Welcome to Bluedot Los Angeles! Every other Sunday, we share stories about local changemakers, sustainable homes and yards, the nature all around us along with planet-friendly recipes, and advice from Dear Dot. Please email us with story ideas at laeditor@bluedotliving.com. Together, we can make a difference for the blue dot we call home.
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SIMPLE / SMART / SUSTAINABLE / STORIES
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The City Nature Challenge started in 2016 as an eight-day friendly competition between just two cities: Los Angeles and San Francisco. The goal was to see who could document the most nature, and it was a hit: Almost 20,000 observations were recorded between the two cities. Word spread, and by the second year, 16 cities were participating. Fast forward to today, and you’ll find
amateur naturalists participating in the challenge in 600 cities around the world, from April 26 – 29. The
goal is to encourage everyone to make observations and collect data about the natural world, and, as a result, connect to the environment. “Once you put on your nature eyes and start really looking at the details, I think it’s almost impossible for you not to start falling in love with what you’re seeing,” says Amy Jaecker-Jones, community science manager for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which helps to organize the challenge. “And of course that love leads to action.”
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Quick Links
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Skip scrolling! Here’s what you’ll find in today’s Bluedot Los Angeles Newsletter:
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Bluedot associate editor Lucas Thors had a conversation with digital projects manager Kelsey Perrett about a very cool eclipse project she’s been working on. “The visual experience is very powerful, but there is a lot of evidence that suggests you can experience an
eclipse with multiple senses,” Kelsey told him. Since 2017, she’s been working with the Eclipse Soundscapes Project, a NASA-sponsored citizen science initiative, to study how eclipses affect animals (and plants!), including humans. Anyone can sign up to observe and record what they notice. In other science news, money is beginning to flow to fund cleaner production of lithium, the “white gold” used in everything from cell phones to EVs, at the Salton Sea. Bluedot editor Jim Miller took a look at the hard-luck history of the saline lake and the potential it has to become a hotspot for cleaner lithium extraction.
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Dear Dot: Is Organic Food Really Better?
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–Illustration by Elissa Turnbull
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Dear Dot,
I’m a Harvard alum and a recent article in the Harvard Gazette indicated that organic food is no better than conventionally grown. What say you, Dot?
– David
Dear David,
Dot, for one, would be sorely disappointed if I was paying a premium for organic food and got nothing for it. And I’m sure that the 40 percent of Americans who buy at least some organic food would agree. In Canada, it’s a whopping two-thirds who “regularly” buy organic (and a shocking three-fourths of Albertans)! But let’s recap the Harvard Gazette article you cited for the rest of our readers and then dig into the issues.
Read the rest of Dot’s answer.
Got a question for Dot? Write her at deardot@bluedotliving.com.
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BUY LESS/BUY BETTER:
Organic Cotton Underthings We Love
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If you make a purchase through our links, including from Amazon, we may earn a small commission.
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If you’d like to make some more space in your top drawer, refresh your wardrobe for spring, or just need new underwear, we’ve got ideas for you this week. The one we’re most excited about: Subset’s pioneering recycling program, which will basically pay you to send in your old underpants, socks, pantyhose, and bras. Once they receive your package (you provide the envelope, they pay the shipping), they’ll email you a $25 credit to spend on their great organic cotton underwear. Your old underthings will live on as furniture batting,
insulation, and more. How cool is that?
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Bluedot Kitchen: Cooking with Cleo
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Cleo Carney, a student from Ottawa, Canada, is an adventurous baker who loves to discover new ways to make delicious cakes, cookies, and breads that are healthier for you and for the planet. She’s a key part of our Bluedot Institute (BDI), which brings together middle and high school students from all over North America to talk about their own environmental projects and share ideas and advice about tackling climate change on a local level. Cleo’s
known for her desserts; you can find more of her recipes here.
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Works in Progress: Preserving the Carpenteria Bluffs (Not Only) on Canvas
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Supermoon at the Bluffs by Arturo Tello
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Artist and long-distance runner Arturo Tello started painting en plein air in 1979, when the natural beauty he saw on his runs through the Santa Barbara area inspired him to try his hand at landscape painting. Through his art, he found himself more connected with the natural spaces around him, and he realized he wanted to help conserve those spaces.
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So he co-founded the Oak Group, a collective of local landscape artists with a mission to use art to support and inspire conservation. And when developers trained their eyes on the Carpenteria Bluffs, the group sprang into action. Not only did they host fundraising shows, but they also brought their artwork to planning meetings,
displaying their landscape paintings of the bluffs next to developer’s plans for the same site. “I wanted to show that they’re acting as if they would not be destroying something, but they would be destroying that which exists that we enjoy,” Arturo says. Bluedot Associate Editor Lily Olsen caught up with Arturo to find out what the Oak Group is up to these days.
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Our Blue Dot
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NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977, with a planned lifespan of five years, long enough to cruise by Jupiter (about 500 million miles away) and Saturn (about a billion miles distant). But Voyager kept operating and
sending back data, and NASA kept extending the mission.
Sadly, NASA recently announced that since November 2023, Voyager 1, now 15 billion miles away, is no longer sending back any usable data. However, NASA is optimistic they can fix the bug, even though the computer is 47 years old and moving at 38,000 miles per hour, and it takes over 22 hours for a radio signal to reach the craft.
Of all the tremendous gifts Voyager has given us, the best may be a photo it snapped of Earth on Valentine’s Day 1990 from six billion miles away. Our planet is tiny in the photo, less than a pixel against the vastness of space, appearing slightly blue. Carl Sagan, who worked on the Voyager program, was so moved by the photo, he wrote a whole book inspired by it.
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our
species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
We take our name, Bluedot Living, from that photo and Carl Sagan. So we say, Long Live Voyager 1!
Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back in two weeks!
–Robin Jones
Do you have a special Los Angeles photo or story to share?
Email laeditor@bluedotliving.com.
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Robin Jones is a Southern California native who served as an editor at Westways magazine for more than a decade. She currently lives in Long Beach and teaches journalism at Cal State Long
Beach, where she advises the award-winning student magazine, DIG MAG. She loves road-tripping across California, especially when the itinerary includes stops in Arcata and Trinidad.
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