Huge Victory for Glendale, for California, and for the Global Environment! Glendale City Council Does the Right Thing!

This is huge news! I'm so proud to have been part of the group that worked to get the city of Glendale to investigate building out clean energy instead of expanding a polluting fossil-fuel- buring electricity power plant. Real praise should be directed at Dan Brotman, an adjunct professor of economics at Glendale College, for organizing hundreds of concerned citizens to rally against the original GWP plan to greatly expand the Grayson plant.

Cities all over the world must do more than their fair share if we are to get ahead of climate change and bend the curve on CO2 release. This, of course, will mean not only a better global environment, but also a cleaner, healthier atmosphere to breathe locally. This was a victory for my children's lungs!

Now, how do we get Glendale College to take these issues seriously enough to help GWP and Glendale by installing many megawatts of solar panels on the parking lots and on our buildings?

http://www.latimes.com/socal/glendale-news-press/news/tn-gnp-me-grayson-eir-20180411-story.html

GCC Podcast: Professor Rachel Ridgeway on Marie Tharp and the Theory of Plate Tectonics

My colleague, Rachel Ridgeway, produced an excellent and marvelously concise podcast on how one woman was essential to the development of the theory that explains the distribution of mountains, volcanoes, and earthquakes. It's well worth the three minutes of your time:

https://soundcloud.com/user-295774952/prof-ridgeway-on-marie-tharp

Podcast: Putting Young Career Women in Their (Own) Place: Bungalow Courts in 1920s and 1930s Southern California

Last week, I recorded a podcast about Bungalow Courts in Southern California. These cute little houses turn out to have a uniquely gendered history. In human geography we think of the visible world around us as the result of both culture and environment. These little houses are a great example of that in that they were built to embrace the warm Southern California weather, but also to reflect a whole range of cultural values, including those about where a woman should live.

You can here the podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/user-295774952/mike-reed-woman-history-month?in=user-295774952/sets/woman-history-month

“The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result."  Carl O. Sauer

Good News on the Environment For a Change: Plastics-Free Grocery Store Aisle Debuts in the Netherlands

Good News on the Environment For a Change: Plastics-Free Grocery Store Aisle Debuts in the Netherlands!

Read the text and watch the video:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/28/europe/ekoplaza-plastic-free-supermarket-aisle/index.html

This kind of effort is long overdue. Our streets, rivers, and oceans are filling up with both large and microscopic piece of plastic and there is really no reason for it to continue except for our unwillingness to pay a little more at the grocery store to do better.

Polymers, the building blocks of plastics, can be made from plant materials (corn, sugar, soybeans, etc.) and these plastics are biodegradeable. We can't keep hoping that everyone will recycle all their plastic. We just need to design systems that are sustainable no matter how the average person behaves. These "plastics" will just biodegrade when people toss them on the street or they flow into rivers. I look forward to the day when it's virtually impossible for anyone to litter with plastics!