Fishing for Compliments

The U.S. Environmental Protections Agency recently honored the Palos Verdes Shelf Fish Contamination Education Collaborative by awarding the group its National Citizen Excellence in Community Involvement Award.  Heal the Bay has been a member of the collaborative since its inception and our Pier Outreach Program has been one of the cornerstones of the effort to [...]

Greetings from Tel Aviv

I was fortunate enough to get invited by the Jewish Federation to visit Los Angeles’ sister city, Tel Aviv, to discuss environmental issues with leaders here. I joined city and county officials and Federation activists to share stories about water quality, sustainability and river restoration.  We’ve met with people in the NGO community, the mayor [...]

Mountain Highs and Lows

I just got back from the Aspen Environmental Forum and there’s a lot to share.  The only thing more depressing than mulling National Geographic’s presentation about the oil sands of northern Alberta (50 square miles of tailings ponds) was watching “Extreme Ice.”  The haunting film by James Balog depicts how quickly the world’s glaciers are [...]

This Story Has Legs, er, Arms …

The pressure to blog on Heal the Bay’s biggest star is overwhelming.  I spend way too many hours each week blabbing on about TMDLs, toxicity levels, water recycling, you name it, in a bid to engage jaded and overwhelmed members of the media. But the public has spoken – they love critters.
Because the eight-armed vandal [...]

Please Pull the Plug…

I guess Heal the Bay has been going after beach pollution in the wrong way over the last 20 years.  We’ve tackled the problem by authoring numerous statewide beach pollution bills, working with state Sen. Fran Pavley and the Davis and Schwarzenegger administrations to create and fund the Clean Beach Initiative to clean up California’s [...]

California Academy of Sciences

I ventured with the family to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park the day after Thanksgiving. No one else, other than the two quarter-mile lines of folks that put Disneyland to shame, had similar ideas.
I had read so much about the largest public LEED Platinum-rated facility on Earth that I [...]

Greetings from Egypt

I’m on a tourist ship floating down the Nile from Luxor to Aswan, and I am not alone. There are dozens of other ships with 150 tourists each from all over the world sharing the same experience at the same time.
The juxtaposition of the modern and the ancient is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. [...]

Life as a Gold

Thanks to my spontaneous retort to the L.A. Weekly’s article on whale-meat  consumption in Seoul, the word is on the street.  Jonathan Gold is indeed my brother. The Pulitzer Prize-winning foodie — who coined the slogan “Tacos Forever!” long before the food truck battles began — has spent most of his adult life chowing down [...]

Heal L.A.

This Saturday marks the 18th year that Heal the Bay has led the Coastal Cleanup Day effort in Los Angeles County.  This year, nearly 11,000 volunteers will come out to 71 locations throughout the region to give the county a three-hour face lift. Volunteers of all ages will participate in cleanups from Sun Valley to [...]

Youth Is Served

As millions of school kids return to classes statewide this week, I’m reminded that teaching our children about environmental problems, their causes and the solutions to these problems has never been a higher priority.
Opening up the newspaper or visiting a few environmental websites can lead to an overwhelming sense of depression. The San Francisco Bay-delta [...]