Tag archives: Climate change

In a bittersweet ceremony, Montecito’s The Project for Resilient Communities (TPRC) on Sunday received a prestigious national award for the private-public project that installed protective ring nets in canyons where deadly torrents surged down in the 1/9 disaster. Three leaders of the Virginia-based ReadyCommunities Partnership, which spotlights and supports efforts across the nation demonstrating “resiliency […]

Remember the 2018 devastating debris flow that changed Montecito forever? Those of us who lived here at the time do. Like it happened yesterday, with all the pain and loss and destruction it brought. But for those who made Montecito their home post-debris flow (or PDF as I like to call it), the knowledge of […]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has captivated, as well it should, our general news coverage, our hearts, our minds, and our ability to clearly see the greater peril which is momentarily being obscured by the war. That is understandable on many levels when we see our fellow human beings, average Ukrainian civilians, targeted as victims of […]

Combating climate change and the effects of air traffic are dichotomous and irreconcilable. In spite of this threat, private/corporate and commercial jets are increasingly congesting our local skies. To make matters worse, Santa Barbara’s City Council approved the airport expansion that is expected to bring a 50% increase in aircraft traffic in 10 years. While […]

Climate change has been in the news a lot, what with extreme weather, wildfires, and the recent international negotiations in Scotland. What I thought I could do here is go into the science behind what’s happening to the climate system and to leave the policy implications to my fellow citizens and their representatives; kind of […]

As I write this, countries from around the world are convening in Glasgow for COP26 to solve the climate crisis. It is 26 because for 26 years these meetings have been going on and the threat keeps getting worse. I first began talking about the climate crisis in 1981 when it was called Global Warming […]

Dennis McFadden, a respected architect and member of UCSB’s Design Review Committee, has resigned from the Committee in protest over the university’s proposed Munger Hall dormitory project.  As a long-time Santa Barbara architect, community resident, and fan of UCSB, I am writing to add my objections to the Munger Hall “Mega Dorm” currently proposed for […]

I am reading Bob Hazard’s series on our water crisis with great interest. He is a strong writer and does his research, but I think there are instances in which he is cherry-picking the data. In his first piece, he mentions that 5% of California water is used for outdoor residential purposes. That may be […]

You may recall the 18th century poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is an incredible story of one man’s abuse of nature causing devastation all around him. In the tale, the Ancient Mariner is the navigator of the vessel on which he sailed, and after some misadventures, his ship […]

The latest August 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identifies methane as one of the worst greenhouse gases contributing to climate change. This IPCC report is one of many signs that climate change is accelerating, and already producing considerably graver impacts than has been forecasted by all the leading scientific consensus […]

Lions and tigers and bears, oh, my! As expressed so well by Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, these are the things we evolved to fear. Unfortunately, in the modern world, these are not the things that really matter. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just released its latest report emphasizing the urgency of […]

The 1960s TV show Get Smart often offered deep insights cloaked in humor. In the episode, “Do I Hear a Vaults?” the Chief gets locked in a bank vault with agent Larrabee. There is only enough air to last 24 hours and it is on a time lock that won’t open until the end of […]

A common refrain that has echoed around American society for the last 70 years or so goes like this: “Nothing in life is certain, except death and taxes!” Cute, and up until recently a truism that could be counted on. No longer. It turns out there is one other thing that is certain, is inescapable, […]

What on earth is going on in Miami? A 40-year-old, 12-story building named the Champlain Towers South (the “Towers”) collapsed into a heap of rubble without any advance warning, a mile from Miami Beach in Surfside, Florida. At this writing, there are at least 11 fatalities, many injuries, and more than 150 people still missing. […]

With climate change and potential severity of future droughts unknown, voluntary conservation continues to be an essential component for water supply planning locally and statewide. Historically, Montecito Water District customers have been able to reduce demands when necessary. In 2009, SBX7-7 set a requirement for urban water suppliers to reduce demands 20% by 2020. The […]

Last year 40,000,000 human beings were uprooted from their homes and became international refugees. You read that correctly. Forty million people. The vast majority of these people flooding other countries out of a desperate attempt to improve their lives to the point of achieving subsistence living were climate refugees. People driven from their ancestral lands […]

Wow! Hard to believe we’ve celebrated 51 Earth Days and the environmental battles we are fighting are worse than ever. Looking back, we delight in the history of Earth Day, in part catalyzed by the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. Earth Day was officially launched in 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson and Congressman Pete […]

With Earth Day 2021 rolling around just a week after the publication date of this issue of the Montecito Journal, you’d think the big three-day festival would be all anybody at the Community Environmental Council (CEC) would want to talk about. After all, it was a nascent CEC that organized Santa Barbara’s first Earth Day […]

Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA, is the recipient of the Santa Barbara’s Community Environmental Council’s 2021 Environmental Hero Award. “Her work exemplifies what it means to build the broad, boots-on-the-ground base of activism that we need to go all in together on the climate crisis,” says the CEC executive director Sigrid Wright, who […]

Sustainable landscaping doyenne Susan Van Atta is healing the local ecosystem one acre at a time… It was Susan Van Atta’s birthday just after the presidential inauguration and she wanted to spend it quietly riding her bike on a nostalgic tour through “her” Carpinteria. She set off along the paths of the Salt Marsh Reserve (she helped designed […]