You may have noticed that some years in Los Angeles County are wetter—or drier—than others. And in wet years you may also have noticed a lot of unfiltered water rushing off paved surfaces, into storm drains, and out to sea carrying whatever pollutants it washes over. So, not only are we losing water that could…
Carolyn Gray Anderson
Carolyn Gray Anderson is an editor, writer, and nonprofit communications professional in Los Angeles. She volunteers regularly with Good Karma Gardens and at the Learning Garden at Venice High School, enjoying many a meal straight from the earth. She loves TreePeople almost as much as she loves trees.
Like it or not, you DO make a difference
February 6, 2013“You are never in neutral,” TreePeople founder Andy Lipkis tells environmental leader Huey Johnson, in an interview about how we all affect the environment. “People say [to me], ‘I love what you do because you show that people can make a difference.’” The truth is, people do make a difference, Andy says. And it comes…
Check Off Your Unbucket List
January 30, 2013Just when you thought you didn’t need another to-do list in your life, Unbucket launches to encourage your list to grow. With Unbucket, you can to expand your to-do list in the direction of the things—outdoor activities, charitable causes, learning opportunities, intellectual pursuits—you’re most passionate about. Unbucket is an app for sharing lists of things…
Grow a Food Forest in a Food Desert
January 16, 2013The term “food desert” describes an urban community that lacks access to fresh, healthy food in local shops and grocery stores. These are regions in our city where, for various reasons, neighborhood retailers can’t or don’t stock produce and healthful alternatives to processed fast food. In Inglewood’s “100 Seeds of Change” initiative, residents have taken…
Vote for a local school’s environmental initiatives and send students to the mountains to restore fire-damaged forest
January 9, 2013Starting January 9, students from 17 Los Angeles area middle and high schools will compete in TreeByTree, a social media campaign to win a field trip to help restore fire-damaged wilderness. You can support them by logging on to Facebook over the next five weeks and voting as often as once a day for your…
A Native Re-Greening for TreePeople’s Cistern
December 19, 2012Park operations director Jim Hardie calls it the “grasscrete circle”—also known as the TreePeople cistern, a 216,000-gallon underground storage tank, where we save rainwater filtered and collected from rooftops and the Parking Grove. The stored water irrigates TreePeople’s grounds in the warm months. For the past four years, the circle has been planted with wildflowers,…
The Soil Solution
December 17, 2012Soil is as vital to environmental health as the plants that grow in it. If you watched the latest Ken Burns documentary, The Dust Bowl, or if your forebears settled in California because they had to flee the ruined soil of the Midwest, then you know what Burns means by “the worst man-made ecological disaster…