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Please take the Bluedot Living 2023 Survey
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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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Year In Review
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This week, we’re taking a look back at our most-read stories of 2023. In the top spot: Lily Olsen’s foraging adventure through Highland Park with botanist and survivalist Christopher Nyerges. “Within minutes,” Olsen says, “Nyerges had plucked a leaf and offered it to me to eat. As he rattled off the plant’s taxonomy and nutritional benefits, I decided to trust him. Thankfully, my stomach didn’t regret it.” A longtime scavenger – he’s been
teaching classes on the subject since 1974 – Nyerges sees foraging as a survival skill. More than that, though, he values the health benefits of wild foods, which he says contain greater concentrations of vitamins and minerals than farmed food.
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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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Our second-most-popular story in 2023 described the perfect daytrip biking along the L.A. River and noshing on vegan treats in L.A.’s Elysian Valley, better known as Frogtown. Writer Leslie Veliz found vegan
cinnamon rolls and breakfast burritos, a pocket park with a pavilion draped in grapevines, and a natural wine bar along with a great community of locals and business owners committed to sustainability. Coming in at number three was our story about Bob Ramirez and the Kuruvungna Village Springs in West L.A. When he arrived at the springs to volunteer and found an overgrown, abandoned site and dirty, cloudy pools of water, he was compelled to take over as president of the Gabrielino Springs Foundation and restore the natural springs and their surroundings. With Ramirez as her guide, writer Kelsey Brown toured the site, which is now bursting with life, both flora and fauna. “Springs are central to life,” Ramirez says. “We have one right here in our backyard—in the city, surrounded by buildings. It’s pretty unique.”
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Top L.A. Dear Dot of 2023:
Dear Dot: Dishwasher or Handwash – Which Method Saves Water?
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–Illustration by Elissa Turnbull
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Dear Dot,
This has always been a burning question for me. What’s the most efficient water use for cleaning dishes — handwashing in sink or running through dishwasher?
–Maria
Dear Maria,
It is my utter delight to be able to tell you — indeed all my readers — to stuff your rubber gloves back in a drawer, treat yourself to a fancy manicure (if that’s your thing), and let your dishwasher do the dirty work. Yes, even your inexpensive dishwasher without all the fancy options.
Let’s start with the numbers. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, 27 gallons of water goes down the drain per load by hand versus as little as three gallons with an ENERGY STAR-rated dishwasher. ENERGY STAR itself boasts that a standard-sized ENERGY STAR certified dishwasher costs about $35 per year to run and can save about 3,800 gallons of water over its lifetime.
Pretty compelling sales pitch for the machine, huh Maria?
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:
Nurturing Hobbies in the New Year
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The Bluedot Marketplace includes affiliate links. If you purchase a product through one of our links, we may earn a commission, essentially a small digital finder’s fee. These commissions help us fund the valuable journalism that you see on Bluedot. Thank you for supporting us!
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What is it that you’re looking forward to in 2024? For some of us, it can be easy to talk about a resolution, but actually making things happen may be harder. We recommend these three Bluedot favorite reads for those of you looking to pursue laudable goals in 2024. If you want to:
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Bluedot Kitchen: Doing More With Less (Booze)
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Happy New Year! If you’re still looking for what-to-drink inspiration to strike before midnight, check out how to make the most of your pantry with no-buy cocktail ideas. Looking ahead to 2024, here’s some inspiration for a Dry January to remember, with these alcohol-free specialties.
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Throughout 2023, we’ve asked scientists and community leaders to share insights about their research and work for our Field Notes features. Our readers’ favorite Field Note for this year featured Dr. Sophie Parker, The Nature Conservancy’s lead climate scientist in California. With a group of researchers from UCLA, the California Botanic Garden, and the environmental firm Roux Associates, Inc., she seeks to better understand desert springs in the Mojave Desert. Turns out the springs are sentinel environments that can reveal impacts of climate change to scientists before they are apparent anywhere else.
“We have the opportunity now to save desert springs,” Parker writes, “and heed their warnings.”
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By the Yard: Gardening With Color and Texture
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We’ve also spent time in the front- and backyard with our gardening expert, Laura McLean, learning how to grow different types of plants while always conserving water. Bluedot Living’s favorite By the Yard column this year explained how home gardeners can create a sense of connection between their home and their garden by selecting plants with the right colors and textures.
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Good News for the New Year
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Good news is often relegated to the back burner, especially in environmental news, where so many challenges remain. But we ARE making progress. Over the past year, Bluedot Living has published hundreds of uplifting local, state, national, and international stories. What’s more, 2023 has been a great year for Bluedot Living itself: We launched five new newsletter-and-website locations, including L.A. (as well as San
Diego, Santa Barbara, Toronto, and Boston). We now have more than 175,000 subscribers across all our newsletters (in the fall of 2022, it was about 10,000), and we’re going to keep growing like crazy in 2024, because you deserve to hear the good news! We hope you’ll consider contributing so we can keep telling stories about changing the world for the greener.
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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