Spouting Off Blog

Supreme Hope

The California Supreme court gave the Pacific Ocean hope Thursday by agreeing to hear Manhattan Beach’s appeal on its overturned plastic bag ban. Happy Earth Day indeed!! The news comes during a week when a dead gray whale was found to have inge…

Act Locally

Happy 40th Earth Day! It seems as if the enormous 20th anniversary celebration was just yesterday, but that’s what happens when you get old. For Heal the Bay, Earth Day used to mean Earth Month, but now the festivities occur mid-March to mid-May…

An Explosive Idea

By now everyone has seen the devastating havoc wreaked by the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland And I’m not just talking about the impacts on the careers of TV journalists trying to pronounce the Icelandic tongue-twister of a volcano. …

Bagging a Win

Assemblymember Julia Brownley’s bill to ban single-use bags, AB 1998, passed out of the Natural Resources Committee on a 6-3 vote Monday.  If the Heal the Bay-sponsored bill is signed into law, California retailers (grocery, drug and conven…

Back to School

I’ve spent the last 10 days with my son Zack on the traditional high school junior rite of passage: the college roadie. Personally, I only applied to one school. Ever. I’m a Bruin – born at the hospital, bachelors, masters, doctorate and a c…

Just drill, baby!

So the Obama administration has proposed to open the Atlantic coast from Delaware to northern Florida for offshore oil exploration. That’s up to 167 million acres of ocean floor.  And now that the pesky polar ice cap is melting away, the ent…

Power Play

Good things come to those who wait. Unless you’re a fish. Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office finally allowed the State Water Board to release a modified once-through-cooling power plant policy. The governor’s office held the …

A Collapse of Governance

I always thought that a species was endangered if the organism’s population plummeted to a fraction of historic levels.  In California, the scourge of DDT and PCBs led to the listing of the California Brown Pelican on the federal endangered…

Butts on the Beach

The California Assembly approved on Monday a sweeping ban on smoking at state parks and beaches. Sen. Oropeza’s SB4 is part of the Clean Seas Coalition package of bills to combat the marine debris crisis. Major props go to the Surfride…

Baby Blues

With April right around the corner, the official beach monitoring season is upon us. Under AB 411, all heavily visited beaches near a potential pollution source statewide must be monitored once a week from April to the end of October.  T…