This past week, Q-line asked: “What environmental programs in Santa Monica should be given priority?”
Here are your responses: ✆ “First of all, the city should not allow a dog beach. Anyone who thinks all dog owners clean up after their dogs is living in fantasyland. I pick up dog poop off my lawn several times a month, and see it on other people’s lawns and sidewalks often. The beach is Santa Monica’s most precious land. If some areas are deserted, why not leave them alone? Don’t give it to the dogs. The city should stop overbuilding, and do something to solve all the traffic congestion. I also suggest that the trash cans and recycle bins be emptied more often. This would prevent them from overflowing, and the city could recoup some of the bottles and cans to pay for the programs instead of trying to increase rates for homeowners and allowing the homeless to make a mess and get the money for themselves.” ✆ “Santa Monica has made good efforts at trying to improve and sustain the environment but most of it is negated by the large homeless and vagrant population lying around our beach, parks, and sidewalks. There has been crying over the ground squirrels and their fleas. How about the 24/7 filth of the disease-ridden bums and the garbage they tote and deposit all over the city? Clean that up, and it may indeed be green again.” ✆ “My answer to your green question would depend on the definition of green that you are referring to. Is it the green cash that carpetbagging greed-inspired entrepreneurs mine in Santa Monica on a daily basis, or the plant life and photosynthesis to the atmosphere? Whether it is one or the other, the city of Santa Monica has plenty of both. Still, the answer to any equation is equal to the components of the equation. The components of the Santa Monica equation are traffic jams, parking woes, and overcrowding that is destined to get worse at the completion of the Playa Vista housing projects that will turn beautiful San Vicente Boulevard into a freeway alternate with a quagmire of bumper-to-bumper congestion, especially at the intersection of San Vicente Boulevard and 26th Street.” & “Yes, I think more should be done in Santa Monica to fix the pavement because some of them are kind of wobbly. And they also need to plant more trees — jacaranda trees, magnolia trees to make it more pedestrian friendly because this city is world renowned for its environmental Issues. Yes, it’s elementary my dear Watson.” ✆ “Our city’s traffic calming plan, which reduced most two-lane streets to one, and added bumps and mid-street planters, caused a traffic nightmare in parts of our city. The idea was to slow traffic down so that drivers would stop and shop here. However, the slow traffic has added to the pollution and gas consumption and traffic noise. Fire the stupid staff who suggested this mess, and free up the streets like they were.” ✆ “Where should the city start? How about litter? The people of Santa Monica, the employees who work here, and the tourists, leave an incredible amount of litter. Our streets are absolutely filthy on either side of both boulevards and downtown as well — and look at the beach. So, the environmentally conscious people of this town should start by not throwing paper on the ground. That would be a terrific start.” ✆ “Green is an issue simply because 1) there is too much brown that is too much human waste of all kinds and 2) too much energy and resource use. And the cause of these problems is out-of-control population growth almost everywhere. Until the issue of out-of-control population growth is addressed by stopping it, green — forget about it. Everyone’s brown has got to go somewhere, everyone has to use energy and resources. Even if you reduce the amount per person, the inexorable population growth means more brown to deal with, and dwindling energy and resources per person. Greening attempts without population reduction are like tilting at windmills. To get green would mean changing religious attitudes towards birth control, abortion, and infanticide. To get green would require changing business and government attitudes about growth as good boosterism. To get green would mean ceasing subsidizing litters of human spawn, which means ceasing funding for public schools, aid for dependent children, tax breaks for children, and other direct or indirect subsidies. You get more of anything you support and subsidize and that includes children. The only way to make a city-state or country green is to make it child unfriendly. Deal with it. You don’t to do it as necessary — fine. Then forget green. You can’t have it both ways. Boo-hoo.” ✆ “Solar cells would be a good thing to put on roofs of buildings, maybe the city could get a good deal if enough people to go in on it— maybe a bulk discount. New building should be encouraged to include sustainability in their designs — like solar power, rain collecting, energy saving equipment. You see a lot of old buildings and you can’t redesign them. With the new buildings you could design them that way on purpose. As for pollution, they could clean up the bay by getting rid of all the bums who use the alleys as a toilet. If they stop using the alleys as a toilet, there won’t be as much garbage and filth going into the water.” ✆ “In environmentalism, there are few people who are truthful. Statistics, surveys, and reports can all be twisted to fit a fear-induced panic that these supposed natural healing groups broadcast. Why is it that the city is trying again to be the No. 1 green community? What do surrounding cities spend on green efforts? Why aren’t efforts made to induce federal, state, or county officials to help become a green community? Again our egocentric council in its quest to be No. 1 in bums, traffic, parking, expensive architectural pyramids, now seeks to be No. 1 in green power. What council and planning board members own environmental-friendly cars that they bought in Santa Monica and paid as much as the rest of us? How about also their kitchen appliances that are also environmentally-friendly? Let private enterprise develop environmental sustainability products, and stop using taxpayer funds to support progress of ideas of organizations that provide high-paying jobs to their CEOs and staff, and future jobs to board members.” ✆ “Throw the bums, the mentally ill, and the homeless out of our town. That’s where the city should start in correcting environmental problems in Santa Monica.” ✆ “I think the city should start by getting rid of all the bums and all the filthy garbage they drag around out of here. Get the health department involved, and stop housing them in decent apartment buildings around the city under section eight, where once again the taxpayers are picking up the tab. And there are decent people paying high rents in the same buildings who have their lives made miserable by their presence.” ✆ “The most important environmental issue is what affects the health of every resident, what comes out of the faucet as tap water and goes into our bodies and through our skin when we bathe. We need to stop the city from adding a hazardous waste, toxic fluoridation substance, which also contains arsenic and lead. What else could be more important than that?” ✆ “I think it’s ironic that after having spent multi-millions of dollars to clean up MtBE from the city’s water supply, that we’re now re-contaminating it with fluoride. That makes absolutely no sense. In addition to the fluoride, it comes with a host of other goodies like arsenic and lead, and other things that have been proven to cause cancer or other fatal illnesses. If you want to start to clean up the environment, then start with our water supply, and get the fluoride out.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 18, 2005. Read the original PDF.