We're in the La Canada Valley Sun!

 

One hundred Crestview Preparatory students team up with the Sustainable Living Bike Tour to clean up the Hahamongna Watershed Park in La Canada Flintridge.  Read more here: 
Reaching for a greener tomorrow

Bike Tour in the Santa Ynez Valley Journal

Oak Valley School students learn the basics of bicycle maintenance

Sharing Our Planet with Lessons in Sustainability

Will Teaches Students about nutrient cycling with our Eden Aquaponics System

Lissa teaches students to make their own all natural, plant-based mouthwash and lip balm. 

Students check the PH, ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate levels of the bike tour Aquaponics system

The Finish Line

What will it take to connect a critical mass of people to natural systems? How do we inspire ourselves and others to embrace a sustainable lifestyle? What is quality of life and how can we best achieve it for ourselves and our communities? The answers to these questions come in many different shapes and colors, but year after year, one answer is the bike tour. 14 volunteer cyclist-educators, 700 miles, 23 days, 17 schools, 12 gardens, 15 flat tires, 3 brand new compost systems, and thousands of students. As educators, paid or volunteer, experience has shown us, it isn’t enough to teach with words. We have to live our lesson plan. It isn’t enough to ask students to make environmental pledges without building them the resources to follow through. It isn’t enough to teach the students that pay us. We have to BRING IT, outside of Catalina island, outside of the box, outside of the classroom, and outside of an abstract separation between work and life. And we have to have an amazing time while doing it! Thank you to the countless individuals that made it all possible. Thank you to the friends, families, schools, and churches that put us up for the night. Thank you to the farms and natural food stores that fed us. Thank you to the teachers and administrators that worked extra hours to fit us into their schedule and purchased resources to make their schools a model of an ecologically sound future.

The Homestretch...

This morning’s ride to Markham Middle School took us through Pasadena Arroyo, Chinatown, downtown LA, and south central LA and into Watts. This was our first time at the school, so it was exciting to be there. We worked together with the non-profit program Enrich LA that has been building a farm project on the school’s campus.

We worked with 130+ students on bike tour and Markham Farm projects including; planting of a herb and vegetable garden, painting compost

signage, constructing a compost bin, and making natural body care products. It was a very busy day with lots of kids getting their hands dirty, trying new things, and expanding their knowledge of where our food comes from. Many thanks to Oscar, Yenny, and Tomas for all of

their hard work coordinating a day on the urban farm. We left at the end of the school day and

had a quick ride to a homestay with the host with the most: Rasheed. This is our second to last day of the tour!

Pasadena

We continued south on our weeklong lap of LA and spent 2 days in the Pasadena area. We were close to the mainland office of Catalina Island Camps and treated to a lovely dinner by CELP’s executive directors Tom and Maria Horner. We were privileged enough to have Ms Carey and the Hearst Family take us into their homes for 2 nights. We were so thankful their warm houses, good food, and hospitality!

At Chandler School we visited John McCarty’s 5^th grade science class for a slide show and aquaponics program. When asked if any of the students took the CELP principals home after their trip to Catalina we were pleased that the students shared a myriad of eco friendly initiatives. Some of them included water and energy conservation, composting, gardening, and conscious consumerism. It was also neat to see ecological innovation designed into Chandler’s new middle school building. Thanks again to John and his students.

Our visit with Crestview Preparatory was unique because their students got to leave the school campus and go to nearby Hahamonga Watershed Park. There we worked with students in conjunction with the Arroyo Seco Foundation on a variety of creek bed restoration projectsincluding trash pick-up, invasive plant removal, and mulching oak trees. Thanks to Crestview students and the Arroyo Seco Foundation for providing tools, hands, and enthusiasm to make the day come together.

TAKE THE LANE.

The tour is taking over LA! We spent our weekend preparing for the busiest week of outreach, while cycling down the coast from Carpinteria to Calabasas. We've been greeted in LA with two of our coldest nights of camping, packs of coyotes howling throughout the night, and 8 flat tires on Monday. But otherwise, the weather has been wonderfully mild this entire trip and we are all very lucky to call sunny California home!

Monday began with the tour visiting Viewpoint School in Calabasas where we ran Aquaponics and Urban Homesteading workshops for the 7th graders that attended CELP. On Tuesday, the tour split and visited two schools! The first was Bridges Academy where the riders stayed in the school’s dorms and worked with the high school's green team to build a tumbler compost bin from a 50 gallon almond oil bin. The second half of our group visited Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy (FSHA) in La Canada where the riders worked with the 9th grade biology classes to squirrel-proof the school's panoramic garden. As a FSHA alum, I was impressed with FSHA's persistence in installing a garden even though the faculty and students were only granted a space where a parking lot would probably be built in the next few years. One of our CELP dreams is to see all of the schools that attend our program maintain their own garden. Although I was disappointed to see the students’ failure in properly sorting compostable items at lunch, it was fun to hear the girls reminisce about their experience on Catalina and hear from those who also hope to work at the program some day, just like yours truly : )

Throughout our outreach visits, the program I have facilitated is Urban Homesteading. In this workshop, we try to instill a value in simple living where we teach students how to make things on our own, as if we were pioneers! One of the core activities has been making lip balm from all-natural ingredients; refer to the blog post from Nov 21st for the easy recipe – a great Christmas gift idea. We've also played a cosmetic game with many of the older students, where ingredients found in everyday cosmetics are listed on cards and students must match up ingredients to the corresponding displayed products, by reading the ingredients list. Some of the ingredients are beneficial, like coconut oil. Yet many of the ingredients listed in our sunscreens, lip balms, shampoos, soap, and lotion may have potentially harmful effects. The activity not only teaches students to watch out for potentially harmful ingredients, like sodium laurel sulfates and parabens, but to instill a curiosity about the origin of the products that we put into our bodies every day!

A great resource that many of the tour's riders rely on heavily is the Cosmetic Database, a bible for anyone who uses body products (and cares about their health). This website rates a product’s toxicity and lists the harmful ingredients within the product. The writers dig deep by thoroughly researching the product’s safety for both humans and the environment.
Another easy resource that is available to compare different consumer items and businesses can be found in book form or app form: the Better World Shopping Guide . Many companies are guilty of “green washing,” a business tactic that tricks consumers into believing that a business is not harming the environment and potentially even beneficial for the planet. However, the easiest way to cut costs and increase profits is by funneling costs into externalities. Externalities are costs included in producing a product that are often not included in the market price paid for a good. Common externalities are laborers and the environment. Factory and field workers are often paid wages that are not enough to cover basic living costs and are often exposed to hazards like toxic chemicals and pesticides. In addition, costs burdened by the environment are rarely included in the costs consumers pay; for example, pollution that contaminates our ocean, rivers, and air doesn’t show up on a price tag. These environmental and social external costs are not indicated on a product and can be difficult for consumers to discover. But luckily there are organizations researching the ethics of products that we use! So remember that with every dollar you spend, you can choose to support companies that are paying the true costs of producing goods and services and doing so in a responsible way! And the Better World Shopping Guide takes all of these issues into consideration when constructing their extremely user-friendly categorized lists. Btw, this book makes for a great Christmas gift : )

Happy Holiday Shopping!

Best,

Katie

Look Mom, we're on TV!

Click here to Watch the Sustainable Living Bike Tour on KEYT.

Two Wheeled Revolution

Hey Blog fans,

Pedals to the asphalt, what a night of biking festivities!

Arriving in Santa Barbara with the help and hindrance of the Santa Anna winds, we were embraced by the warm hospitality of the Ocean Futures Society making us feel right at home keeping our minds off the somewhat hairy ride. Meeting with John Michel Cousteau, Holly Lohuis and the rest of the crew and hearing about their adventures and ideas are truly inspiring.

Lucky for us we happened to be in town for the monthly Bike Moves event. A 300-strong victory lap of downtown Santa Barbara spreading bike advocacy throughout the city, never have you seen such holiday festivities on two wheels. Bike Moves in

conjunction with BiciCentro and the Santa Barbara Bicycle Coalition hosted our event for spreading the word of sustainability with urban homesteading workshops, an aquaponics display and slideshow along with the chance to raise some money with many thanks to the following for their generous donations for our raffle:

Bicycle Bobs

Wellen

Happy Harry’s Produce Market

Granada Theatre

Yoga Soup

The Wheel House

Island Seed and Feed

Telegraph Brewing Company

Isla Vista Food Co-op

Ocean Futures Society

All this cycling over that last 2 weeks got me thinking about what a great way to get around the bicycle is. Did you know that the bicycle is soon reaching its 200^th year anniversary? Over the last two centuries the bicycle has come a long way, and now bikes number around 1 billion world wide--double the amount of automobiles. Bicycles have had many triumphs: from the ‘freedom machine’ by the women of the suffragette movement to alleviating poverty in rural areas of Africa and Sri Lanka by 35%. Not to mention that daily exercise from riding a bike has been linked to better health and lower risks of heart disease.

Apart from the obvious advantages for your health are the advantages to the health of our planet. Riding a bike reduces the amount of cars on the road, thus lowering the amount of oil being consumed and burnt. Of all of the oil drilled out of the ground, 74% of it is converted into fuel for transportation. Burning all of that oil leads to the release of hydrocarbons that have been linked to global warming and climate change. PCMs, which have been linked to asthma, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases and a plethora of other gasses and minute particles, have been proven to be carcinogenic and hazardous to human health. One gallon of gas powers the average American car for 23.5 miles, whereas the average biker can go 732 miles on the same amount of energy. Makes you think that our zero miles per gallon two-wheeled wonder machines are pretty sweet devices.

With all that biking doing cycles in our heads, we visited Crane Country Day school and Carpinteria Family School to show them how they can live more sustainably through urban homesteading workshops making lip balm, shopping bags from old T-shirts and jar farming sprouts. Also our friend Fussilli made an appearance to show kids how to close in that nutrient cycle. And of course, in the theme of all things two-wheeled: a killer bike maintenance workshop teaching about the ABC’s of bike maintenance and how to repair the all too common flat tire.

Remember before you ride, the ABC Quick Check:

A – Air, check your tire pressure this can make your riding easier and also less likely to get a flat or damage your rims.

B – Brakes, make sure that they are working by fully engaging before the levers touch the handlebars, the pads are not rubbing against the tires and not rubbing when the bike is freewheeling.

C – Chains and Cranks, Make sure your drive chain is working by shifting your gears, make sure you lube your chain (especially after rain) and that all is taut and not going to make your life too difficult on the uphills.

Quick – Quick releases, make sure those wheels are on firmly and not going to come loose, could lead to some expensive dental work if forgotten. Also make sure you re-engage those brakes if you removed the wheel recently.

Check – Check all over for wear and tear and also good styling. Look good out there people!

Well until next time,

Be cool out there and remember to always wear a lid (helmet)!

Ben