Environmental videos

From VenturaCountyStar.com

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Dana Rene Bowler / Star staff Rachel Morris rides her bike to help reduce the amount of carbon emissions. Over the years, she has worked on issues ranging from stopping nuclear power plants to making sure a tiny hill near her home wasn't lost to development.

The very expression "Earth Day" implies something that happens only once a year.

But for a group of activists in Ventura County, Earth Day is a misnomer. For them, every day is a chance to examine their actions in light of the environment and teach others what they've learned. They aren't people with large checkbooks or the power of big organizations backing them. Most started with the simple desire to make a difference in their community and then created movements and organizations that matched their passions. And they got results.

Alec Loorz was so driven to do something about global warming, the 13-year-old went into an independent study program at school so he would have time to teach kids about the state of the planet.

Kent Bullard has spent much of his life not only preaching about biodiesel but also making it easier for people to get the less-polluting fuel into their cars.

On any given weekend day, you can find Carol Day hiking through Los Padres National Forest, clearing the trails so others can enjoy them.

And Rachel Morris was so inspired by the hundreds of fellow Venturans who demanded a game plan to fight global warming, she started a group to tackle the issue.

Today, on Earth Day, these four committed environmentalists share their stories.

Alec Loorz, global warming crusader

Alec didn't even want to see the movie that would eventually change his life. When his mom told him she rented Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," the then 12-year-old thought it would be a boring documentary. But within two hours, he was transformed.

The next day, he got into an argument with a student who believed global warming was a hoax. Though Alec

held up his end of the discussion, he figured he had to crystallize his argument.

"I realized I had to do something," said Alec, now 13. That night he stayed up late making a PowerPoint presentation that outlined the threats of global warming and how to deal with skeptics.

"I thought I needed to educate other kids."

He wanted to be one of the people Al Gore trained on giving his talk, but Alec was too young, so he developed his own speech. Before long he was giving his presentation at an environmental charter school in Los Angeles and then at an Earth Day event and then another and another.

"It was like a little idea I had last year, and now it has grown into a huge project that needs to get done," said Alec, whose brown bangs hang just above his glasses. He went into independent study at school so he could devote his time to getting kids active in the fight against global warming. He built a Web site to keep others up to date on what his group was doing.

He's given 18 talks so far, including one to more than 700 students at an environmental conference in San Diego. He started a group, Kids vs. Global Warming, that motivates other youths to get involved in the issue that in 50 years will affect them more than their parents.

"I can't wait 10 years until we have our Ph.D.s and we can make big changes," said Alec. "If we make changes now we can make a difference."

At every school he speaks at, he encourages students to start action teams and figure out how to reduce their output of carbon emissions.

He's also started SLAP, or sea level awareness project, which is trying to get a series of poles put up around Ventura that would show how high the ocean level could get if the polar ice caps melt.

But his intent is to never allow that to happen.

"If we work hard enough," Alec said, "we can make a difference."

On the Net: http://www.kids-vs-global-warming.com

Kent Bullard, helps promote biodiesel

If Kent Bullard has his way, Exxon Mobil may go out of business one day. Or at the very least, the oil giant will start replacing all its petroleum with the more environmentally friendly biodiesel.

In recent years, Bullard, 51, has been preaching the wonders of running cars off the same stuff used to cook french fries. He's helped people around Southern California gain easier access to the fuel made of plants instead of dead dinosaurs.

"We are driving down the highway at full speed ahead, and we never look behind us to see what we left behind," said Bullard, a maintenance supervisor for the Channel Islands National Park.

Not only has he converted many of the power systems on the islands to solar or other renewable energy sources but also he's done the same at the Galapagos Islands, taught others how to convert their homes to solar power and started a nonprofit group that provides people with the hard-to-find biodiesel.

He was part of a pioneering force for the National Park Service when he figured out that burning 2,000 gallons of diesel to ship 8,000 gallons out to Anacapa Island was a waste of resources. He installed a solar system to power the park's buildings, and the park now uses only about 263 gallons of fuel on the island annually. During the Channel Islands National Park's many expansions over the years, Bullard helped to supply power using renewable energy sources.

But Bullard's work is hardly done after he punches the clock.

Wanting to help others get the hard-to-find biodiesel, he started LA Biodiesel Co-op, a nonprofit that purchased a 1,000-gallon fuel tank from which members can load up. Bullard fills up his cars — with the license plates PUREBIO and BIOCAR — when they need topping off. After a few successful chapters in Los Angeles, he's working on establishing one in Ventura.

Bullard also got involved with Habitat for Humanity and helped build homes that run off alternative energy, saving not only energy but also money on utility bills for the eventual owners.

Bullard says he's afraid of what's going to happen to the world if people keep heading in the same direction.

"At times I'm scared for the future populations," he said. "The children and grandchildren are not going to have the same world as we do."

On the Net: http://www.labiodieselcoop.org.

Carol Day, longtime forest trail worker

For Carol Day, it started with a ghost of a trail.

In 1981 she had recently moved to Santa Paula and was looking for good hiking trails near her new job at Thomas Aquinas College, where she was an astronomy teacher.

The map she got showed a line marking Last Chance Trail, which snaked through the mountains that rise like a wall behind the campus. But she couldn't find the trail no matter how hard she looked. The trail had completely grown over.

So she organized some volunteers, borrowed some tools and refurbished the trail so others could hike through the mountains.

After she was done with that trail, she took care of another, then another, then another.

More than two decades and countless miles of trails later, Day is still at it, caring for the trails that many use to explore the backcountry of Los Padres National Forest.

Since last year, when she started keeping track, she's logged more than 460 hours working on trails. That works out to be about an hour a day.

"If it eats out time I would spend watching TV, that's good," said Day, 56.

Over the years, she's heard mountain lions scream, seen countless bears and recently had a turkey vulture eye her warily.

"She's not afraid to tackle anything," said Heidi Anderson, a Wilderness Trails manager with the Forest Service. "She has a lot of enthusiasm."

The work is as much fun as it is work, she said.

"I love being outdoors," she said. "I think being a steward of the land is something I feel responsible for. This is just one way to do it."

Rachel Morris, head of VCCool

It all started by accident.

Rachel Morris and her friend thought they would try to organize a petition to give the Ventura City Council the impetus to do something locally about global warming.

"I had no intention of being responsible for anything," she said.

But then more than 300 people showed up at a town hall meeting last year, and Morris knew she had to do something to harness all that energy.

"This is an opportunity to get something done," she remembered. "We had a feeling of responsibility."

And VCCool — or Ventura Climate Care Options Organized Locally — was born. Now Morris, 45, is trying to find a way to quit her job as a Web designer, mold her group into an active nonprofit and focus full time on local solutions to global warming.

Since the group started last year, Morris has led campaigns to use reusable cloth grocery bags instead of disposable plastic ones, organized a bike summit to encourage ridership and helped put people on "carbon diets" to curb their carbon dioxide emissions.

For the high-energy, high-spirited woman, the roots of her environmentalism can be traced back to her formative years in northern Utah. Morris can remember staring endlessly at lizards as they scampered across the harsh desert, then waiting a half-hour for one of the critters to pop its head back out from under a rock.

Over the years, she has worked on issues ranging from stopping nuclear power plants to making sure a tiny hill near her home wasn't lost to development.

When she's not working on VCCool, she's testing out development of an energy-free homemade refrigerator, biking around town (because she vows to use a car only twice a month) and strumming tunes with her music duo, Nature Girl.

But there isn't much time when she's not thinking of ways to help Venturans tread lighter on Earth.

"I can't think of anything else that is more important," she said.

On the Net: http://www.vccool.org.