Japanese Garden green generation mixer focused on “Redesigning CSULB, the renaissance of Long Beach and Southern California”

The beautiful Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden on the Long Beach CSU campus was the perfect setting for the third in a series of Student Sustainability Task Force (SSTF) green mixers designed to foster dialogue and collaboration to unite the campus and local community on issues of environmental sustainability that affect us all.

Held April 13, this prelude to Earth Week 2011 featured guest speakers spotlighting green efforts on and off campus and representing the city, the university, and other community groups. Jeanette Schelin, Director of the EBM Japanese Garden, and Tracy Gorden, Program Assistant at the Garden, presided over the event and introduced the speakers.

Whole Foods sustains local & ethical healthy food choices!

Adrienne Peters, the marketing supervisor at the Long Beach Whole Foods Market that sponsored this event, spoke about Whole Foods’ green mission and commitment to local healthy food and environmental sustainability. She introduced Whole Foods’ Health Starts Here program to help people make healthier food choices, and the store’s participation in Global Animal Partnership (GAP) which she described as “beyond organic.” GAP is a 5-Step animal welfare rating standard used to rate and certify meat producers based on their animal welfare practices.

Donnie Bessom, the SSTF Project Coordinator, asked Ms. Peters to consider bringing Whole Foods to campus because as he said,

 “right now food on campus is pretty bad.”

The snacks Whole Foods shared at the event were pretty good,

“Especially the cheese,” says the cheese lady*.

Green Long Beach! shines a spotlight on the green community!

Tiffany Chen, recent CSULB alumna, current sustainability assistant in the city’s Office of Sustainability, and co-Catalyst of Green Long Beach!, highlighted the evolution of the Green Long Beach! festival. First held in 2009, the festival attracted >1,000 attendees and 100 participants. The theme of this year’s festival is Ignite Change! and is expected to draw > 5,000 attendees and 400 participants. It will take place Saturday June 11, 2011 from 10 AM - 8 PM at The Promenade between Broadway and 3rd Streets.

City of Long Beach sees a greener future!

Larry Rich, who has worked for the city in various positions for 20 years, became one of the city’s sustainability commissioners in 2008 the year the Office of Sustainability was formed to develop and implement green initiatives throughout Long Beach. He describes himself as the most sustainable of the sustainability commissioners, since he is the only one of three remaining.  His office currently oversees 10 part time interns (8 who are paid) and 17 youth workers from the Workforce Development Bureau’s green jobs program.

In what Larry describes as a soft sell (of green awareness) some of the interns act as one-on-one field supervisors of the youth workers, working on projects such as planting native drought tolerant plants at city installations, and delivering mulch to vacant city lots as part of Project Mulch-A-Lot and to residential applicants as part of a new Mulch Delivery Program. In collaboration with West Coast Arborists, the Office of Sustainability diverts ~6,000 tons of green waste per year from the waste stream.

Larry explained that the city’s solid waste reduction program does not include green bins (such as are offered in neighboring San Pedro) because Long Beach has the largest of the only three California Southeast Resource Recovery Facilities (SERRF) where solid waste is burned for energy. This is considered diversion, not incineration.

CSULB facilities are green behind the scenes!

Jon Root, the campus manager of integrated waste management and waste services, spoke about the university’s recycling efforts that mostly go unseen. The mulching mowers used on 60 acres of campus turf divert ~400 tons a year of grass from the waste stream, The tree trimmings from the 7,200 trees on campus are saved and re-used in the landscape. The university’s recycling efforts include not only paper and plastic recycling (see these images from last year’s CSULB Earth Week fair) but also a scrap metal program and an Associated Students Recycling Center that is operated by student employees.

Long Beach Grows plans for local food security! Grow Beach!

Long Beach Grows promotes food security through urban agriculture. Donna Marykwas, the Executive Director of Long Beach Grows, spoke about her plans and vision for a Long Beach with at least one community farm co-operative per city wide district, where people can grow and harvest real food together while building community. Donna has gardened at various community gardens throughout the country since 1985, first at Cornell in upstate NY, then in Cambridge, MA, Lincoln, MA, and Long Beach, CA. Describing the major differences between typical community gardens versus community farm co-ops, she envisions truly cooperative sites where people share in the work, share the rewards of their efforts, and share the bounty with the community. There are over 100 families on a waiting list to grow food with Long Beach Grows. Donna expressed serious interest in growing food security through urban agriculture on the CSULB campus, preferably at the site where there once was a community garden in the past. She thinks that growing food for the present on the Native American Indian ancestors of the past is a way to honor, respect and preserve their connection to the land.

CSULB faculty designs green phones!

Department of Design Professor Wesley Woelfel spoke about design methods to divert cell phones from the e-waste stream, citing statistics that with 1.2 billion cell phones sold globally per year, only 10% of obsolete cell phones are e-cycled. This is the motivation for his life cycle analysis of ways to design sustainable cell phones. Some ideas that he and his students have come up with are to encourage the design of new phones that are modular, easier to repair, upgradable, and did I hear him say biodegradable? We’ll see.

Industrial designer dreams green transportation!

Max Beach, a founding partner of Impact Design Associates in Culver City, teaches part time at CSULB. He wowed the audience with a futuristic animated video that brought to life his dream of an alternative transportation system based on inductively charged solar-powered CSULB streetcars.

Go green!

Connect with the green community at the next mixer to be held Wednesday, May 4th, 4:30- 6:30 PM, also at the Japanese Garden.


 
Enjoy this? Please share the link and comment below even if only to say "Hi!"

You might also be interested in Donna’s other work as  Long Beach Urban Agriculture Examiner, National Science News Examiner and founder and executive director of Long Beach Grows.

Copyright © 2011 Donna Marykwas*; All rights reserved.

Creating Livable Communities in Long Beach on this evening’s City Council agenda

Long Beach City Council meets this evening beginning at 5:00 PM. Council Chambers are located in City Hall building at 333 West Ocean Boulevard. The 16th agenda item out of 27 total is a

“Recommendation to request City Manager to conduct community meetings to discuss ways that residents can become involved in making Long Beach a more livable, mobile and desirable place to live.”

Vice Mayor Suja Lowenthal, our 2nd district council representative, is co-sponsoring this  request for Creating Livable Communities, along with Councilman Robert Garcia of the 1st district, Gary DeLong of the 3rd district, and James Johnson of the 7th district. The idea, though, is that residents from ALL Long Beach Communities, not just those represented by the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 7th districts, be given the opportunity to become

“more involved in the planning of local projects that enhance community character and reflect a broader group of citizens’ input” to create “more mobile, sustainable and livable communities.”

Tell your City Council representative to mandate this type of community dialogue, including not just a few community meetings but regular meetings on a continuing basis. If you don’t know who your City Council representative is, you can find out here. It is highly recommended that as many interested residents attend.

As an individual citizen of Long Beach, and as the founder and executive director of Long Beach Grows, I agvocate for and work towards a greener, healthier, more sustainable Long Beach that supports local food security through urban agriculture.

Urban agriculture is about building healthy communities in Long Beach. As is the case in San Francisco, the city of Long Beach should embrace urban agriculture into our culture’s mainstream approach towards food security.

A walkable and bicycle-friendly city is only livable if the people who walk and bicycle as their primary form of transportation have equal access to nutritious, affordable, real food. Urban agriculture within the city (not just peripheral to the city) and within all zoning districts will allow this to happen.

In addition to waiting to be heard at one of the community meetings, please voice your opinions here. What does a happier, healthier, more sustainable and livable Long Beach mean to you?

Enjoy this? Please share it and comment below even if only to say "Hi!"


You might also be interested in Donna’s other work as National Science News Examiner, Long Beach Urban Agriculture Examiner and founder and executive director of Long Beach Grows.

Copyright © 2011 Donna Marykwas; All rights reserved.

What is permaculture? An introduction for beginners

A Google Earth view of the Dervaes family's urban homestead in Pasadena, CA.

Long Beach residents who wish to contribute to their own food security might consider a permaculture approach to growing their own food. This term, permaculture, has been bouncing around lately. But what does it really mean?

The simplest definition, literally, is permanent agriculture. That is, the cultivation of our land to meet our basic needs in a way that is permanently sustainable. The grander vision, though, is that we sustain not just our immediate personal needs to get through this life but the capacity of this Earth to sustain future generations (of humans and ALL of Earth’s creatures), at least until the next big asteroid hits.

Thus permaculture, if successful, means permanent culture. This will require species conservation, resource conservation, and responsible, low-impact living, not just for those who live in rural locations, but for those who live in urban human settlements called cities as well.

In essence, the practice of permaculture doesn’t really sound like a choice, as was offered to Long Beach residents at the start of this article, but a necessity if we are to conserve our culture. The alternative is dire. Conserving our culture mandates a shift from our current, selfish, resource-greedy lifestyles to a more conscious, conservative way of living.

The permaculture philosophy is based on lessons learned from nature, from those ecosystems that haven’t yet been tampered with by man. These natural ecosystems are balanced, diverse, resilient, stable, yet living and thus evolving.

Most of the food that feeds the world is grown NIMBY on rural land set aside for agriculture, in most cases big ag. Large tracts of land are planted with a single crop, one variety of a particular genus and species, for as far as the eye can see. This is the antithesis of diversity. There is no ecosystem involved. The soils may even be sterilized by chemical fumigation before the mono-crop is installed. This type of agriculture is unstable and lacks resiliency. If afflicted with an infectious plant pathogen, the whole crop will be susceptible since it is all one and the same clone. It will die without constant human attention because it lacks the self-supportive infrastructure of a diverse ecosystem. And with the exception of perennial crops like fruit and nut trees and grape vines, the vast field must be replanted year after year. Farming is inherently labor intensive, but it is made even more so when it includes labor to kill the soil of all life, labor to deplete the soil of fertility, and labor to chemically supplement the soil with nutrients, a destructive rather than sustainable cycle.

The world’s population is expected to approach 9 billion people by the year 2050. How are we going to feed everybody? It seems that it is our personal and global responsibility to break this cycle in part by taking responsibility for our own food security. The more we can do to feed ourselves and to teach others to feed themselves, the less burden there will be on big ag to use unfriendly practices that might temporarily increase yield but ultimately defeat the principles and practices of permanent agriculture.

This of course is going to mandate an attitude facelift and land use reform so that anyone, regardless of where they live and whether they are vegetarians, flexitarians, or omnivores, can grow their own food at home, in their backyards, front yards, rooftops, parkways, and other under-utilized spaces.

In practice, a permaculturist need not merely replicate a natural ecosystem but can apply an understanding of basic principles and work with nature to design a homestead supported by an intentional ecosystem that includes plants and animals that supply his or her needs.

While this article focuses on food, other cultivable resources include plants for building materials, plants for energy generation, and plants for other uses. Learn more about permaculture here.

Enjoy this? You might also be interested in Donna’s other work as Long Beach Urban Agriculture Examiner,  Long Beach Restaurant Examiner, National Science News Examiner and founder and executive director of Long Beach Grows.


Copyright © 2011 Donna Marykwas; All rights reserved.

Top 12 New Year’s resolutions for a happier, healthier, greener, more sustainable Long Beach

1. Instead of using the words my, mine, me, and I, try substituting the words our, ours, us, and we. 
2. Grow some of our own produce, at our own homes or at a community garden or community farm co-op. Local food is food security!
3. Source and buy the rest of our produce from local growers, preferably at one of Long Beach’s numerous farmers’ markets to show our support of a local food economy.
4. Eat more greens. They are good for us. Here is a great recipe to try.
5. Share our excess with those who are less fortunate than we are. Excess food can be shared via SoCal Harvest or other local sharing resources. Other items that we no longer need can be donated to charity or exchanged for items that better meet our needs at the Seven-Ten Swap and potluck held on the third Friday of each month at the Catalyst Space, 430 E. 1st Street, Long Beach.
6. Share our time, knowledge, skills, and expertise by joining the Long Beach Time Exchange. Encourage others to too.
7. Become a catalyst for community action. “Connect and Affect” by joining the Catalyst Network of Communities.
8. Join LONG BEACH GROWS to help grow our urban community farm co-op.
9. Explore our neighborhoods and meet our neighbors while getting some exercise. Some say that a simple half hour walk once a day is all it takes to keep our hearts healthy. Our dogs will appreciate the walks too. But please scoop the poop and throw it into a trash can!
10. While taking that daily walk, be on the lookout for under-utilized space such as vacant lots, relatively open land, and sizable flat rooftops in Long Beach. Please share this information with LONG BEACH GROWS.
11. Sign the petition to permit urban agriculture in Long Beach.
12. Make an effort to attend some of the monthly meetings of our city’s Sustainable City Commission, the City Council, and other committees. We can use these opportunities to make our voices heard. Attendance at these meetings is instructive to see how things get done and to learn about who is making what decisions that impact us all.

Copyright © 2011 Donna Marykwas; All rights reserved.