Showing posts with label national forest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label national forest. Show all posts

Tuesday, 20 May 2014

Scary LA: LIONS! Don't visit this summer

Xochitl, Ashley Wells, Crystal Quintero, Wisdom Quarterly; Ipagn28 (buzzfeed.com)
"I met some Los Angeles people once. I hated them." The Grumpy Guide to Life (Chronicle Books). See Grumpy Cat live, Monday, Aug. 4, 2014, 6:00 pm, at Kitson, Santa Monica Place, Ste. 120 and Aug. 5, 2014, 6:00 pm in Las Vegas, Nevada (shopkitson.com)


L.A. with its own Himalayan foothills (Nat'l Forest) just behind the megalopolis (buzzfeed)


Sightings of big cats in our "Central" (Griffith) Park have been confirmed near the Hollywood sign. They are peaceful but not safe for children or crouchers. (Burma Charwoodland/Firstfire53/flickr).
 
According to the last census, Los Angeles is the Most Densely Populated Urban Area in the US. At nearly 2,000 more people per square mile on average than New York, we can’t compare Manhattan to Culver City and call it a day.
 
"Entering a space of privilege and prejudice"
Where does anyone think the traffic comes from? It’s people, commuting from one place to another. It has already been pointed out that due to the lack of a center, people move from where they live to where they work or play. It is a great expanse to cover, and most of it is covered in concrete and asphalt, which facilitates travel. It is actually just much more evenly distributed in terms of density than east coast cities.
 
A dozen Southern California fires rage destroying Pendleton military base. Arson, sabotage, Pentagon incompetence, Santa Ana winds? Mother Nature avoiding violence? (scpr.org)

 
Post-Native Los Angeles, Old Mexico
What L.A. really is is BIG. It’s massive. It's not a metropolis but a megalopolis. It is widely spread out, spilling into neighboring cities and counties...

And there are A LOT of people there, too, distributed in hundreds of communities, living in any number of configurations, speaking hundreds of languages (the L.A. Almanac says 224). More

After the earthquakes and the toxic petroleum street spill, there were some fires.
3) Everyone is in the Industry
Traveling up Beachwood Canyon to the old Hollywood sign, circa 1932 (weirdca.com)

Hollywood sign with 8-ft. long nocturnal predator lurking in the dark (Maya Sugarman)
On ridge above the lights of Los Angeles, a male cougar labeled P-22 made his way from the Santa Monica Mountains to Hollywood's Griffith Park -- an island of habitat surrounded by homes and freeways (Steve Winter/National Geographic/scpr.org)
Preliminary DNA evidence shows that P-32, one of three cubs recently born in the Santa Monica Mountains of the City of Los Angeles, is inbred (National Park Service/SCPR.org)
Not fit for cat food -- massive LA fish die off over the weekend. Rat poison runoff? (LAT)
Know why L.A. has so much smog? So the God can't see what we're doing down here.

    Wednesday, 12 March 2014

    Native American Walkabout 2014 (March 22)

    Xochitl, Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; ArroyoSeco.org (Facebook)
    If the Buddha -- a wanderer -- went on a walkabout, what would he be doing? "May peace and balance be restored to Mother Earth and all who walk upon her" (Eco_Bela/flickr.com)

    Buddha Mind, Buddha Body: Walking Toward Enlightenment (Thich Nhat Hanh)
    Tim Martinez led hikers to Hahamongna (JPL/Devil's Gate Dam), where they learned about its rich Native American heritage and how to protect it. Comments on the Devil's Gate sediment removal draft EIR were due on Jan. 21, 2014. (See here for more information).
    View of flood control basin as it fills from atop Devils Gate Dam with JPL in distance
     
    Old Los Angeles (tongvapeople.org)
    What better way to celebrate the equinox and welcome spring than to set off on an aboriginal walkabout?

    The original inhabitants of Los Angeles were the Tongva, who considered the Hahamongna watershed "sacred" land. The rain that falls in the forest rushes down the mountains and percolates through springs rising before flooding down into the Los Angeles Basin into the Pacific Ocean.

    The Foundation
    One of the most spectacular accomplishments of the Arroyo Seco Foundation (ASF) is reestablishing the Arroyo chub, a native fish in this major tributary of the Los Angeles River.
     
    The ASF mission is to preserve and enhance the Arroyo Seco (dry gulch) from the San Gabriel Mountains down to the Los Angeles River, reforest the region, and promote environmental and cultural (Tongva/Gabrielino and Chumash) awareness of one of Southern California’s greatest natural resources. More
    Hahamongna Watershed Park, next to dam and its usually dry basin (PasadenaWeekly.com)

    Thursday, 16 January 2014

    Climate chaos: Forest fire rages in Los Angeles

    Ashley Wells, Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)

    The Colby Fire is raging in the deep foothill suburbs of Los Angeles and moving west due to wind gusts and the state's continuing drought.

    Temperatures are in the eighties, humidity is at 10%, and the chemtrails -- which seem to be more about geoengineering and toxic weather modification attempts lately, more so than spreading heavy metals and aiding HAARP experiments. Right wing AM radio has been laughing heartily at the misnomer "global warming" due to the polar vortex and dropping temperatures across the country, even the very chilly nights in California. But climate change is general and punctuated not a simple linear increase in across the board measures. All temperatures do not rise everywhere to call it warming.

    Such simpleton logic and climate-denier misinformation is alarming. Increases in rain and flooding in one place means drought and fire in another. Hurricanes and cyclones spinning out of control is not a harbinger of a new ice age. Our declining snowpack shows movement in the other direction.
    Glendora castle burns (sgvtribune.com)
    And geoengineering (cloud seeding, aerosol chemical cloud/haze cover, squeezing more rain out of weather systems, redirecting hurricane paths with atmospheric agitators...) does not correct what human activity is disrupting. Their are natural cycles, and there are exacerbated cycles. Human doings are aggravating the problem. The result?

    Monsoon patterns are changing; forest and freeze zones are retreating north; seas are acidifying; poles are melting (in general as seen over time); coral is dissolving; toxic fuels are leaving their mark; and corporations are raking in record profits. 

    No one can successfully deny that the climate is generally worse -- hotter, colder, wetter, drier, and more chaotic. Look at the places it used to snow, used to rain predictably, used to cool, used to remain above water.
    • PHOTOS: Firefighters try to protect the main house as a fire burns a section of Singer Mansion on Kregmont Drive in Glendora (Los Angeles Times/Irfan Khan)
    The central question is, Why? Even if all the planets in the solar system are growing warmer, our human-created pollution, our annihilation of ecosystems, our monocropping, our allowing of endless military-industrial complex war and crushing poverty, all of which exhausts natural resources, is contributing. 

    What FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, and similar ideologues are doing is unconscionable.

    Why would rightwingers, such as Tea Party racists and Tea Party egalitarians (are there many?), help the Koch Brothers, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council, the source of most actual conspiracies affecting the US and the world), Chevron, BP, and transnational corporations continue to ruin the planet while denying that something is terribly wrong? Sea levels are rising. Fukushima and nuclear sites on the East Coast of the US are contaminating. And Republicans, with plenty of help from their brothers the nominal Democrats, are colluding.


    Meanwhile in nearby HOLLYWOOD-Land...

    The West's version of Bollywood (the world's largest producer of movies, located in Mumbai/Bombay, India) does not stop even when the hills are on fire, the skies are choked with smoke, and a second coming of a post Ariel Sharon messiah is ready to launch (or be launched by the NSA, Mossad, and similar spying agencies around the world). Nominations were announced and it is looking very good for "12 Years a Slave," based on the true story of the American slave trade, and Amy Adams in "American Hustle," based on the true story of Abscam. "Gravity"? Bullocks. And better luck next time, Tom Hanks. See all the nominees: Oscar.go.com