Ecology Action

The Ecology movement started organising last fail. I joined a group called Ecology Action which began discussions on campus. We learnt about food chains, eco-systems, the over-use of pesticides (which is an inevitable result of the one crop agriculture in which California specialises), how to make compost heaps out of organic garbage and how to recycle the rest. Ecology Action has sponsored a Survival Walk from Sacramento to Los Angeles. They started out 20 March and arrived in Los Angeles on 1 May. The walk was to call attention to the ecological crisis, serve as an organizing tool for local groups in the Valley, and be a public forum. While on the walk, they showed movies, slides, put on puppet shows, street theatre, and distributed literature. They planted wild flowers along the route and established plots of native grasses close to schools and colleges.

Ecology Action has also written a text called What's Ecology for high school teachers. It's being used in a pilot program with 450 students at one high school in the Bay Area and will be revised and published with a teacher's aid. I went to a teachers' workshop when the text came out to help familiarise the teachers with equipment available for teaching ecology. We showed them films, talked about how students could be taught ecological principles and what activities the class could take part in.

Ecology Action has an electrical car coop in the works and the latest plea from the Ecology Action Commune is for skilled engineers, mechanics, welders and fibreglass moulders to volunteer to help them. Ecology Action has helped save Aquatic Park, a place that sounds rather more charming than it is. On the filthy Berkeley Bay Shore, it's a small sanctuary for the hardy marine life that has managed to survive in the Bay. Last year all the fish in the Park were found floating on the surface, killed by hot water pollution from one of the Emeryville ("armpit of California") factories. Since then, the Park has been restocked and Ecology Action has tried to force the city to penalize polluters. There is, of course, a law against polluting the Bay but the Pollution Control Board keeps regular office hours. You should drive round the Bay on a Sunday afternoon. Ugh!