EcoLocalizer

Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment of Sanctuary City, a fictional apocalyptic serial that appears regularly in Ecolocalizer. Read the previous chapter here.

Each day was hotter than the one before it. Blistering new temperature records were broken every week, as the parched planet, blanketed in increasingly thick layers of pollution, continued to swelter and bake. Clean water sources evaporated and food was scarce. Drought ravaged the land and displaced billions.

Some people turned ugly very quickly. Racist scapegoating flourished; a few states began enacting hateful separatist immigration legislation, banning entry to anyone from another state or region. Residents had to constantly carry current citizenship papers; anyone found without proper identification was immediately sent to the work colonies in the scorching desert desolation of southern California or the contaminated Gulf Coast, never to be heard from again.

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Editor’s note: This is the third installment of Sanctuary City, a fictional futuristic serial that appears weekly in Ecolocalizer. Read the previous chapter here.

Chemical Dispersants & Acid Rain

At the beginning of the apocalyptic oil spill disaster, the criminal British Petroleum cartel flushed billions of gallons of untested chemical dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico in a feeble attempt to make the evidence of their catastrophe disappear. Each day millions of gallons of toxic crude and monstrous poisonous methane clouds continued to spew from the chasm that they tore into the earth’s crust back in 2010. The experimental chemicals created massive oil plumes beneath the water’s surface which spread for thousands of miles. Then the dispersants were absorbed up into the atmosphere and came back down as acid rain, scorching and withering all life that it fell upon.

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Editor’s note: This is the second installment of Sanctuary City, a fictional futuristic serial that appears weekly in Ecolocalizer. Read last week’s chapter here.

The planet’s oceans turned into acid. The seas had already absorbed so much carbon dioxide from our pollution that their acidity levels had increased threefold in just the few years that she had been alive. Our saltwater had gradually been transformed into carbonic acid, and began dissolving the shells of living sea creatures, coral reefs and mollusks. The shellfish melted away, as did all of the other life forms that depended upon them. The entire food chain began to collapse; massive dead zones spread across all of the oceans, swathes of sea the size of continents, lifeless, anaerobic, putrid, stagnant, and filled with endless torrents of toxic oil.

East Grand Terre Island on the Louisiana coast — image by AP photographer Charlie Riedel

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Editor’s note: Sanctuary City is the first installment in a fictional futuristic serial that will appear weekly in Ecolocalizer.

June 23, 2011

The constant rain outside muffled her fractured thoughts; as she started reading her favorite newspaper column, “Ask the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill“, she heard a familiar song faintly playing somewhere far away. Kurt Cobain’s voice faded in and out, wavering in the distance beyond the forest and dripping fog:

Somewhere I have heard this before
In a dream my memory has stored
As defense I’m neutered and spayed
What the hell am I trying to say?

She had just been in the middle of reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower again, but today she found the bleak dystopia too oppressively prescient and perspicacious. Butler’s young heroine, Lauren Olmina, had been struggling with how to cope with her hyperempathy, the ability to feel the perceived pain and emotions of other creatures; now she herself had learned all too well that hyperempathy was not just a fictional construct, it was very real.

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Sustainable Silverlake hosted a lovely celebration in the parking lot of indie-music mecca, Spaceland. At the entrance, we could sign in and read a list of suggested promises to choose from. They even had an “advanced” page for those of us who are already doing a lot. Dublab made a webcast of our promises which you can listen to here. Broadcasting our promises to the planet was a really great way to celebrate Earth Day, and I think it makes sense to conceptualize this day as a day of reflection, thinking about what I’m doing to make the world a better place,and what I could be doing better. Having this simple neighborhood event brought home the importance of staying local in LA. Although my current home is downtown, I lived in Silver Lake for years and still consider it home. We hear so much about how sustainable Santa Monica is, it’s time we represent for the east side!

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I took this photograph in December when my friend Ulrich and I rode up our favorite road in the Angeles Forest Mountains. It’s a great area to go riding, either by motorcycle or bicycle, and it broke my heart to see the once-lush and beautiful mountains looking so scorched and bare. Many of the roads are now open, but the forest is still sick. After years of drought, the fire damage sustained last summer will take years of wet winters to rejuvenate on its own. And we all know how common wet winters are here in Southern California.

Your Daily Thread’s Danielle Davis wrote about this today, and I was so thrilled I had to find out more and spread the news. Forest Aid and TreePeople have joined forces to make it easy for any of us to plant trees. And not just anywhere, but in the San Bernardino Forest, which has been ravaged by forest fire lately. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo Courtesy Little Green

Little Green Cocktails is a group that meets bi-monthly to discuss sustainability in Los Angeles over mojitos (clearly a green drink if there ever was one!) and other green cocktails. The event is held in someone’s fabulous loft at the Brewery; after you go up a million flights of steep and winding stairs into a loft where beer was indeed once brewed, at the far corner of The Brewery grounds is where you’ll find them. They’re also on Facebook, of course. Little Green was started in December by Robotics Engineer Heather Knight, aka Marilyn Monrobot.

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Have you made your Earth Day plans yet? I’m sure they involve riding your bike to some awesome party which will renew your faith in humanity and inspire you as never before. I know that’s what I’ll be doing. I’m having trouble deciding, given the wonderful array of things to do to celebrate Earth Day in Los Angeles. The Go To Green LA calendar always has great events listed, so bookmark it to stay on top of what’s cool in LA. I’ve found all kinds of great things to do through that calendar. Global Green also has a calendar, with some interesting events and ways to donate. Please add an event in the comments, if you think of something I missed! In case you’re wondering where this verdant wonderland is, it’s Griffith Park! Greener than ever and fully recovered after all the horrible fires she’s suffered in recent years.

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At a public borehole in Zviyambe, a village in the backyard of Zimbabwe, approximately 250 kilometres away from Harare, the capital city, butterflies, goats, cattle and human beings mix and mingle in edenic fashion all in search of the precious liquid: water. Under a blazing sun, Sekai Mabika (not her real name) and her sister take turns to fill up buckets with water all the while shooing the goats away while the butterflies flutter hither and thither sipping at the water spilled to the ground and the cattle standby for their turn to drink water. Read the rest of this entry »

The Clodius Parnassian butterfly is more common at the top of its elevation range in the California mountains than in the past.

Climate change is making things rough for many vertebrate and invertebrate species. But add to this a steady loss of habitat, and many species just can’t adapt successfully to the combined stresses.

From the coastal lowlands to the coniferous tree lines of Northern California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, scores of species of butterfly are in an existential fight for their evolutionary futures. The survival challenge seems to be most impacting those species whose preferred habitats lay in the lower elevations, but the effects are being felt further up as well, as more butterfly species are moving into higher-elevated habitats. This evolutionary struggle might have gone unnoticed but for the diligent work of one research team, lead by butterfly expert Arthur Shapiro of the University of California at Davis. Read the rest of this entry »