Listening to Jessica Hall last night at the monthly meeting of the Culver City Democratic Club was not unlike drifting noiselessly in a canoe downstream in Ballona Creek on a warm, lazy and cloudless afternoon.
She is the Stream Restoration Coordinator for the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission, which made it impossible to hide the subject of a story she related with both grace and insight.
Her accent, of course, was on restoration.
No matter how many changes history and man have wreaked upon the Creek, Ms. Hall said, there is more crucial groundwork than ever remaining to be tackled.
With the heavy flow of mid-evening traffic darting up and down Overland Avenue, outside of the Vets Auditorium, reminding listeners of their urban setting, merely Ms. Hall’s title, stream restoration coordinator, suggested an other-worldly image, by a stream, say, in Kansas or Nebraska.
Soothing and savvy, she led her willing audience on a compelling journey through the last hundred years of the devolution of Ballona Creek.
The Key Element
Her tone, relaxed rather than hunched forward, probably drove the success of her storytelling.
Choosing low-key fluidity over hard
-edged militancy, Ms. Hall was more guide than partisan. She traced the belching 20th century changes of Southern California, from bucolic breadbasket to madhouse modernity, that have transformed the Creek from an innocent, unthreatened, meandering water thread into a surgically redrawn artifact struggling just to keep breathing in a world dominated by concrete instead of nature.
A New Voice
Not a soul breathed aloud as she handed off to hometown activist June Walden, the Creek’s favorite grandmotherly type and perhaps its most fervent fan. Ms. Walden capped the fast-paced program with a call to arms — and voices — to join her and Jim Lamm in sprucing up the Ballona Creek Renaissance group.
Possibly because she was in a nest of activists who require little coaxing, Ms. Hall’s tame tone eased her path into a presentation on the Ballona Creek watershed.
“Even though we call Los Angeles a desert,” she said, “we are actually a fairly wet place. Rather than a desert, we live in a dry Mediterranean climate.
“A hundred years ago, we had 148 miles worth of perennially, year-round, flowing streams in what we now call the L.A. Basin. We had 312 miles of intermittent streams as well as 94 miles of dry wash and nine square miles of wetlands.
Even Larger
“If you go back only 20 years farther into the past, we had much, much larger wetlands areas. But we lost a lot because of groundwater pumping, for agriculture, and development.”
Ms. Hall explained that the stone canyon culture of Southern California has shrunk and redirected historically open-armed streams. Three quarters of Ballona Creek is a casualty, she noted.
Turning to Stone
Eighteen of the 24 Creek miles have been converted into concrete causeways.
The 130-square mile Ballona Creek watershed today wends through Inglewood, Culver City, Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and a tiny corner of Santa Monica. Perennial streams are down to 20 miles.
“A hundred years ago,” Ms. Hall said, “we had almost 400 square miles of freshwater and marsh wetlands in the watershed.”
From Teaching to Teaching
When it was Ms. Walden’s turn, she offered a more personalized perspective. Forty years ago when she was a young elementary school teacher, she quietly became a prescient pioneer by teaching her students an appreciation for the environment. “In those days, teaching about the environment was a crackpot idea,” she said. “People thought I was a little off-base, that I was out there.”
At her retirement from the standard classroom, Ms. Walden accelerated her environment education by transferring her skills and passion to an outdoor classroom, the Ballona Creek Wetlands.
She embarked on a new kind of teaching career, educating her neighbors and friends about the frailty and the significance of the environment.
Her commitment to the entire theatre of the environment, long strong, steadily deepened as her knowledge expanded day to day.
Sign-up Time
Her main purpose seemed to be a recruiting mission for the Ballona Creek Renaissance, an organization in which she and the renowned Mr. Lamm are pillars.
Scanning the Rotunda Room crowd at the Vets, Ms. Walden said that “we would like to see everyone involved.”
The Renaissance is looking for a certain kind of person, Ms. Walden said. “We need more vitality, and we are looking for people who will take this up as a cause.”
On Ladies Night at the Democratic Club, Vice Mayor Carol Gross also spoke, providing an update the state of the nearly half-mile Ballona Creek Bikeway.
ballonacreek.org is the email address of the Ballona Creek Renaissance.