge deal when it comes to our sustainability, resilience, adaptation to climate change and protection from its effects, in fact our very lives.

Dirt! The Movie addresses many basic things we’ve forgotten – why we need healthy soil to survive and thrive as humans…whether for water supply, to protect from floods, or to feed people.

To find its way out of the current financial crisis, the City of Los Angeles will have to do more than just trim jobs. The city must reorganize itself under enormous fiscal pressure to save hundreds of millions of dollars, even as the services it provides to protect the safety and health of its citizens are more needed than ever.

This much is well-known. What has gone virtually unnoticed are the roots of this crisis in environmental mismanagement. Waste and duplication are unwittingly built into the very structure of our city government, costing us hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Water provides the best example.

I just installed a rain barrel at my home, provided by the city of Los Angeles' rainwater harvesting program (which is not accepting new applicants, but does have a waiting list).

This isn't the most viable solution for making us in LA more water-secure. It only collects 60 gallons of rainwater, a thimble full. But it is a solid step in the right direction.

Instead of 60 gallons, we should be collecting thousands of gallons per household so we can replace a substantial amount of the water that must be imported to water our landscapes.