Tag Archives: Earth Day

earth day 2010

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Our sign at Earth Day

Happy Earth Day everyone!

Last week­end I helped out with the local native plant society’s infor­ma­tion table at San Diego’s Earth Day cel­e­bra­tions, adver­tised as “the largest free annual envi­ron­men­tal fair in the world.” Imag­ine that, in sleepy lit­tle con­ser­v­a­tive San Diego.

Our booth

Some of the plants we had for sale at the table. We ended up not push­ing them too hard since a heavy gal­lon pot seemed to be more than most peo­ple wanted to carry around with them on a warm day with thou­sands of peo­ple crowded around. Seeds were and eas­ier sell.


Some of the crowd at Earth Day


This exhibit was encour­ag­ing peo­ple to grow more of their own food. The cutouts for kids to poke their head through assured some atten­tion from the younger crowd. Not all the kids looked at the exhibit, but a lot did.

There are always dis­plays of elec­tric car conversions…

…but with elec­tric cars start­ing to come on line, they’re less of a draw than before. But peo­ple seemed really inter­ested in the elec­tric scoot­ers next door.

It’s always a wide mix of things that you’ll find in a large environmental-themed gath­er­ing, from con­ser­va­tion orga­ni­za­tions to green-technology ven­dors to the ubiq­ui­tous booth sell­ing ket­tle corn. What ket­tle corn has to do with sus­tain­able liv­ing I have no idea, but it did keep some of the peo­ple fed and happy.

And it’s always a broad sam­pling of peo­ple who attend these fairs. Of the peo­ple who stopped by our table, there was the Euro­pean fam­ily that was stranded due to Iceland’s Eyjaf­jal­la­joekull vol­cano, plenty of peo­ple inter­ested in to work of the plant soci­ety, and even more peo­ple who were in the process of replac­ing their land­scap­ing with less water-intensive plants.

I enjoy talk­ing plants–any sur­prise since I do a gar­den blog? Help­ing to get the word out about the value of native plants, in the wilds or around the home, was extra-cool.

Some of the plant­i­ngs at Bal­boa Park’s Alcazar Garden

But it was nice to escape the crowds for a few min­utes and just look at some plants. Our booth was adja­cent to Bal­boa Park’s Alcazar Gar­den. The grounds­peo­ple are con­stantly chang­ing the look of the gar­den. Today it fea­tured flow­er­ing blocks of red snap­drag­ons and laven­der. It’s not a com­bi­na­tion I’d have come up with, but I think I like it. Of course I’m way too curi­ous about plants–and prob­a­bly way too ADD–to limit myself to two gar­den plants.

A detail of the pair­ing of snap­drag­ons and lavender.



Even with grand dis­plays like this near the native plant society’s table, we had a nearly con­stant flow of people–a sure sign that peo­ple are think­ing about dif­fer­ent kinds of plea­sures for their gar­dens. The times they are a-changin’.

earth day fair

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Yes­ter­day was the big city Earth Day fair here in town at Bal­boa Park. Buoyed by tem­per­a­tures in the 80s, tens of thou­sands of peo­ple came out to celebrate.

freeway-backup

Get­ting to the park required some form of travel, which for many peo­ple meant par­tic­i­pat­ing in a three mile traf­fic jam to exit at the park. (Just a lit­tle bit of irony in peo­ple in get­ting into their inter­nal com­bus­tion pow­ered vehi­cles to cel­e­brate the earth, don’t you think?)

With the main core of Bal­boa Park ded­i­cated to pedes­tri­ans and the fair, park­ing a car there was pretty impos­si­ble. The orga­niz­ers had arranged for remote park­ing and shut­tles, which seemed to be work­ing well.

scooter-parking

I rode my scooter, which made park­ing in the unused space between cars easy. I give myself a few brownie points for dri­ving some­thing that’s pretty fuel-efficient, though in real­ity a car­load of peo­ple in a Hum­mer would have used about the same amount of gas to get there. I’m try­ing to get greener, really. (All of you read­ing this, hold me to it–Guilt works. So does an appeal to my sense of the greater good.)

bicycle-valet-parking

In the end, though, even on a hot day, the way to get there was on two feet–or two wheels. Cars were barred from enter­ing the core of the park, and there was free valet park­ing for bicy­cles. Yeeha!

earth-day-crowd

electric-car

stuff-to-buy_solar-cells

earth-day-information-booths_tijuana-river-estuary

Once you got there you had your choice of 400-plus booths. Native plant soci­ety? Check. Land­scape con­trac­tors spe­cial­iz­ing in low-water land­scapes? Sev­eral. Infor­ma­tion on greener res­i­den­tial con­struc­tion prac­tices (includ­ing solar energy)? Or on most of the pub­lic nat­ural park­lands around the county? Or on con­vert­ing your car to a purely elec­tric vehi­cle? Absolutely.

electric-rolls

Left: A 1930s (1932?) Rolls Royce that has been turned into a purely elec­tric vehicle.

glamorous-trash

On such a warm day I felt really sorry for the per­son in this garbage can cos­tume that was meant to draw atten­tion to city waste issues. But he or she was incred­i­bly perky all the time I watched. Bet­ter than the wilted guy in the banana suit nearby.

recycled-paper

One of the kid-friendly booths was this hands-on demon­stra­tion of paper-making using recy­cled paper. I watched a girl of prob­a­bly no more than five star­ing at the lit­tle sheet of paper that she’d just made, like it was the most mag­i­cal object in the world.

stuff-to-buy_rain-barrelsstuff-to-buy_sandalsstuff-to-buy_cactus-and-succulentselectric-bikes

And of course there were booths to buy earthly stuff: water stor­age sys­tems (a lit­tle pricey at over $6 per gal­lon of capac­ity), elec­tric bicy­cles, cool suc­cu­lents, san­dals, teeshirts, ket­tle corn… Okay, some of the offer­ings were more oppor­tunis­tic than they were green, but hey, it’s a fes­ti­val. The home-made lemon­ade stand caught my inter­est, but even by not long after noon, they were sold out. Waaah.

Events like this are inter­est­ing to see what’s being pushed as the lat­est great­est thing, and some of the green con­struc­tion tech­nolo­gies were pretty big. Fif­teen years ago an event like this would have been filled with peo­ple demon­strat­ing their double-paned win­dow sys­tems. Yes­ter­day I might have seen one out­fit offer­ing a spe­cial­ized ver­sion of insu­lated glaz­ing. That goes to show how what may have seemed cool and exotic a decade ago can become commonplace–and even part of reg­u­la­tions. It gives me hope that we’re see­ing a lot of peo­ple work­ing on some of our big prob­lems. And what’s con­sid­ered a bou­tique indus­try this year might be com­mon as dirt in a decade. Solar-electric kettle-corn stor­age sys­tems, anyone?

Crowds or not, I always enjoy going to Bal­boa Park. Here are just a few ran­dom sights. I’ll post tomor­row on what was going on in the botan­i­cal build­ing, seem­ingly obliv­i­ous to the Earth Day happenings.

tea-trees

Always a crowd-pleaser, the wild trunks of the Aus­tralian tea tree (Lep­tosper­mum lae­vi­ga­tum) were draw­ing pho­tog­ra­phers every few min­utes. I’ve loved this plant ever since I saw it in the 1970s at the Los Ange­les County Arbore­tum. I might have room for one if I nuke every­thing else in the back yard…

bush-poppy

The park is devot­ing itself more to Cal­i­for­nia native plants. Here’s a new plant­ing of bush poppy (Den­drome­con, prob­a­bly har­fordii) with a ground­cover ceonothus.

lawn-bowling

In my clois­tered life a tightly cropped patch of lawn is a pretty exotic sight. And then add lawn bowlers on top of that. Wow. Not things I see every day. The park is always great for keep­ing my eyes open…

from shower to flower

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Earth Day is com­ing up on Wednes­day. What environment-friendly changes will you be try­ing to make?

Last year we installed a tan­k­less water heater, a move that has saved us at least 30% on our gas bill. But it still takes a while for the heated water to make it to the bath­room. In the past, we let the cold water in the pipes go down the drain until the water got to a proper shower tem­per­a­ture. recovered-water-bucketBut now the water is going into a bucket that we’ll use to water the gar­den. (A prettier–or at least cleaner–bucket not for­merly used for pulling weeds and mix­ing pot­ting soil is next on the agenda…)

The next log­i­cal step for water con­ser­va­tion would be to install a gray water sys­tem to reuse wash­wa­ter. Reg­u­la­tions in Cal­i­for­nia have been com­plex enough so that only 41 house­holds have done it legally in San Diego County, and only 200 state-wide. State sen­a­tor Alan Lowen­thal from Long Beach has intro­duced a new bill, SB 1258, that would man­date a review of exist­ing codes to make it eas­ier to design and install legal gray water sys­tems, a piece of leg­is­la­tion that is being called the “shower to flower” bill.

It’s a good start, and one worth supporting.

Related read­ing:
San Diego Union Tribue: New water­ing source is sur­fac­ing (March 23, 2009 arti­cle)
Los Ange­les Times: A solu­tion to California’s water short­age goes down the drain (April 19, 2009 opin­ion piece)
The text of SB 1258, marked up with com­ments and sug­ges­tions for fur­ther improve­ments by Oasis Design.