this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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Individual Climate Action ✊

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A guerrilla gardener installed a pop-up wetland in the LA River. Here's how — and why (www.npr.org)
submitted 4 days ago by stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net to c/climate_action_individual@slrpnk.net
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[–] kurikai@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago

Easier to get forgiveness than permission

[–] HalfEarthMedic@slrpnk.net 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I can't comment on the legitimacy of the concerns about his actions impacting ecology or flood control - although I suspect they are overstated if not outright nonsense - but crikey that concrete LA river looks terrible, please anything to make it nicer.

[–] BurningRiver@beehaw.org 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

It does look terrible, however it definitely serves a useful purpose. Since the LA basin is basically desert, the ground doesn’t soak up water very well, which leaves it prone to flash flooding.

So the dangerous part about physically being in the concrete river is that it might rain in the mountains 50 miles away, and in just a few minutes there’s a roaring wave of water passing through. Every time it rains out there, someone inevitably gets caught up in it and needs to be rescued, or worse.

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Oh no, the water is flowing quickly and not getting absorbed by the dry soil, let us build a giant smooth ramp of completely impermeable material, that will fix things! Now every time it rains people get swept up it, yay!

You know what helps slow down floods, improve soil water absorption, and reduce desertification? Wetlands and lakes. You know why Los Angeles was colonized by the Spanish rather than any other place in its stretch of its very dry coastline? Wetlands and lakes.

The LA river has the same story as its highways and its public transit: elitists destroying anything that does not acknowledge their superiority, actively ignoring if not outright pursuing the suffering of those they believe to be below them.

In this case, real estate developers wanted to replace the low population density wetlands with suburbia to sell houses on the cheap, and when this meant the water had nowhere to go and the city got flooded because they built it wrong, they bullt the concrete chute as a kludge.

Any sane desert city treats water as a precious commodity, not something to flush into the sea at the highest speeds possible. But that would require rebuilding the city right, often in places inhabited by poor people because of the floods urban designers caused.

[–] BurningRiver@beehaw.org 2 points 3 days ago

No argument here, I was only explaning why it exists.

[–] GreeNRG@slrpnk.net 3 points 4 days ago

I love this idea so much. I wonder how I can bring about this level of 'minimalist' change without having any waterways like that to work with.