https://reasonstobecheerful.world/los-angeles-river-renaturalization/
"If the Los Angeles River were a living being, we’d call her a survivor.
From her headwaters in the Simi Hills and Santa Susana Mountains, her 51 miles
wind through one of the most densely populated regions of the country and then
flow straight down into the Pacific Ocean near Long Beach. The City of Angels
owes its existence to her; over 1,000 years ago, the Tongva established the
first settlement on her banks near where Los Angeles City Hall stands today.
However, she is now forced to swallow urban discharge and runoff from farms,
factories and millions of residents. Ever since devastating floods in the
1930s, most of her body has been imprisoned in a straitjacket of concrete,
often polluted by big-city trash such as rusty shopping carts and plastic
bags. Yet there are still a few areas where the Los Angeles River is allowed
to show her original beauty and meander more naturally.
One can glimpse that beauty in the Sepulveda Basin, a 2,000-acre flood
management basin in the San Fernando Valley, squeezed between two major traffic
arteries, the 101 and the 405. This is one of the few stretches where the milky
blue-green water has been allowed to keep its naturally sandy basin, framed by
oaks, cottonwoods and sycamores that provide shade in a park-starved city.
Melanie Winter has been kayaking here for many years — even before it became
legal in 2011 — to show reporters and citizens “what our river actually looks
like and how she functions.” Winter has been instrumental in organizing the
removal of invasive plants along the half-mile stretch, including 180 trees, to
restore native habitat and improve water quality. She has spent the last two
and a half decades advocating for the re-naturalization of the LA River. If
Winter had her will, most of the river would be freed to look like the
Sepulveda Basin: meandering between native trees and shrubs, with white egrets
picking their lunch from the sandy riverbanks.
“We could solve several problems at once,” Winter says in her energetic voice.
“For starters, we are park-poor to such an extent [that] it has as much of a
negative impact on public health as the housing deficit.” In the San Fernando
Valley, neighborhoods lack open green spaces, with only 0.2 acres of park per
1,000 people in Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks — significantly below the LA County
goal of four acres per 1,000 people. But despite all her efforts over the past
25 years, Winter must acknowledge, “We have not removed a foot of concrete
anywhere in the Los Angeles River.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
