Now that California has officially designated a series of offshore coastal areas as Marine Protected Areas, the state needs to monitor them. Lori Abbot has this report on how that's being done.

At right, an underwater fish survey in progress. Photo courtesy of Reef Check California.

In 2004 California voters, their eyes full of the promise of stem cell therapies, passed Proposition 71, to establish a multi-billion dollar research agency designed to change the face of medical research. That agency became the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. But most of the money handed out by the agency goes to institutions that employ the agency’s directors.

Writing this week in the Sacramento Bee, David Jensen, producer of the California Stem Cell Report blog, details how Proposition 71 essentially built this conflict of interest in from the start. Most members of the governing board have ties to institutions that benefit from agency money.

by Aubrey White

Lately, I’ve seen the familiar signs of back-to-school. The school bus noisily pulls away from my neighbor’s house before the sun has fully risen. The neighborhood kids are inside a bit earlier in the evening (probably to finish that pesky homework), and I see throngs of students walk down the street with heavy backpacks slung low over their shoulders. But there are a few new signs in my neighborhood that school is back in session; kids with dirty jeans, mud stained at the knees from time spent in the school garden. 

Interest in school gardens in California is high, and institutions are working to provide the resources to make school garden development a success. The UC Davis Children’s Garden Program, in collaboration with Life Lab Science Program, has been working for over a decade to train those who wish to start school gardens that can provide positive experiences for students, but can also serve to enhance academics in the classroom. Beyond just a site for planting and harvest, the garden can be used, for example, as a space for young children to practice math skills like measuring, for middle school students to study civilizations of the world and for high school students to work on culinary arts, agricultural skills and entrepreneurship. 

The Creating and Sustaining Your School Garden workshops teach the nuts and bolts of starting a garden, but also provide trainees with curriculum designed to bring many state-mandated education requirements into the garden. Between 2012 and 2014, the workshops aim to train approximately 700 school educators from throughout California.

 “School gardens really should be regionally mentored,” says Carol Hillhouse, director of the UC Davis Children’s Garden Program. “California is so geographically diverse. The way that we garden in the Central Valley is different from how we garden in the Imperial Valley or the Sierra foothills. So training new regional trainers has meant really effective mentors in different parts of the state. And our training materials provide a really simple way to get information out there that is easy for new trainers to use.” 

Between 2007 and 2008, the workshops trained 180 trainers, who went on to train an additional 664 people in the practice of starting a school garden. The participants in those workshops represented nearly 300 schools, with a school population of 93,879. The sustained level of interest in these workshops and in school gardens in general over the years has been impressive. 

School budget cuts, threats to school programs and teacher salaries are a grim reality in California. But in the face of those challenges, school garden interest seems to grow. ”School gardens have held their own even in a very difficult economic climate and that says a lot and frankly has surprised me because I know how hard it is in schools these days," Hillhouse said. "The response now is as strong, if not stronger than it was when we first started these workshops in 2007. And at that point, through state legislation, schools were getting reasonable grants to develop their school gardens. There are not those same grants for these programs today, yet the interest is there.” 

Still, gardens are not yet institutionalized within school budgets, and so their success depends on staff members, community and parent volunteers. Hillhouse advocates for gardens becoming more than expendable extras within schools.

“There’s a real power in gardening. Whenever you’re gardening, people want to see what’s happening and get their hands dirty. They get excited and want to start gardens in  their own schools; this is a tangible way they can make their schools a better place," she said. “If we help hone that attitude from ‘we can put a garden here’ to ‘we can put a garden here, and it can help support our science curriculum, and it can help kids understand what to eat in the cafeteria, and it can even produce roses that we can put on the principals desk,’ then we have a viable program. Not just a garden, but a program that enriches a school in many ways”

Creating and Sustaining Your School Garden workshops along with workshops in other topics will be offered several more times around the state between now and June of 2014. Visit the UC Davis Children’s Garden Program website for information on dates and locations as they are scheduled and links to workshop registration.   

David Waxman, a staff television producer at KRCB, commutes to our studios in Rohnert Park from his home in Richmond. On Friday, Sept. 21, he had an especially memorable trip to work, as he relates in his own words below:

I never saw, in person, a Space Shuttle in motion. Until this morning:

When I got into my car to head to work, I heard on the radio that it was reported flying over Sacramento. Since it was going to do two flyovers of the Golden Gate Bridge, I briefly considered going to Pt. Isabel on the Richmond / El Cerrito Bay shore across from the Golden Gate, but I decided to go to work instead.

As I was crossing the bridge, the radio said that the shuttle would be over San Francisco Bay in five minutes. So as soon as I got to the lookout point in San Rafael, at the western foot of the bridge, I pulled over and joined 35 other spectators. They reported that the shuttle still hadn't arrived, so I got out my cell phone camera and waited.

When it didn't show up at first, many people expressed concern that we had simply picked a bad location; the official viewing sites were at Chrissy Field in San Francisco and at the NASA Ames Center in Mountain View.

Suddenly, somebody spotted the shuttle-- just as it flew over the Richmond Bridge near the Chevron port. As the shuttle came closer, I was alarmed to discover that the glare on my cell phone screen was so bad, I couldn't even tell if the phone was on or off! So I pointed the camera at the sky, pecked at where I thought the record button was, and hoped that it would turn out okay.

As it turned out, our motley crew of strangers picked the perfect spot. The shuttle flew directly overhead all of us in its first approach to the Golden Gate Bridge flyover!

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The video is a little too shaky, but I have to admit that I stopped paying attention to the camera to take in the sight. It was much more impressive in person-- the 747 was so close to the ground and you can hear the awe in the crowd in the video.
I only wonder--from the look of its flight path--if the shuttle could have also buzzed my house near Hilltop Mall. If it came close, the view from my backyard would have been spectacular!

But then I would have missed the camaraderie of witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime sight with a bunch of other Richmond Bridge travelers and San Rafael drivers, all of whom--on whim--stopped by to see what perhaps turned out to be one of the best views of the shuttle flyover in the Bay Area!