HtB in the News
People who swim, surf and fish in L.A.'s coastal waters have their first chance this week to learn how regulators plan to keep them clean with updated rules for managing stormwater.
The meeting will be held Thursday, May 3 at 10:30 a.m. in the California Science Center in Exposition Park.
"Pollution limits have been put in place over the last decade to make sure that our water body actually gets cleaned up," emphasizes Kirsten James, a member of the clean water advocacy group Heal the Bay.
"So it could be anything from making sure that our beaches are safe for swimming to making sure that fish in our waters are safe for consumption."
The “paper or plastic” question — a hallmark of the modern grocery shopping experience — has been all but outlawed in the small coastal town of Solana Beach. The City Council decision Wednesday night makes Solana Beach the first in the county to remove single-use plastic bags from grocery stores, retailers and restaurants.
Solana Beach’s decision also puts in place rules that require stores to charge customers at least 10 cents for each paper bag they use, a move city officials hope will push consumers away from one-time use bags and make it routine for them to bring reusable bags to stores throughout the city, as it seemingly has in cities that have also banned the bags, such as Santa Monica.
Many beach advocates are hopeful that Wednesday’s decision will spark a regional trend and ultimately help force a statewide bag ban.
At Heal the Bay, Water Quality Director Kirsten James said dozens of bag laws across California are building toward the need for a law to unify the patchwork of approaches. She said about 1 in 6 Californians is covered by some sort of bag-reduction act.
A statewide ban failed a few years ago, but James said the momentum created in places such as Solana Beach show demand is building.
Water Quality Director Kirsten James discusses one of the biggest threats to our environment: The single-use plastic bag. We u se billions of them every year, and only one to two percent of those bags end up being recycled. Watch it now.
Amy Smart not only has a lot on her plate, she needs an enormous, biodegradable serving platter to accommodate all the things she has going. When the 36-year-old, Topanga Canyon-bred actress is not shooting the Showtime series Shameless… she directs her indefatigable self toward more altruistic pursuits, such as saving the giant marble we're all living on.
She's a longtime volunteer and board member of Santa Monica's Heal the Bay. In fact, Smart will be honored for her environmental leadership over 18 years of volunteering with the organization at its annual Bring Back the Beach awards gala at the Jonathan Club on May 17.
The Santa Catalina Island resort town's water has long been tainted with sewage, its beach one of the most chronically polluted in the nation. Now, the L.A. Regional Water Quality Control Board is putting Avalon under its supervision.
"This is a big deal," said Kirsten James, water quality director for Heal the Bay, the environmental group that last year named Avalon Harbor the second most-polluted beach in California — the eighth consecutive year it has placed in the bottom five.
Near the eve of the one-year anniversary of the disaster, the environmental group Heal the Bay has the 411 about possible debris hitting our shores.
Santa Cruz County may curtail ocean water monitoring if the federal Environmental Protection Agency eliminates a program to test water quality at the nation's beaches.
Local beaches have come under scrutiny, with one environmental group recently naming Santa Cruz' Cowell Beach the worst in the state for water quality, and ranking Capitola Beach among the poorest.
That group, Santa Monica-based Heal the Bay, is sounding the alarm about the proposed cut.
Heal the Bay pays tribute to the mondo mammals in Santa Monica.
It has been a banner winter for gray whales off our shores. It's been a banner winter for all sorts of whales, in fact, including those crowd-pleasing orcas.
Now, before the season starts to wrap up, and before those gorgeous, majestic grays swim away from our SoCal shores, Heal the Bay is pausing to pay tribute at a family-nice, two-day, ocean-close bash.
The best things in life are free…go spend time with the person you love.
If Encinal Canyon in Malibu is crowded, you can blame Heal the Bay. Their Valentines’ day beach guide for ocean lovers chooses “top spots for healthy romance” along the west coast.
A romantic beach is one of those can’t-miss Valentine’s Day standbys — the more pristine the better. And no one knows pristine like Heal the Bay, which has released this guide to the West Coast’s most romantic sand. All have received an “A” for water quality.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday gave final approval to a rule that bans large ships from dumping sewage less than three miles off the California coast.
"We still have a long way to go," said Kirsten James, director of water quality for the Heal the Bay environmental group. "There are a lot of different sources of pollution in our coastal waters, but this is definitely a step in the right direction."
Many shoppers in Calabasas appear to welcome the city’s prohibition on carryout plastic bags, which went into effect last July.
Calabasas officials made a prudent decision, said Kirsten James, water quality director with Heal the Bay, a nonprofit environmental organization.
“It is making a difference, and we need to continue on this path,” James said, adding that fewer bags have been found in local waterways since the ban went into effect.
Heal the Bay has come up with 10 resolutions – like reducing litter – for ocean lovers on how to improve the health of waterways.
The resolutions are just one more action in the organization’s history to promote clean coastal waters and watersheds since 1985.
KFWB’s Maggie McKay talked with Meredith McCarthy, director of programs at Heal the Bay, for some tips to keep our rivers, creeks and beaches clean.
Heal the Bay announced Tuesday that Executive Director Karin Hall will take over day-to-day leadership of the organization, while Stephanie Medina Rodriguez will serve a two-year term as board chairwoman.
The nonprofit group Heal the Bay, which early last year began collecting data about MPA usage in Malibu, plans to train volunteers for the first time today on coastal trails and bluffs near Point Vicente - where fishing is prohibited in a 15-square-mile section of ocean.
"We'd like to track human-use trends inside and outside MPAs," said Heal the Bay marine scientist Dana Murray. "This social data will complement the biological data collected by other groups."
So far, Murray said she's seen a positive response to MPA Watch.
"The public's been really enthusiastic. We've been getting people from all over Los Angeles County and Ventura County," she said. "I think it's because, the ocean belongs to no one and yet it belongs to all of us. I think ... people want to be involved and they want to help protect it."
One of California’s most prominent environmental advocacy groups, Heal the Bay, is saying goodbye to its president, Mark Gold, after his 23 years of service. Mark joined Patt Morrison to discuss his work advocating for coastal protection laws.
Creators of EarthScents, a line of nontoxic cleaning products, are committed to recyclable packaging and a no-animal-testing philosophy. EarthScents also donates five percent of profits to Heal the Bay. The company, which manufactures its products in Malibu, recently cut its first check to Heal the Bay for $500.
Long the public face of Heal the Bay, Mark Gold will become associate director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
Gold has spent his entire adult life building the group into what it is today and said its hard work has helped make a huge difference in quality of life for Southern Californians and aquatic creatures alike.
"Think about where Santa Monica Bay is today versus where we were when I first started," he said. "We don't have a dead zone in the bay, we don't have fish with tumors ... the beaches are so much cleaner. We don't have these sewage spills that were commonplace in the 1980s. We have marine protected areas."
This week, Santa Monica-based environmental group Heal the Bay suggested 10 resolutions for Southern Californians to give the ocean a clean start to the new year.
Celebration for Underwater Parks Planned for Jan. 21.
Malibuites and beachgoers are invited to join Heal the Bay volunteers at a beach cleanup at Westward Beach at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 21, followed by a guided nature walk in Point Dume State Marine Reserve at 1 p.m.
Other activities will include an education booth. Free maps of the new MPAs and canvas tote bags will be distributed. Same-day free admission to Heal the Bay's Santa Monica Pier Aquarium is also being offered.
The state Department of Fish and Game on Jan. 1 began enforcement of a new marine protected area stretching from Paradise Cove to El Matador State Beach.
"As this day approaches I've been reflecting about the effort that went into the Malibu MPA becoming a reality,” Heal the Bay President Mark Gold said last week. “In the mid-1990s someone I consider an iconic part of Old Malibu, Mary Frampton, had the foresight to put the wheels in motion by advocating for this legislation.”
Starting today, fishing will be halted or limited in some 15 percent of Southern California's most bountiful ocean waters under a new landmark environmental protection initiative.
From Point Conception in Santa Barbara County south to the Mexico border, more than 350 square miles of open sea will become state marine protected areas.
It's hugely important," said Sarah Sikich, coastal resources director with the environmental advocacy group Heal the Bay. "We're very excited that the MPAs that have been worked on so deeply over the past several years in Southern California are finally taking effect."
Heal the Bay has announced a new fundraising effort to raise money for continued marine biology education in local public schools, seeking to bolster programs likely targeted for budget cuts.
The environmental group hopes to raise $30,000 by the end of the school year.
Cuts may include field trips to the ocean and coastal aquariums, which Heal the Bay is afraid may keep students from performing up to par in science education. The group says experimental, interactive and hands-on learning have been proven to increase performance.
As part of the continued effort to ban single-use bags in Los Angeles, Heal the Bay has dubbed Thursday, December 15 "Day Without A Bag." The event is appropriately timed, as L.A. City Council is expected to move forward with a sweeping ban on single-use carryout bags next week.
State parks representatives cite risks to habitat and health in opposing an off-leash zone.
"Santa Monica taxpayers have spent millions of dollars cleaning up local beaches (over $2.5 million on the successful Santa Monica Pier cleanup alone)," Heal the Bay President Mark Gold, a dog owner, wrote on his blog.
"Adding a new source of fecal bacteria to our local beaches doesn't make any sense in these financially challenging times," he wrote.
Jose Bacallo, Heal the Bay senior aquarist for the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium, says the bay is his backyard, "When I'm out here, or I'm in the water, doing stand up paddleboarding with my daughters, fishing, tidepooling, I've always viewed this as our resource."
"I've never looked at it as my right," he said. "I've always looked at it as, this is a resource for our greater community."
That's the way he wants visitors to the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium to experience it, too. All of its animals, plants, even the water comes from the bay. They're neighbors.
In what is the strictest bag ban to be explored to date, the Los Angeles Board of Public Works met Wednesday morning and unanimously voted to support a ban of plastic and paper bags in the city of Los Angeles."The time is now," said Kirsten James, Water Quality Director at Heal the Bay. "The city of L.A. really has a chance to be a true leader, the biggest city to take action on this in the nation. It is one of the most progressive policies we have seen before us."
People in California can no longer eat the Chinese delicacy of shark fin soup. The Governor of California officially made it illegal to sell or possess shark fin. ... conservationists, like Sarah Sikich of Heal the Bay, say the demand for shark fin is devastating the shark population.
An environmental group is urging people to stay out of the ocean for 72 hours after the first significant rainstorm of the season because of pollution from urban runoff.
The potential contaminants, including chemicals and debris that have been accumulating for months on sidewalks, roadways and riverbeds, have now been washed into storm drains by the rain, said the group Heal the Bay.
One day after our big rainstorm, people are being told to stay out of the water. The environmental group "Heal the Bay" says runoff from Wednesday's storm could be dangerous to your health.
The waters off Long Beach -- long among the most contaminated in the state -- have improved dramatically in the last year, according to a new report that gives the city's beaches their highest water-quality ratings in a decade.
All the beaches in the city earned grades of A or B in the environmental group Heal the Bay’s End of Summer Beach Report Card.
More than 10,000 volunteers at 65 locations collect 44,038 tons of trash as part of the 22nd annual California Coastal Cleanup Day.
Students from Los Angeles-area schools play 'Fatal Food', a game intended to teach them the perils of ocean pollution, during environmental nonprofit Heal the Bay's Eco-Derby Tuesday at Santa Monica Beach.
Tarps are pulled off to reveal a four-story-high series of colorful square panels affixed to the shell of what will be a new home. The intent is to highlight ocean pollution. The city says it must go.
In an op-ed, Mark Gold, Heal the Bay's president, and Sue Chen, director of Shark Savers, join forces to urge the public to contact their State Senators in support of AB376, the shark fin ban bill up for a vote by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Monday, Aug.15. Gold and Chen write: "Californians are the No. 1 consumers of shark fin soup outside of Asia, and our state is a significant entry point for fins trafficked to Asia."
This time out the beneficiary is Heal the Bay, an organization dedicated to keeping the waters off Southern California safe and clean. The vehicle is a sale titled Buy the Bay …
A new campaign for environmental nonprofit Heal the Bay is trying to encourage tourists and locals to do just that, using their smartphones to read QR codes on the ad-wrapped cans. Once you do, you'll find a mobile website with the latest weather …
