Southern California Resources
As part of our ongoing effort to serve the larger KCET community, we will be rolling out a series of resource guides designed to help you make the most out of Southern California living.
First up, Earthquake Preparedness. Are you ready for the Big One?
Next, in honor of Ken Burn's upcoming The National Parks: America's Best Idea, we're launching SoCal Park, a look at our bounty of state, county and city parks. (The image to the left was taken by Flickr user docentjoyce. It was used under CC license.)
SoCal Parks
Information, news and community around our Southern California Parks. Learn more.
Fire News
Regularly updated news and links related to the Southern California fires.
Earthquake Preparedness
Check out these resources and prepare yourself for the Big One.
Flu Preparedness
We've pulled together some basic information about the seasonal flu and the "swine flu" to help you stay healthy for the holidays.
Free the Beach!
By Robert Garcia
October 8, 2009
Robert Garcia is Founder and Executive Director of The City Project, a Southern California based non-profit that "focuses on parks and recreation, playgrounds, schools, health, and transit" in order to "enhance human health and the environment, and promote economic vitality for all communities." Over the next few weeks, he'll be sharing his thoughts about the region's national, state and local parks..
"If everybody had an ocean / Across the U.S.A. / Then everybody'd be surfin' / Like Californ-i-a." The Beach Boys.
Beach access is a hot button issue for surfers, social justice advocates, mainstream environmentalists - and property owners who want to privatize public beaches.
It was a condition of California joining the Union that beaches remain public. Nine in ten Californians say the quality of the beach and ocean is just as important to them personally, as for the quality of life and economy of the state. (PPIC survey)
Permalink Discuss (2 Comments)National Parks: The Morning of Creation
By KCET Admin
October 2, 2009
Denali National Park
National Parks: Episode 6
Friday, October 2, 2009
8:00 PM and 1:00 AM
Synopsis
Following World War II, the parks are overwhelmed as visitation reaches 62 million people a year. A new billion-dollar campaign - Mission 66 - is created to build facilities and infrastructure that can accommodate the flood of visitors. A biologist named Alfred Murie introduces the revolutionary notion that predatory animals, which are still hunted, deserve the same protection as other wildlife. In Florida, Lancelot Jones, the grandson of a slave, refuses to sell to developers his family's property on a string of unspoiled islands in Biscayne Bay and instead sells it to the federal government to be protected as a national monument. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter creates an uproar in Alaska when he sets aside 56 million acres of land for preservation - the largest expansion of protected land in history. In 1995, wolves are re-established in Yellowstone, making the world's first national park a little more like what it once was.
Permalink DiscussParks and the Diverse Values at Stake
By Robert Garcia
October 1, 2009
Robert Garcia is Founder and Executive Director of The City Project, a Southern California based non-profit that "focuses on parks and recreation, playgrounds, schools, health, and transit" in order to "enhance human health and the environment, and promote economic vitality for all communities." Over the next few weeks, he'll be sharing his thoughts about the region's national, state and local parks..
KCET and PBS this week are showing the Ken Burns documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea, while California struggles to keep state parks open during the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. This is a moment to reflect on the values at stake in national, state, and local parks and green space.
Parks provide the simple joy of playing in the park. The United Nations recognizes the child's right to play as a fundamental human right.
Transit to Trails takes inner city children on trips to the King Gillette Ranch and other places in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
"[A]pplying public health criteria to land-use and urban design decisions could substantially improve the health and quality of life of the American people," according to UCLA Prof. Richard Jackson.
While many schools abandon physical education, studies show that students who participate in physical activity do better academically. Active recreation and team sports provide positive alternatives to reduce gangs, violence, crime, drugs, and teen pregnancies.
Permalink DiscussNational Parks: Great Nature
By Gwynn Perry
October 1, 2009
George Melendez Wright
National Parks: Episode 5
Thursday, October 1, 2009
8:00 PM and 1:00 AM
Synopsis
To battle unemployment in the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt creates the Civilian Conservation Corps, which spawns a "golden age" for the parks through major renovation projects. In a groundbreaking study, a young NPS biologist named George Melendez Wright discovers widespread abuses of animal habitats and pushes the service to reform its wildlife policies. Congress narrowly passes a bill to protect the Everglades in Florida as a national park - the first time a park has been created solely to preserve an ecosystem, as opposed to scenic beauty. As America becomes entrenched in World War II, Roosevelt is pressured to open the parks to mining, grazing and lumbering. The president also is subjected to a storm of criticism for expanding the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming by accepting a gift of land secretly purchased by John D. Rockefeller Jr.
Permalink DiscussNational Parks: Going Home
By Gwynn Perry
September 30, 2009
Grand Teton National Park which was preserved by Albright and Rockefeller.
National Parks: Episode 4
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
8:00 PM and 1:00 AM
Synopsis
While visiting the parks was once predominantly the domain of Americans wealthy enough to afford the high-priced train tours, the advent of the automobile allows more people than ever before to visit the parks. Mather embraces this opportunity and works to build more roads in the parks. Some park enthusiasts, such as Margaret and Edward Gehrke of Nebraska, begin "collecting" parks, making a point to visit as many as they can. In North Carolina, Horace Kephart, a reclusive writer, and George Masa, a Japanese immigrant, launch a campaign to protect the last strands of virgin forest in the Smoky Mountains by establishing it as a park. In Wyoming, John D. Rockefeller Jr. begins quietly buying up land in the Teton Mountain Range and valley in a secret plan to donate it to the government as a park.
Permalink DiscussSubscribe
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404 City- Los Angeles is the ultimate networked metropolis, and in 404 City blogger Ophelia Chong takes a look at our diverse web of communities, all of them interwoven by freeways, shared history, media, automobiles, and the ever present digital penumbra of cell-phones and computers.
Blur + Sharpen- Blur + Sharpen is an insider’s look at Los Angeles’ vibrant and globe-trotting community of new media artists. It is curated by Holly Willis.
Cakewalk- Cakewalk is journalist and op-ed columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan's first-person account of politics and identity in Los Angeles, with an eye towards the city's African American community.
City of Angles- From City Hall to the City Council, from the County Board of Supervisors to the L.A. Unified School District, from elections to ballot measures to budgets to scandals, Brian Doherty's "City of Angles" will help you understand and appreciate all the angles of L.A.'s always lively and often perplexing political scene.
The Guest Room- Every now and then we'll be asking one of your neighbors - famous, anonymous, maybe infamous - to share a few blog posts about their corner of Southern California. Past guest bloggers have included NPR host Madeleine Brand and journalist Ki-Min Sung.
Movie Miento- Movie Miento is a poetic exploration of Los Angeles history, Latino culture and overall sense of place, darting across LA’s physical and psychic borders. It is written by poet and journalist Adolfo Guzman-Lopez.
Pixeltown- KCET Local's editorial team crawls the SoCal web and brings you the best of local blogs, video, film, television and other pixellated curiosities.
Think Tank LA- Think Tank L.A. is a slow-boil chronicling of the goings-on at policy centers, research institutions, and the like in and around the Southland – and beyond. The blog covers the tanks themselves, the people who work at them, and the big ideas so often born at tanks. It is written by Jeremy Rosenberg.
Where We Are- Where We Are is an ongoing examination of LA's twinned identities as urban and suburban written by one of the area's great chroniclers, D. J. Waldie.