LA Weekly

Last week I hooked up with the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club for a bus tour of the Santa Clara River. I tend to get carsick, so I was lucky that Barbara Wampole of Friends of the Santa Clara River sat next to me -- she had candied ginger in her lunch bag and was happy to share it with me.

But Wampole proved useful for other reasons, too: For one thing, she's lived in the region -- Saugus, to be exact -- for 30 years and knew all kinds of history, both of the development and the ecology; she could point out the invasive species sprouting up in the floodplain (arundo is the big one; it looks like bamboo and burns like crazy), and knew all about Val Verde, the African-American resort community established back in the 1920s, when blacks were banned from public swimming pools. ("Everytime I see James Earl Jones I think, this is the only place he could go swimming," she told me on the phone today when I called to check some facts and invite her to lunch).

Several times during the tour Wampole protested when Lynne Plambeck of the Sierra Club was speaking. While we toured a new development Plambeck had introduced as ecologically sound, Wampole -- who had begun the tour chanting "No Buried Bank Stabilization!" over the pitch of a pitch from City Councilperson Marcia McLean -- cried out "This is hideous!" Plambeck continued to talk, and so did Wampole -- mostly to me. "This is an atrocity," she said of the greenbelts and trails winding their way around the houses. "Look, this is not xeriscape; it's all irrigated. " She also pointed out the fake lake separated from the river's flood plain by a road -- a dirty trick for migrating wildlife -- and the site's location, which was not far enough back from the flood plain.

But Plambeck wasn't presenting the development as ideal, only as better than other river front developments that had gone before it. Wampole hated that. "We say, 'Oh, it's not perfect, but it's so much better than the L. A. River," she said. "We shouldn't be gauging our success based on how we failed in the past. If you can't meet your ideals, that's one thing, but don't brag about how you're not quite raping the habitat as violently as we used to."

More on that Santa Clara River tour in weeks to come.

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