“You know the joke about when the best time to plant a tree is, right?” asks 70-year-old Peter Lucey. “Yesterday,” he answers. And then adds, “And the next best time is today.”
Lucey has just finished helping plant four trees in Moon Canyon, a part of hilly Mt. Washington, which is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Along with a group of like-minded neighbors who work together as “Friends of Moon Canyon,” Lucey is working as a “guerilla” climate change activist, planting trees on city-owned property that has been neglected by the city and trying to find other climate-friendly options, like using goats to clear undergrowth. The four trees, which include two California Live Oaks, are surrounded in the early spring by a carpet of green and wildflowers which will be gone in a few months, leaving behind a dry and brown canyon. Lucey and others haul buckets of water from a nearby neighbor’s house, to keep the trees watered during their early growth.
Lucey, who grew up in southern California, is a retired aerospace engineer and a longtime activist. He remembers being deeply affected by the first Earth Day in 1970 and the following year had his first “eco-experience” when he volunteered to clean birds contaminated by oil when two Chevron tankers collided in the San Francisco Bay. The 2006 Al Gore documentary “Inconvenient Truth” convinced him immediately that climate change was real.
What has climate change done here?
In my 70 years in Los Angeles the heat that used to be insufferable for two weeks in late August has spread itself throughout the year. Air conditioning that used to be a luxury for a few has today become a necessity for all. In 2024 the Los Angeles County Board of Health recommended rules to ensure adequate cooling in rental property. Unfortunately, of course, cooling our homes drives up the Urban Heat Island Effect. This combined additional heat has led to droughts of up to five years and our fire season now famously lasts from May through December. I remember returning to elementary school in the heat of late August and playing at recess on a smoggy day when the temperature reached 105 degrees. We have conquered the smog and ozone that plagued the Los Angeles of my youth but the heat has conquered us.
As a child in the 1950s and 1960s, I lived in Canoga Park, one of many suburbs pushing into the San Fernando Valley, displacing small farms and large citrus orchards. In winter we would hear on the radio alerts to farmers to light the smudge pots under their trees to ward off the frost that would settle in with the night. Winter rain came in torrents and the streets in the flat valley would flood and run like tributaries into the Los Angeles River which was really a concrete canal that ran 50 miles to the Pacific Ocean. We don’t get winter frosts any longer and though the rain still comes in torrents the storms don’t come as frequently.
What do you think world leaders have to do now to stop things from getting worse and to help us adapt?
Admit there is a problem! And get going with a solution, that is all I can think to say. Plant trees, that is always a good idea.
I can’t help going back to my youth in LA breathing the stagnant poisonous air trapped in the San Fernando Valley by an atmospheric inversion layer. Smog, ozone, and particulate pollution was an existential threat to the health of everyone in Los Angeles and cities around the world. Like climate change we all were responsible for causing it and we all suffered the consequences. So, the government identified the sources of smog: automobiles, of course, but also point sources like power plants and factories. Then the government set limits and targets, very analogous to climate targets, and set about enforcing those targets. The solutions were, as today, largely technological; things like smog control devices, catalytic converters and higher MPG cars. But there were behavioral solutions too, like carpooling. The effort was decades long and each increment of improvement faced pushback from entrenched parties, usually auto makers and fossil fuel corporations. So the effort went back and forth but mainly forward and today the air in Los Angeles is cleaner than it was in my youth even though the population of Los Angeles has doubled to 10 million in those seven decades.
Life expectancy 2023
.svg)
