The Los Angeles River
By Great little piece in the Times on the Los Angeles River. The L.A. River has been forgotten about for most of Los Angeles’ history, and certainly since the city stole all the water from the Owens Valley (something most remembered from the film Chinatown) meant that the city was no longer reliant on it for water. But there’s been a movement to rewild the river for a couple of decades with some real progress. This gets at the question of what is nature. Is nature the pristine? Or is it the polluted backyard? I’d argue that it is both, but too often places like the L.A. River get forgotten about. Urban rivers are as important for us as the wilderness. If we want people to get in touch with nature, doesn’t it make more sense to revitalize the places they can actually visit, like the L.A. River, rather than put all of our resources into a place almost none of us will ever visit, like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?
Also, this: