So as I hope we all know - today is Earth Day - - A time to reflect and appreciate the beautiful planet which we live on and hopefully set some goals and commit to how we can live more respectfully on this very fragile ecosystem.  

Today Industrial District Green was excited to have been invited to Brookfield's Earth Day event at DTLA's Ernst & Young Plaza.  It was a fun event with good people and a chance to share our organization with people working in the area.  

 Thanks to my good friend and fellow environmentalist Carolyn Paxton for helping me set up and co-sit the table with me.  

Happy Earth Day - - Try and think of earth day as every day! 

Last Thursday we had Danny Carmichael from TreePeople come out to the Arts District for a little training session on how to use their new TreeMapLA program.  We are fortunate enough to have Art Share in our community and they let us use one of their rooms for this session.  

Once we got comfortable with the program - we went out to start measuring! We started with the famous Arts District Ficus microcarpa 'Hippo Tree' 

If you'd like to help us map all of our trees in the industrial neighborhoods of DTLA - please let us know and we can help put you in the right direction! 

This will be a quick and dirty lesson of why we are still in a terrible drought even though we've just been lucky enough to finally receive some rain here in LA.  

So - - we've just had all this fresh water falling from the sky - but where does it go?  Most of it unfortunately shoots off our roof rain gutters, then down to the curb gutters ..then down the storm drains….then off to the LA River…. then off to the ocean.  Here are a couple of images of this beautiful rainwater that we did not save from these last few storms.  

 Above in this picture, we have a waterfall right here in the Arts District. 

 Wasted water…. 

A River right here in the Arts District…. too bad it's not being redirected into an appropriate stormwater detention system.  bye bye beautiful fresh water…. we're still in a drought.  

And this is where most of our rainwater goes to - - collecting garbage and trash along the LA streets and onto the LA River.  Yesterday the water was so high it covered the Willows and shrubs in the River.  

On the bike path in Frogtown today- one of my favorite places in LA as it's one of the only … more...'natural' sections of the LA River. Katherine and I were headed to support our friend Daveed Kapoor's LandBridge event and Pop-Up LA River Cafe.  

And a special viewing of a beautiful Egret on the River! 

And below is a great example of a stormwater detention system.  All this mean is that rainwater is directed here and detained in a depressed area so that it has a chance to percolate back down to the water table.  This is a detention system at Marsh Park in Frogtown.