A few weeks back, Long Beach’s Aquarium of the Pacific held an “urban coast” festival, celebrating the millions of people and thousands of species that share hundreds of square miles of ocean. Now the Aquarium is developing scenarios for what Southern California’s ocean and its coastline should look like within 40 years, and it’s looking for help.

That’s where the rest of us come in. Aquarium president Jerry Schubel says just about everyone has a stake in the coast's future. “We’ve got the two largest container ports in the nation. We have some of the best, busiest beaches [and] surfing. We have all of California’s offshore oil platforms, 17 of them, so it’s this wonderful combination of humans and marine life, living and acting and working and surviving in relative harmony,” Schubel says.

From the bend in the coastline at Point Concepcion in Santa Barbara and extending 400 miles south, that’s what's known as the Southern California Bight. This area is home to scientists who monitor this area for public research. By their own reckoning, they cover only about 5% of the region, and a lot of that work looks at the pollution sent via stormwater and sewage runoff out to sea. So this project is, basically, a really informal version of the same information the South Coast Marine Life Protection Act folks sought. (And KPCC, actually.)

The Aquarium of the Pacific is doing this to support federal policy. The Obama Administration has made “marine spatial planning,” a sort of regional planning in U.S. coastal waters, a priority. That’s a change from the piecemeal, patchwork of rules we’ve been making for decades: separate rules for fishing, boating, research, pollution, and other human activities.

“The Aquarium of the Pacific is leading the dialogue on urban ocean issues at local and national levels, raising awareness among the public, and bringing together stakeholders to make innovative plans for the future,” said Margaret Davidson, who directs the Coastal Services Center for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Aquarium president Schubel says Southern California could focus on recreation, or a healthy ecosystem, productive fisheries, or science research. (Maybe all of the above.) “And we’re asking people to pick from among these to tell us what they want the urban ocean to look like, thirty, forty, fifty years from now.”

The idea is that people will send their opinions via email, Facebook or Twitter. The aquarium plans to put the findings together for a report due out in July. 

City of Los Angeles - Aerial mapping

The LA river and its tributary, the Tujunga Wash (under the 405 freeway) are well-known parts of the LA River watershed. The Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission is looking for some of the less well known ones.

Today on the radio, I report on a call issued by the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission to all Angelenos. They want your creeks and streams: the idea is to improve the city’s protection of these small watweways.

Advocates for the river, for these small waterways, argue that most of L.A.'s little streams are either gone or controlled in pipes and concrete channels. They hope to use new information in planning a stream protection ordinance in the city.

Landscape architect Jessica Hall, a longtime advocate for "daylighting" streams in LA, says the small waterways that remain can be sources of confusion for builders and urban planners."I’ve seen this situation a few times where because the creeks are not mapped," she says, "building and safety officials aren’t aware of their presence and don’t know to take the steps that they need to take to protect the streams when a neighbor comes in and wants to McMansionize their property."

Hall and others argue the city’s building department often doesn’t know where the remaining creeks and streams are, unless someone reports them, or the waterways spark a property dispute. "Things like that happen because the streams themselves are not well documented and there isn’t a clear set of policies regarding how to manage them," Hall says.  

Hall mapped creeks some years ago. Historically, so has the city. But she says nobody’s checked the accuracy of the maps in years. "What that leaves us with is a situation where they would be hard pressed to use something like that as a final list without actually being able to verify that the streams are there," says Hall.

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Hall's blog, LA Creek Freak, is a pretty authoritative source on the river's smaller pieces. But the city has some information on this too. At LA's stormwater website, creek freak author Joe Linton writes that to get involved with the cause, people can start: 

using reusable grocery bags, tending to your pet’s poop, participating in clean-up events, harvesting rainwater, planting a creek-friendly landscape in your yard and working to green your street. Some other ways that Jessica Hall and I have written about at our blog L.A. Creek Freak include: riding your bicycle, re-using greywater, and protecting our more natural streams.

The most obvious idea? The one that the Friends of the LA River, the city of LA, and creek freaks can all agree on? Just spending time out there, listening to the river, taking pictures of it, and seeing what's up. 

So what's your favorite part of the LA River? And do you have a secret favorite creek? 

JonathanR/Flickr

Cowes Week is an enormous regatta on the Isle of Wight. A deck shoe boat is an enormous deck shoe.

Apologies for the absence last week of what is likely your favorite part of the week, Song of the Week. Family matters forced my overlords to unshackle me from the blogging desk. Been out of commission for several days.

However, on this shortened week, I returned in time to report that the EPA and California are finally on the same page, and cruise ships and cargo vessels no longer can drop even treated sewage in state waters.

As far as I'm concerned, David Foster Wallace wrote the only nonfiction essay about the cruise ship industry; "The Love Boat" is the only television show to get down on the gritty below-decks politics of what happens when Halston, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Geoffrey Beene all guest star with Colonel Henry Blake from M*A*S*H, stop being polite and start being real; and The Greyboy Allstars have written the only funky song about strolling around the Lido deck. Song of the Week is "Deck Shoes," for the EPA and the cruise ship industry.

The state ban has been 7 years in coming; Cal EPA had to petition federal authorities for authority to enforce it. There are ways it's not very significant: while the federales emphasize that it'll keep 22 million gallons of treated wastewater out of coastal waters, it's worth knowing that hundreds of millions of gallons a day of treated wastewater continues to go into coastal waters from onshore sources, i.e., at least one refinery, and municipal treatment plants. Still, those discharges have to meet pretty high standards. And this is the first wall-to-wall (state line to state line) ban, along 1600-plus miles of coastline, that the EPA has authorized. They're looking at Seattle and Hawaii next. 

While you're listening to "Deck Shoes," maybe try imagining yourself boogie-ing around the promenade deck. No, I don't know much about cruise ship decks either. But I do know that deck shoes have white, non-scuffing bottoms. And you probably don't want solid waste on the bottom of your top-siders. So why would you want treated bilgewater in your ocean? Billions of blistering blue barnacles!

Listen to all of the songs of the week, 2012 style.

The 161-year old race for the Auld Mug is on its way to San Francisco. The America's Cup itself isn't till next year, but plenty of events happen along the way to the final series. For all of them, for some time, environmentalists have been concerned about the impact a huge sailing race will have on the San Francisco Bay and the ocean waters around it.

Those double-hulled racing yachts are sailing under wind power, right? Sure, but the event's a huge tourist draw. That's going to bring in cruise ships and other spectator boats. And air pollution and water pollution their engines will bring, too.

And there's all the temporary development on shore. Most recently, environmentalists shut down plans for a giant floating TV screen in Aquatic Park (the Dolphin Swimming and Boating Club threatened to swim around that area in protests). The Sierra Club pointed to "concerns about water pollution impacts and other criticisms of the project's final environmental impact report, which the state requires before construction can begin." Now that's sorted out; the San Francisco Chronicle reports that San Francisco Supervisors addressed those concerns in the last several days. 

Instead of seeing the Cup events as a potential for disaster, Dan Pingaro sees the America's Cup as a huge environmental opportunity. Pingaro heads Sailors for the Sea, "a new voice for ocean conservation based in the greater boating community." Sailors for the Sea has been prominent at America's Cup run-up events, promoting conversations about global warming, marine debris, and ocean conservation efforts. 

The group was founded by David Rockefeller, Jr. Rockefeller leads the board of directors. The group's day-to-day operations are thriving now with Pingaro at the helm. Pingaro's the CEO and executive director. But first and foremost, he's a sailor. And that's how his involvement with Sailors for the Sea started. 

"I was racing 50 days a year in San Francisco," he remembers. Pingaro came from an environmental policy background; in northern California, he was taking some time to be an entrepreneur. A Surfrider meeting caught his attention. "Here’s all these folks organized to go sailing on the weekend. Any one of them are smart intelligent people," Pingaro continues. "I just had that aha moment walking on the dock. There’s nothing in sailing that's similar. Let’s start something like that."

The group has developed a certification process for events at yacht and boating clubs. "Clean Regattas" include certification standards for everything from trash to the paper regatta awards are printed on to water discharge and waste disposal. Pingaro calls the America's Cup "the pinnacle of sailing." Sailors for the sea is the only nonprofit focused on sailing and the environment. Pingaro says he wants to engage the sailing and the boating community to leave behind a clean, healthy ocean. 

The America's Cup is the biggest effort in this vein to date, with the America's Cup Events Authority committing to sustainable practices at race and meet events throughout the runup to the Cup races themselves, and at multiple locations. They even organize sailors to pick up trash along the coast on their days off racing.

Beyond the Cup activities, Sailors for the Sea has developed marine science education for young sailors. "We’ve found a very receptive audience," Pingaro says. Members of the sailing community can calculate their "carbon wake" on line too. 

My most burning question for Dan Pingaro proved to be the most difficult. I asked him why this has all happened in the last three years; why it took so long for sailing to make the connection to the ocean's health. "I don’t know why it hasn’t happened before. It takes a unique set of circumstances to galvanize a whole new constituency."

A sorta hidden gem of a park in north Atwater Village is getting a higher profile today…for the facelift it's been getting for a while. 

 City officials broke ground on a restoration project in late 2010. Joe Linton and the LA Creek Freak team have poked their heads over the fences and documented how the restoration project's going for the last year-plus. (They even wrote a poison pen letter to graffiti loving fools who spray painted on the wall along the river walk.) What's cool about the park is it's not just a park; it's an integral part of the Los Angeles River watershed. A tributary to the river will get to operate as nature intended if everyone sets this up right. 

Today Interior Secretary Salazar (and let's hope, his cowboy hat) are going to be in town to check on progress and talk about the general awesomeness of river redevelopment. The federal government got a hand in helping it last year, when something called the Urban Water Federal Partnership adopted seven local-water-areas (Lake Pontchartrain was another one in my old town). 

In the meantime, check out the plan for what the North Atwater Park is going to look like (you can click for a better view). If Philip Alexander is right (on the the Atwater Village public forum), four years ago this area was "covered with graffitti and had multiple bullet holes through the basketball court's backboards."