Wallace Stegner Panel at ALOUD

Tonight, my mother and I had the pleasure of attending an excellent panel discussion at the downtown public library. The event was titled “Wallace Stegner and the Shaping of Environmental Consciousness in the West,” part of the ALOUD series, presented by the Los Angeles Public Library Foundation.

Wallace Stegner's West (Heyday Books, 2008)

David Ulin moderated a panel that included Tom Curwen, Bill Deverell, Jenny Price and Page Stegner. David Ulin and Tom Curwen are award-winning editors and writers at the L.A. Times. Bill Deverell is a history professor at USC who wrote and edited quite a few books that have shaped my understanding of Los Angeles history. I recommend Land of Sunshine (a collection of essays on the environmental history of L.A.), Eden by Design (a reprinting of the unfulfilled 1930′s Olmsted-Bartholomew parks plan for L.A. – which called for multi-benefit parks along local rivers) and Whitewashed Adobe (about how early white L.A. ignored its Mexican/Chicano present in favor of its idealized Spanish past.) Jenny Price is a great urban nature writer, L.A. River tour guide, and a friend of mine – more on her in past creek freak blog entries. Page Stegner is the son of Wallace Stegner and the person who manages his literary estate. The occasion for the panel is the publication of Wallace Stegner’s West, a book of collected fiction and essays by Wallace Stegner, edited and introduced by Page Stegner.

My mom’s favorite book of all time is Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, which I’ve read and consider an excellent book (but don’t just trust me and my mom, it won a Pulitzer Prize, too.) Panelists remarked that Angle of Repose is a great book that is not only seminal to telling the history of the American West, but also the role of American women, genealogy, irrigation/engineering, and more. Read it.

The discussion was a treat – all the panelists are sharp folks with plenty to say about Stegner, the American West, and about the current directions of writing, environmentalism and politics. Their discussion touched down on the middle ground between contradictory Western tendencies: mobility/rootedness, fiction/history, humanity/nature, myth/reality, and meandered into water, storytelling, regionalism, and even the important role that western states (Hawaii, Alaska, and Arizona) played in the recent election.

Folks made points about the arc of Stegner’s writings going from early awe of the west’s wide open spaces, to later more explicitly political advocacy for the preservation of those spaces, all the while very beautifully rooted with rich and detailed descriptions of place. This arc parallels the evolution of environmental movements, though Jenny Price asserted that 21st century environmental movement is moving beyond hallowing wild places and environmentalism is now focusing on how we live in cities (including struggles to reclaim the Los Angeles River), and that this urban environment is a place that the works of Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) don’t explore.

I’ll let Wallace Stegner speak for himself, by leaving you with a compelling excerpt (shared tonight by David Ulin) from an essay called Striking the Rock, featured in Wallace Stegner’s West:

[an unnamed famous architect looking into writing his autobiography and seeking Stegner's advice] showed us slides of some of his houses, including a [in 1948] million-dollar palace in the California desert of which he was very proud. He said it demonstrated that with imagination, technical know-how, modern materials, and enough money, an architect could build anywhere without constraints, imposing his designed vision on any site, in any climate.
In that waterless pale desert spotted with shadscale and creosote bush and backed by barren, lion-colored mountains, another sort of architect, say Frank Lloyd Wright, might have designed something contextual, something low, broad-eaved, thick-walled, something that would mitigate the hot light, something half-underground so that people could retire like the lizards and the rattlesnakes from the intolerable daytime temperatures, something made of native stone or adobe or tamped earth in the colors and shapes of the country, something no more visible than an outcrop.
Not this architect. He had built out of cinderblock, in the form of Bauhaus cubes, the only right angles in that desert. He had painted them a dazzling white. Instead of softening the lines building and site, he had accentuated them, surrounding his sugary cubes with acres of lawn and a tropical oasis of oleanders, hibiscus, and palms – not the native Washingtonia palms either, which are a little scraggly, but sugar and royal palms, with a classier, more Santa Barbara look. Water for this estancia, enough water to have sustained a whole tribe of desert Indians, he had brought by private pipeline from the mountains, literally miles away.
The patio around the pool – who would live in the desert without a pool? – would have fried the feet of swimmers, three hundred days out of the year, and so he designed canopies that could be extended and retracted by push-button, and under the patio’s concrete he had laid pipes through which cool water circulated by day. By night, after the desert chill came on, the circulating water was heated. He had created an artificial climate, inside and out.
Studying that luxurious, ingenious, beautiful, sterile incongruity, I told its creator sincerely, that I thought he could build a comfortable house in hell. That pleased him; he thought so too.

An environmental agenda for Supervisor Ridley-Thomas, Part II

Part II

Honorable Supervisor Ridley-Thomas,

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley Thomas with Tavis Smiley

Congratulations on being sworn in as our newest county supervisor!  We’re impressed that you’ve tapped Dan Rosenfeld to be your planning deputy. Rosenfeld has caught our attention as someone who really gets urban environmental issues, including supporting river revitalization (including playing a role in the creation of LA City’s River Revitalization Master Plan.)

In our last post to you, we outlined key Creekfreaky environmental objectives for the Second District.  Today we are sharing with you our priorities on a County-wide basis.  There are management issues that affect waterways and the environment throughout the County, and that need your leadership to foster healthier creeks and happier people.

We’re aware that Supervisors, out of respect for one another, often defer to each other’s lead within their own domains.  However, where natural resources are concerned, we ask you – and your fellow Supervisors – to consider that these resources are a common good, not defined by a political boundary.  We heartily recommend that you take a leadership position on these issues that impact your constituents but aren’t limited to just within your district’s boundaries.  We trust your leadership and statesmanship to move these forward without stepping on too many toes.

Countywide Issues

Broaden the Mission of the Los Angeles County Flood Control District - The LACFCD will celebrate its 100th birthday on your watch.  A lot has changed in a hundred years, but not the district’s mandate.  Older thinking brought us single-purpose concrete channel flood protection.  Currently approaches favor multiple-benefit approaches that prevent floods, but also increase local water supply, green neighborhoods, provide recreation, improve habitat, and more.  Creek Freak urges you and your fellow supervisors to work with county staff and state legislators to redefine the mission of the flood control district to encompass a broader, more holistic, multi-purpose watershed management approach.  Perhaps it could be re-purposed and re-named - maybe a County Watershed Management District?  Your experience in and relationships with the state legislature will be critical in this task.  A re-purposed District could be the engine driving a revitalization of our local infrastructure, capitalizing on President Obama’s momentum to reintegrate and naturalize waterways while creating a restoration economy.  If London can do it, so can LA. (JH/JL)

Implement Integrated Maintenance for County Rivers and Creeks – Current county maintenance regimes result in a boom and bust cycle of healthy neglect for vegetation growing in our creekbeds, then total bulldozing (as was recently inflicted on Compton Creek and the lower Los Angeles River.)  Sometimes exotic invasive vegetation is left standing while native trees are felled.  These bipolar approaches are not optimal for flood protection capacity nor for habitat nor for aesthetics.  Creek Freak urges you to help County Public Works to study and to adopt a new maintenance regime that integrates and balances flood capacity, habitat, water quality, and other benefits.  Integrated maintenance might be a little more labor-intensive, hence a little more expensive. You might be able to save some money, if you can get greater community involvement in the stewardship of our waterways.  What do you think about a pilot integrated maintenance project on the soft-bottom stretch of Compton Creek? (JL)

Work Cooperatively with Cities to Revitalize Waterways - Unfortunately there seem to be too many turf struggles between the county and cities when it comes to pursuing waterway projects.  These issues can be attributed to both electeds and agencies, to both county and cities.  The LA City River Revitalization Master Plan probably doesn’t sufficiently respect the county’s LA River Master Plan that preceeded it… so the Joint Powers Authority the city proposed has been roadblocked, debated, undermined, watered-down and downgraded into a (still-not-finalized) Master Use Agreement that won’t have one-hundredth of the momentum that the initially proposed JPA could have had.  Creek Freak looks forward to the benefits of your leadership and your experience in city government to foster a more cooperative atmosphere.  We urge you to focus on what’s best to make progress for our communities and our environment, and not get bogged down in jurisdictional squabbles.  (JL) 

Sewage infrastructure and reclamation.  Sewage of +9 million people is a big deal.  The City of LA may have the largest treatment plant, but the County also plays a major role in addressing sewage.  Aging sewage pipes are a nasty business*, and opportunities for widespread recycling or recharging treated sewage are tremendous.  Meanwhile, scientists are honing in on the alarming consequences of hormone-mimickers, pharmaceuticals, and other nonregulated contaminants in our treated wastewater.  And yes, there are problems with long term use of reclaimed water – it does have a slightly higher salt and nutrient content than potable freshwater.  Let’s put scientists and engineers to work on figuring out how to close the loop on these issues so we can move forward – rapidly –  to reclaim and reuse this water.  There’s a lot of jobs in replacing the old pipe, and laying the new ones for recycling.  Purple pipes should reach all corners of the county! (JH)

*I once worked on a job where the sewage pipe had corroded away, the void left by the pipe was conveying the raw sewage, in a part of town with a high groundwater table.  Yuck!

Planning & county-wide stream & watershed protection. Moving on to real creeks, our County’s waterways continue to decline, in habitat quality and actual stream-miles of riparian corridor, as development intensifies.  State and federal regulations create a process for assessing and “mitigating” the damage done to these wild areas, but the reality is we are facing net losses of waterways.  At present, watershed management is largely confined to Public Works Departments, who can only work within the existing publicly-owned infrastructure.  Engage Planning Departments in stormwater abatement & stream protection.  While working with the County Planning Department is key, we also need to develop more relationships with the planning offices of the many cities in the County, and get everyone on the same page. Here’s a couple of thoughts how watershed planning and Planning Departments can come together:

• Enact stream buffers around natural streams.  These buffers slow the flow of water, prevent erosion, filter contaminants, protect habitat and can help recharge aquifers.  They also tend to preserve flood plains, and therefore the flood storage capacity of streams.  Assuming someone hasn’t pushed dirt into and narrowed the streams already.
• Enact permeability zones.  Austin, Texas has an interesting model for this.  The County and its cities have a vested interest in seeing recharge of stormwater occur throughout the region.  Planning departments can set limits on impervious paving/building footprints based on soils, floodplains, and other features.  This can and should also help determine where future housing density should be concentrated – and future parkland prioritized.
• Provide density bonuses to developers who voluntarily restore currently channelized or buried streams through their developments, with adequate space for natural functions (including flooding).  Not talking about bonuses for low-flow fake streams.  (JH)

Stepping outside of the Second District

This may be dicey, to get involved in local issues in other parts of the County.  But we hope you will work proactively with your fellow Supervisors on highlighting the importance of these issues.

Protect the upper Santa Clara River.  This is breaking Creekfreak’s heart.  A beautiful, wild, Southern California river, just being itself.  But humankind wants to make tons of money by building on its floodplain, resulting in bank armoring and increased runoff rates.  Its tributaries are also being impacted. This is dangerous as well as bad news for the remaining steelhead that run in the river and everyone downstream.  If we continue in this vein, the Santa Clara will end up looking like the worst parts of the Los Angeles River.  Please don’t repeat that mistake.  We urge you to take a day off and go on a tour of the Santa Clara River.  Spend a day enjoying what this is, so much like what the LA River was.  Some things are priceless and phenomenally difficult-and expensive- to restore once the damage has been done.  (JH/JL)

Western Snowy Plover (photo by Michael L. Baird)

Dunes & lagoons add beauty and habitat at natural beaches. Morro Strand State Beach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bring back the beach – natural beaches for wildlife and people.  Supervisor Ridley-Thomas, have you ever seen the endangered Snowy Plover, which hangs out on our beaches?  Have you ever seen a maintenance truck barrel right through where they are roosting?  I have, at Dockweiler, a popular destination of many of the Second District’s residents.  Beach grooming also kills the eggs of our native grunion, a funny little fish that runs out of the ocean on full moons and spawns in the sand (Desal will kill them too – increased salinity of seawater is real bad for them).  The fact is, our beaches bear little resemblance to the incredible blending of lagoon, dune, and rocky intertidal habitats of yore.  Conventional thinking is that a beach denuded of actual beach habitat is more profitable than a natural one.  I contend that a mix of groomed and natural beaches is good for humans and habitat – and that tons of nature nerds will flock and spend money while gleefully observing least terns, snowy plovers…and sea otters if you can bring ‘em back (and yep, they were here too). (JH)

Remove Rindge Dam on Malibu Creek.  Creekfreak’s reach is broad, and we hope yours will be too.  Rindge Dam on Malibu Creek is a major obstacle to the re-establishment of steelhead trout (another of our endangered species) on an already natural stream.  The habitat is there, the fish just need to be able to get to it.  The dam serves no flood control purpose.

And while were at it, perhaps we could re-evaluate the need for other dams that are currently filled to capacity with sediment. (JH)

LA County’s deserts are jewels.  California’s deserts are being eyed as something of a mother-lode for alt-energy, following on decades of use for mining, defense industry training, and more recently suburbs with some of the most aggravatingly long commutes.  They are also fragile, precious and extremely vulnerable to political pressure.  Riparian areas are particularly sensitive, but the wildlife that uses desert waterways also needs safe and protected corridors to access them and move elsewhere in their ranges.  As we move forward, we need to give this serious consideration too. (JH)

 

We could go on (and we sometimes do.) There’s a lot of work to be done, and we’re glad that we’ve got strong progressive leadership in the Second District. We’re looking forward to working with you in the years ahead. 

With respect and hope,

Los Angeles Creek Freak (Jessica Hall and Joe Linton)

Finally!

(and apologies to La Opinión)

Here I was whining about the lack of local media coverage on the bond freeze, and La Opinión was ON IT from day one!  Remind me to read it more often. Like every day.

12.18.09 Paran obras públicas en Calfiornia (Public works projects stopped in California)

SACRAMENTO.— Demandas por incumplimiento de contratos y la pérdida de alrededor de 200 mil empleos traerá la decisión de funcionarios estatales de detener la realización de obras de infraestructura, financiadas con dinero público por casi 4,000 millones de dólares, debido a que los legisladores no han podido ponerse de acuerdo en el cierre del déficit presupuestario.

1.17.09 Liberan fondos estatales (State funds are freed up)

SACRAMENTO. — La Junta de Inversión del Dinero Conjunto del estado ‘descongeló’ ayer parcialmente los fondos para los proyectos de infraestructura que fueron paralizados en diciembre pasado, con el objetivo de ahorrar dinero al estado ante la falta de un acuerdo que cierre el déficit de 42,000 millones de dólares.

Now these La Opinión stories focus on public works projects generally, which is still great, as this larger issue was largely not covered.  Thankfully, Judith Lewis was also there, blogging on the freeze and its statewide effects, with an environmental focus, for the High Country News:  Budget crisis stalls conservation

And finally, the city’s English-language paper of record, the LA Times, noted we’re up a s@%t’s creek:  Funding freeze halts environmental projects across California.  They did a great job describing the effect across Southern California.  Thankfully.  Finally.

For more stories statewide about the impact of this funding freeze, go to Stop Work Impact: Responding to California’s sudden bond funding freeze.

A project worthy of a new era’s PWA

First we let Seoul beat us to it when they removed a highway and daylighted the buried Cheongyecheong River.  And now London has gotten into the game.  Their efforts serve as inspiration, and hopefully will stoke energetic competition.

Vision for stream daylighing at Lafayette Park includes a range of uses and activities.

LA, we need the water quality filtering and groundwater recharge services of natural streams, and now is the time to develop a stream restoration program.  Not a pilot project, not fake creeklike diversion landscape feature(they’re great but we can do so much more), but a full-scale, methodical, visionary restoration program, of our native waters, for the enjoyment of all, humans and beasts alike.

We have parks all over the city with buried streams:  at Lafayette Park, Sycamore Grove, Lincoln Park, and Ladera County Park, to name a few.  Parks next to channels provide restorable floodplain space, making for example, the Arroyo Seco something of a slam dunk in terms of restorability. We also have areas in the midst of densification – that will need new parkland as the population increases.  Government visionaries: this is the moment to set aside land that truly serves multiple goals:  flood management, water quality, habitat, and open space.  Riparian zones provide all of that.

London doesn’t have the urgent need we have to conserve and reuse our water.  And yet they are inspired and moving forward.  We can too.

From the Guardian’s editorial page, January 8, 2009:

“Drowned puppies, stinking sprats all drenched in mud, dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood” – Jonathan Swift’s A Description of a City Shower leaves no room to doubt that the 18th-century Fleet river was a horrid place. No wonder that it was soon buried, tidied away into a drain that gurgles its way from Hampstead to the Thames, passing close by the Guardian’s old offices in Farringdon, where on quiet evenings it could just be heard through a grating in the street outside. For centuries, all over Britain, urban improvement has demanded that watercourses be hidden. The toll of lost London rivers is famous, but every city has its hidden streams, such as the Cornbrook, the Irk and the Tib in Manchester. Now the tide is being reversed. Penned in by pipes and concrete, rivers, even hidden ones, are prone to flood; given space, they can be beautiful. In London, encouraged by the mayor and the Environment Agency, small sections of secret streams are being restored, among them the river Quaggy, which runs for 10 miles through south-east London. The Beam, the Cray, the Hogsmill and the Inglebourne are all being sought. Sadly there are no plans to reopen the city’s two big rivers, the Westbourne – which runs through the Serpentine and in a conduit across the platforms at Sloane Square tube station – and the Fleet. Cleaner now than in Swift’s day, it would make a magnificent sight, its banks restored, its flow carrying passengers on small barges quietly through the city.

Read all about it in this article:

Project launched to restore waterways buried under London | Environment | The Guardian .

Images of Possible River Improvements at Universal

 

Rendering of Potential LA River Greenway upstream of Universal (view southwest from Lankershim Bridge)

In an earlier entry, Jessica mentioned Universal’s planned expansion and its potential impacts on the Los Angeles River which runs along its northern edge.  Universal is looking to expand and renovate its facilities.  This project is currently under environmental review.  Bicyclists and river advocates are urging Universal to include the river bikeway and greenway as part of their development; the studio has been somewhat resistant to allowing a publicly accessible greenway to run along their backlot.

Context Map - the Los Angeles River is running horizontally through the middle, with Universal in the lower right corner and the 101 Freeway diagonally on the left.

Here’s where I confess that I haven’t followed this one really closely… and I had been holding off running these images until I get more background, but then I decided to run them anyway, because I think they look great, and it’s important to get them out while the issues are still before us.

These designs were commissioned by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to show a possible mitigation alternative that would be located just west of Universal.  The project would extend from Lankershim to the 101 Freeway and would literally bridge together the top and bottom of Weddington Park.  Thanks to Mia Lehrer + Associates for creating these renderings and for providing them to creek freak.  This alternative was provided to Universal during their environmental review comment process, and we’ll conintue to track the planned Universal development. 

Proposed Bridge over Los Angeles River connecting Greenways along North and South Weddington Park

 

Proposed Greenway along the East Fork of the Tujunga Wash (parallels the 101 Freeway and enters the LA River at Weddington Park)

If any knowledgable readers are interested in contributing a guest blog or comments or additional background on the Universal project, please add comments below, or contact us at lacreekfreak {at} gmail {dot} com.

CICLE hosts Creek Freak River Bike Tour

Coming up on Saturday January 24th will be the LA Creek Freak River Bike Tour. The tour is hosted by Cyclists Inciting Change Through Live Exchange, known as CICLE. They’re an excellent organization that celebrates bicycling, helps newer riders get more comfortable riding, and more. (CICLE also hosts excellent classes that give beginners the skills needed to be confident in traffic – their next Traffic Basics class is scheduled for Saturday January 31st.)

CICLE's 2006 Los Angeles River Bike Tour, with Joe Linton at the megaphone, the scenic Glendale Narrows in the background.

The upcoming river tour will meet at 11am at the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens in Cypress Park (570 West Avenue 26, Los Angeles, CA 90065.) There are driving directions here, or take your bike on the Metro Gold Line and exit the Lincoln/Cypress Station. From there, turn left onto Avenue 26 and go three blocks and the River Center is on your left.

The event is FREE (though you can donate, and/or buy raffle tickets.) It will be a leisurely-paced ~2-hour ride, nearly all on the Los Angeles River bike path. Creek Freak’s very own artist, author and champion procrastinator Joe Linton will lead the tour, stopping and talking about the river’s history, flora, fauna, and plans for the future. The ride will showcase the Glendale Narrows – the very nicest soft-bottom part of the river, with plenty of tall willow trees, fish, birds, and more. It will be an excellent introduction to the river, and an easy group ride for newer and less confident bicyclists.

For more information, see CICLE’s website.

L.A. State Historic Park Plan Images

Planned wetlands and nature center at north end of Los Angeles State Historic Park

This blog is a follow-up to a previous post about the new plans for Los Angeles State Historic Park, affectionately known as the Cornfields.  The images presented at the November 20th public meeting came on-line in mid-December, and I am sharing a few of them with you here.  For the full presentation, with plenty of  exciting images, see California State Parks’ website.  The design team is headed by Hargreaves Associates landscape architects.

The existing park at the site is called the IPU (for Interim Public Use) – a temporary park while the state plans and funds the permanent park, which is not expected to be built until 2011 – and that’s just the date for the planned first phase.

Historic Photo of the Pedestrian Bridge that spanned the Cornfield Yards (extended from Spring to Broadway, no longer standing)

View of South End of planned park - including new contemporary pedestrian "fountain bridge" echoing the former footbridge

The images I found most dramatic are the following proposed transformation of the area between the park and the river.  To complete this will require some additional property, so don’t look for it to happen in phase one.

Phase 1 - World-Class park on State Parks' 32+acre site - ending at Baker Street - about 100' from the LA River

Phase 2 - Aquisition and greening of existing Metro "triangle parcel" - Baker Street narrowed - park extends to river's edge

Phase 3 - additional acquisition of non-historic buildings (including current Farmlab) - expansion of wetlands habitat

Phase 4 - Park graded to slope down to naturalized river - Baker Street eliminated - below-grade river access under existing railroad tracks.

(My apologies that some of these images, despite my high-tech prowess, have been somewhat cropped and distorted. Please see them in their full glorious proportions and detail at State Parks website.)

Of lemons and goat canyons

Nothing like a leisurely breakfast with the Times in hand to uncover interesting news items related to our creeks and waters.  No, today’s edition hasn’t finally covered the bond freeze that is affecting the livelihoods of so many of my watery brethren.  But here’s a brief pastiche for your Sunday pleasure:

In a smuggling haven, a berm and barrier rise.  The long and the short of it is, yet another stream, Goat Canyon aka Smuggler’s Gulch, has fallen.  Not to developers or flood control authorities, but to the Department of Homeland Security.  If you recall, the Feds waived environmental review requirements for border wall construction, and so hills have been lopped off, a canyon filled, a wall raised.  The article didn’t mention how drainage from the canyon will be routed to the Tijuana River Estuary, on the US side of the border, and one of Southern California’s last remaining coastal wetland jewels that actually,still, functions like a fairly natural wetland, although it did note that the estuary is suffering the effects of too much sediment (from erosion – like when you lop off hills and create acres of bare dirt) washing into it.  I am particularly interesting in this question because, several months ago, the Times also ran a story about smugglers using old culverts – i.e. buried streams – to do their business.  Quite a few waterways flow from Mexico to the US, and we’ve put pipes in some of them, bury them, and then forget that they ever existed.  And are then surprised by humanity’s ingenuity to use them as a convenient, pre-made tunnel for illegal trafficking.  I’m sure it will be so different on Goat Canyon.

Moving on to the slimmed-down Op-Ed page, a hopeful story, one that speaks directly to my own hopes and beliefs, A view of the drought from Down Under, author Patrick Whyte describes how the urban residents of Queensland reduced their water consumption to 32 gallons of water per person a day.  True they were driven to it by drought, but it demonstrates how people in a populated semi-arid or arid environment can drastically reduce their consumption.  They didn’t need a desal plant because they acted sensibly.  In 2007, I was invited to speculate on what a “regenerative water future” for Los Angeles would look like at Cal Poly Pomona’s 50th Anniversary of their Landscape Architecture program.  My estimates, which I admit were not calculated using the highest or best data (pulled from the internet, with assumptions etc), demonstrated that – to truly walk the talk of sustainability – we actually could unleash ourselves of the Bay-Delta and Colorado River (and greatly reduce our use of the Owens River supply) by doing just what Mr. Whyte describes.  I had estimated that we would need to reduce to 41 gals/person/day.  To attain such a goal would mean radically reshaping how we utilize our landscape – a political thing – which is where we really hit conceptual barriers.  We fool ourselves into thinking the problems are technical, they are not – they are political.  Australians had the political will to do what I hope we will someday be capable of – making decisions that benefit our life-systems, and not just our lawns.  

But even with extreme shifts in consumption, human populations strain our freshwater resources.  So it was with no small ambivalence that I saw on Yahoo! News that the Vatican picked up another bully pulpit topic of mine and many others, the hormone-laden effluent that is affecting our fish, frogs, and probably us (if not now, eventually).  However, instead of focusing on the toxic suite of drugs, antibiotics, and chemicals that we flush down the toilet, they focus on just one:  birth control drugs.  Contraception.  

Hmmm. 

Yes, estrogen mimicking hormones in our waterways are a serious problem, and we need to clean that up. But unfettered population growth (I’m talking humans here) dwarfs all.  If you want to be part of the solution, find another form of birth control.  My earth-mama leanings led me to learn of some natural contraceptives – lactic acid formulas, lemon-and-aloe, and neem(for women and men).  These things create an inhospitable environment for sperm.  But I kinda want more lab verification that these things work before I make a one-woman science experiment out of myself, testimonials aside.  A side benefit would be the liberation of one’s libido from corporate America.  And guys, there’s similar chatter on ways to safely reduce your sperm count without reducing your mojo.  Apparently the little buggers don’t like heat, and will wither with repeat visits to a hot tub, for instance.  So we need to start demanding research and verification of these and other techniques that allow us to live and to love, without polluting or overpopulating the planet. 

Yes, this is a creek blog.