Sustainability Workshop Shows Local Residents How to Live Green(er)

As the song says, it's not easy being green. But a workshop presented last Tuesday night showed that it's definitely getting easier to live green - and more imperative.

"Start with what you can do," workshop presenter Gina Garcia told participants at the Green Living Workshop, being held at the Aldersgate Retreat Center in Pacific Palisades.

The six-week series is being offered to all residents of Los Angeles City Council District 11, including Brentwood.

"I've heard about this [program] for a long time," said Brentwood resident Spike Lewis. "It's good information that should be out there."

The workshop was put on by Sustainable Works, an environmental educational organization that grew out of a Santa Monica city project to educate its citizens about green living options. However, as Garcia noted in her introduction, the organization is a private non-profit, not connected to the City of Santa Monica.

"Or else we couldn't come here," she told the attendees.

The workshop is being funded by a grant from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which was spearheaded by the Mar Vista Community Council Green Committee. The committee had held the series a year ago for their residents, inspiring them to expand the program throughout the council district.

"It never sounds as powerful on paper as it does when you're experiencing it," said Jeanne Kuntz, vice chair of the Mar Vista Green Committee.

She had been at the Mar Vista workshop and is attending the Palisades workshop, as well.

Tuesday's presentation was on the first of six areas of concentration, which was water. Later workshops will cover Energy, Waste, Chemicals, Transportation and Shopping and Food. However, Garcia pointed out repeatedly that all of these areas are interconnected.

The workshop presentations all follow a basic outline, first looking at the problems in the concentration area from a global, then national, then local level. For example, Garcia talked about how young girls in Africa must walk three miles each way to a water hole twice a day to get the family's water, bringing back five gallons per trip. Garcia then pointed out that the water we use each time we flush a toilet is the same amount of water that the girl in Africa brings back from each trip to the water hole.

Awareness, Garcia said, is an important first step in getting to a greener life. The hardest step is changing behavior, so she encouraged participants to go slowly so they don't get discouraged and give up. Many of the tips and solutions she offered included relatively easy changes, such as installing a low-flow shower head, even as she encouraged participants to take shorter showers.

Other solutions that will conserve more water is to eat more plant-based foods, which don't take as much water to produce as meats, and to stop drinking bottled water, as the plastic bottles not only take a great deal of plastic to produce, huge numbers of the bottles end up getting washed into the ocean, where they pollute the water and the beaches.

Residents can still join the workshop by clicking here. The classes meet every Tuesday except September 27, at the Aldersgate Retreat Center, 925 Haverford Ave. Pacific Palisades, CA  90272.