The ‘Impossible Dream’ to Restore the LA River
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Exploring the history, ecology, and future of the Los Angeles River.
This Earth Focus segment traces the transformation of the Los Angeles River, from a heavily engineered waterway to a growing site of ecological restoration and community engagement. The river has shaped life in Southern California and advocates, residents, and environmental leaders are reimagining its future as a vital public and natural resource.
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Earth Focus is a local public television program presented by PBS SoCal
The ‘Impossible Dream’ to Restore the LA River
Clip | 3m 14sVideo has Closed Captions
This Earth Focus segment traces the transformation of the Los Angeles River, from a heavily engineered waterway to a growing site of ecological restoration and community engagement. The river has shaped life in Southern California and advocates, residents, and environmental leaders are reimagining its future as a vital public and natural resource.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship-The growing awareness of green gentrification represents a sea change in how organizations are doing work on the river.
For Friends of the LA River, the nonprofit responsible for recentering the river in public life, this means rethinking how they do their work.
-The story is that Lewis MacAdams, our founder, cut a hole in the fence at the LA River and walked down in there with a bunch of friends and decided that this was a good thing and that we should do more of that.
It really was, I think, Lewis saying, "Why is there a gate here?
Why are we separated from the river?"
It's not something to be in the background in movies.
It's not something to race your car down.
It's actually part of the natural landscape of Los Angeles and something that the people of Los Angeles could be accessing and spending time with.
It began with Lewis really pushing that idea.
Then it was picked up by other people, and that's how Friends of the LA River was formed.
All these other things that came out of that very simple idea that people should be able to access the river.
For so many years, bringing up equity, bringing up diversity, bringing up anything that had to do with environmental justice was seen as something separate, something other as possible mission creep.
Now people are beginning to understand that we cannot be successful if we don't bring along the communities that we claim we care about serving.
It's the thing that we didn't really talk about at FOLAR for many years.
In the time I was on the board a few years ago until now, we have increased the amount of time and energy we're spending on thinking about and talking about gentrification.
The reason why is because sometimes organizations that do environmental work, do parks work, do greening work, we tend to think of it as like an unintended consequence, and we're really sorry that happened, but what are you going to do?
What you're going to do is be intentional from the beginning of the work that you're doing.
It's been a real paradigm shift that's happening all over.
Everywhere we go, we hear people talking about how important it is to engage communities, how important it is to be equitable in the work that you're doing.
My being here at FOLAR is very much in keeping with our value of bringing equity to everything that we do.
For the County Master Plan, I don't tend to look at it as a one comprehensive plan, as in first we're going to do this, then we're going to do this, and we're going to do that.
I tend to look at it more as like a series of vignettes for plans for different parts of the river.
I think because it is a series of vignettes, they each have their own action plan, right?
You can't make one plan for the whole river.
It's 51 miles.
As you look at each vignette, it will need to have its own.
Where do we start?
How do we engage the community?
How do we move forward with these different parts?
We definitely want to see the river return to as natural a state as safely possible.
Anytime we remove concrete, there is an increased risk of flood.
That is an extremely strategic decision.
That's an engineering decision that has to be made.
There's never going to be a time while you're here at FOLAR, advocate for blanket concrete removal.
I'm really trying to look at this holistically.
Also, though, it's not sustainability or environmentalism as normal or business as usual when it comes to that.
We're focused on equity and people, not just changing the landscape.
It's really about how do we engage people and how do we protect people.
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Earth Focus is a local public television program presented by PBS SoCal