Fresh Baked Plans For Los Angeles Rainwater Harvesting Project
Posted on 09. May, 2012 by pamela in G3 Blog, G3 Community, G3 Education, G3 Partners, Generation Water, Green Infrastructure, Homeowner, HOWs, Los Angeles Rainwater Harvesting Project, Los Angeles/South Bay, Neighborhood Walks, Watershed Notes
G3's Marianne Simon Joins Team At LARWHP Kick Off
G3 Associate, Marianne Simon joined Pamela Berstler and The River Project Executive Director, Melanie Winter, in kicking off an official pie eating contest in Studio City….
Melanie Winter at LARWHP Kick Off
Wait a second…That’s not what happened at Dupar’s in Studio City. Determined environmental advocate, Melanie Winter, officially kicked off the Los Angeles Rainwater Harvesting Project, after more than three years in the baking. Guy Stivers of Stivers And Associates Landscape Architecture will lead the design team for developing a homeowner-friendly model approach to using rainwater as a resource. Other team members include Marcus Castain of Generation Water providing irrigation auditing and retrofits, Mark Hanna of Geosyntec providing technical modeling, investigations, and monitoring, and Leigh Jerrard of Greywater Corps educating and advocating for residential graywater. G3 will provide Hands-on classes, coaching, and Site Evaluations to help people use their properties as healthy functioning watersheds that will gather rainwater as a resource.
Tucson Circle Complete At Biosphere2
Posted on 05. Apr, 2012 by pamela in Environment 911, G3 Blog, G3 Community, Green Infrastructure, Rain Gardens, Watershed Notes
Biosphere2 Rises In The Desert
A whirlwind week of exploring Biosphere1′s Green Infrastructure and Low Impact Design (LID) throughout Tucson, Arizona brings itself to a conclusion with a journey to the desert home of Biosphere2. Biosphere2 is an Earth systems science research facility owned by the University of Arizona. Its current mission is to serve as a center for research, outreach, teaching and life-long learning about Earth (Biosphere1), its living systems, and its place in the universe.
Cisterns Capture Rainwater
The grounds are landscaped to capture rain water passively in the landscape and actively in cisterns. An experiment with twenty or more mini-greenroofs explores the best growing conditions for living roofs in arid environments.
Passive Capture In Landscape
Biospherians (yes, that’s what they call people who lived in the Biosphere) inhabited the enormous enclosed structure from 1991 to 1993 and then again for six months in 1994. Intervention into the two-year living experiment came when oxygen levels dropped precipitously and Biospherians found they could not cultivate sufficient calories to sustain the more than 65 hours of work each week required to maintain life within the enclosure. While it is no longer inhabited, the enormous (two and a half football fields under glass) structure is now used by the University of Arizona as a collective research facility, and interesting experiments in Earth-sciences are constantly underway. TreePeople’s Edith de Guzman and her husband Jolly joined G3′s Pamela Berstler and Surfrider’s Paul Herzog for a two-hour tour of the facility. Nearly twenty years have passed since the original Biospherians were locked inside, and the various biomes have grown significantly.
Rise Above Plastics Research
In the more than 600,000 gallon “ocean” an experiment is being conducted on the rate of plastic decomposition. Another experiment is growing Arizona desert native plants in different controlled environments to determine the effects of climate change on desert flora.
Climate Change Experiment
Compared with The Eden Project in Cornwall, England, Biosphere2 seems a bit too “engineered” and sterile. But the research conducted within this controlled environment undoubtedly will contribute to a better understanding our fragile, blue world — and that makes it one of the great wonders of our time.
Low Impact Dunbar-Spring
Posted on 04. Apr, 2012 by pamela in G3 Blog, G3 Community, G3 Education, Green Infrastructure, Neighborhood Walks, Rain Capture, Rain Gardens, Resources, Watershed Notes
Surfrider's Paul Herzog Starting LID Tour At BICAS
The holy book (Rainwater Harvesting For Drylands And Beyond Vol. 1) requires that, at one time during their lives, all Green Infrastructure pilgrims must make their way to Brad Lancaster’s neighborhood in Tucson, Arizona, called Dunbar Spring. Perhaps the most stunning aspect of this oasis of rainwater endowment is the birdsong choir that follows one throughout the visit — birds of all sizes flit from native Mesquite (Prosopis pubescens) to Ironwood (Olneya tesota) and surf the fragile branches of Chuparosa (Justicia californica) and Palo verde (Cercidium microphyllum and Cercidium floridum). Watershed Management Group, hosts of the 2012 Tucson AridLID Conference, arranged for a bicycle tour of Dunbar Spring to get up close and personal with the simple curb cuts and sunken water wells around native trees that identify the neighborhood as the most water-progressive in Tucson.
Curb Cuts
Embracing Water As A Resource
The bicycle tour started at BICAS (Bicycle Inter-Community Art & Salvage), a collectively-run community-based non-profit education and recycling center for bicycles, devoted to the facilitation of affordable alternatives to travel by auto. BICAS and other people-scale businesses arrived in this neighborhood in the mid-1990′s, around the same time Brad Lancaster was making his first, subversive curb cuts allowing stormwater to flow on to his property from the street. This neighborhood-scale green infrastructure is so very simple — cuts or cores in the curb, native and edible trees and understory plants strategically placed in depressions to receive the flow, meandering decomposed granite pathways, traffic-calming water receptacles in the form of bump-outs and circles, and using paint to create perpendicular parking instead of parallel parking, effectively narrowing the wider of the busy streets. The effect is stunning. Time slows to the pace of a stroller or bicycle. Dappled sunlight filters through wispy, native trees. Colors seem brighter in shaded bird and animal refuge nooks. People smile — laugh — enjoy living in Dunbar Spring.
TV Killed Thinking Man
Now that we have experienced the transformative experience of community-based green infrastructure, we are thinking about how best to transport these lessons to the urban deserts of California. What medium best suits the message of cherished resources and better quality of life? Maybe via cave paintings…
Flowing Talk At Tucson AridLID
Posted on 03. Apr, 2012 by pamela in Attainable Sustainable, G3 Blog, G3 Community, G3 Consulting, G3 Education, Green Infrastructure, Los Angeles/South Bay, Speaker Series, Watershed Notes
We're Not In Kansas
Arriving in Tucson, Arizona in the middle of the day, one realizes immediately that one is in a place completely different from Los Angeles or the succulent-loving San Diego, California. Sunny? Yes. Dry? Very. Lawn? Little. The difference in place apparently extends beyond the climate and rainfall to the landscape aesthetic response to that climate. Most of the lawns are found surrounding commercial and public spaces, while residential landscapes are dominated by much more dry-climate-adapted and Tucson-native plants.
G3's Pamela Berstler
G3′s Pamela Berstler spent the week of the AridLID Conference exploring a variety of approaches to Green Infrastructure, including distributed, community-based solutions and large, end-of-pipe projects. When polled, more than half of the 200 conference attendees could identify the price of gasoline in their neighborhood, but fewer than 10 could identify the price of a gallon of water from the tap, and fewer than 5 could quote the average $2.90/month stormwater abatement fee paid by most Arizona residences. Pamela asked the audience of experts to consider the awareness of the average person’s investment in Green Infrastructure as demonstrated by this poll, and shared some of G3′s program ideas for sparking change in neighborhoods, and raising the awareness of both problems and solutions using the G3 Attainable Sustainable Watershed model.
TreePeople's Andy Lipkis
This third annual conference was the first to host a large delegation from the Los Angeles area, including Andy Lipkis and Edith de Guzman of TreePeople, Eileen Alduenda of Council for Watershed Health, Paul Herzog of Sufrider Foundation’s Ocean Friendly Gardens Program, and Bill DePoto, formerly of LA County, and now on the board of North East Trees.
Brad Lancaster
Brad Lancaster, rainwater harvesting’s inspirational common-sense-talking guru, whet the attendee’s appetite to tour his transformed street in the Dunbar Spring section of the city, a true Mecca for Low Impact Design (LID).
No week spent in Tucson studying Green Infrastructure would be complete without a trek (and at an hour’s worth of travel outside the city center, it is indeed a trek) to the Biosphere2, passes courtesy of Mitchell Pavao-Zuckerman, a nematode-loving professor (our kind of guy) at University of Arizona.
Biosphere Explorers Paul, Edith & Jolly
Pamela’s Tucson AridLID Talk Preview
Posted on 25. Mar, 2012 by pamela in G3 Blog, G3 Consulting, G3 Education, Green Infrastructure, Rain Gardens, Speaker Series, Water, Watershed Notes
What do you think about when you see this picture? Does the “ordinary person” (read that: “not particularly tuned into the environmental message”) connect this picture with what happens in the winter in Los Angeles? (ie. RAIN) 
We don’t think so. Of course, it makes sense to all of us. But to the AVERAGE property owner or person walking down the street — this sign means “don’t dump my paint/oil/garbage right into the drain.”
The connection between the storm drain and what’s happening on your own property — when you apply fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, or allow rainwater to run off the driveway into the street — IS NOT EFFECTIVELY MADE! And that’s because we don’t use a Watershed approach for messaging the urban environmental problems and solutions.
Want to hear more? Join G3′s Pamela Berstler in Tucson, AZ this week at the 2012 AridLID Conference, hosted by Watershed Management Group.
