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Push to Ban Smokes on Trails We need to get their butts out of there. The “butts” are cigarette refuse and “there” refers to the dry, flammable chaparral atop Aliso Peak and inland near the trail approaching Laguna Sur in Laguna Niguel. Those of us edgy about wild fires along our...

Take a Stand Over Banning Ranch The 895 homes, 75-room hotel and a hostel planned would not be erected in our town, but in neighboring Newport Beach. Newport Banning Ranch LLC (comprising an oil company and investment firm) owns the 401-acre site and stands to make mega bucks if...

Seasick: Corals, Kelp, and Critters This past Sunday’s New York Times published the article “Climate-Related Death of Coral Around World Alarms Scientists.” Laguna does not have coral reefs, so what does this have to do with our small city? Plenty. The climate-related ocean...

The Day Grandmother Ocean Cried “Grandmother Ocean and this coast” have been sacred and life-giving to my people for thousands of years, declared Fred Collins, administrator for the Northern Chumash Council, who went on to praise Dr. Charles Lester, executive director of the...

  Transpacific Drought and Plastics  When I pick up trash at our local Table Rock Beach, most of what I gather consists of plastics: empty single-use water bottles, snack packaging, and some bags. Since we live along a fairly developed side of the world’s largest ocean, I have...

Three Amigos of Aliso Creek No, this is not a tale about three South Laguna gunslingers dueling at high noon with a sheriff’s posse from “big town,” some four miles north of here. Instead, armed with nothing more than our thoughts and dedication to protecting our local ocean,...

Aliso Creek Back to the Future $1.6 million! That’s what was recently paid for William Wendt’s painting, “The Old Coast Road.” The amount was more than twice the anticipated selling price for this iconic work of art. This brought to mind a color plate I saw long ago of Wendt’s...

When Ideology Trumps Facts In the ongoing, fractious city council election, Lagunans have been jolted by Jon Madison’s inability to validate implausible, phony academic achievements. Lagunans received another jolt at the Firebrand Media-organized candidate forum on Oct. 14 when...

  Don’t drive a Tesla . . . unless you’re prepared to be utterly smitten by its features and performance and sticker-shocked at the $100,000 plus price tag. I drove the Model S recently and experienced both shock and awe. As a proud, Volvo-driving, tree-hugger living on the...

  For those of us who like hiking, south Laguna offers a labyrinth of scruffy, scenic trails.  Thanks to the County of Orange, the South Laguna Civic Association (full disclosure: I’m a board member), and other environmentally minded groups and citizens, public access to...

For those of us who like hiking, south Laguna offers a labyrinth of scruffy, scenic trails.  Thanks to the County of Orange, the South Laguna Civic Association (full disclosure: I’m a board member), and other environmentally minded groups and citizens, public access to these...

  Sustainable Tourism on the Coasts of Southeast Asia My family’s recent tour of countries and coastlines in Southeast Asia yielded good and bad news. The bad news is that beaches bordering the Andaman Sea are being overrun, ironically, by folks like me.  The good news is...

“Beauty will save the world,” said a character in a novel written in the late 1800s by Feodor Dostoevsky, one of the most revered authors in modern literature. Seemingly inspired by this insight, the MacGillivray family in town has long been making film documentaries that have...

Reportedly, on average 3 million gallons of pollutants empty into Aliso Beach daily–rain or no rain.  Motor oil, fertilizers, animal dung, and more contaminate this much-used public beach and the waterway that flows into it.  Imagine the impact of this on public health; put...

  Library Hosts Local Author   Thomas Osborne, local author and columnist for Laguna Beach Independent, will be at Laguna Beach Library on Monday, Sept. 16, at 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. He will answer questions and sign copies of his most recent work, “Pacific Eldorado,” which...