If you visited Alameda Park this weekend, you saw for yourselves what a great job the Community Environmental Council (CEC) did with this year’s Earth Day celebration.  From vendors providing information about green driving and locavore food production, to a public square filled with organizations encouraging activism, to entertainment that made it all go down easy, Earth Day 2013 was a huge success.  CEC staff should be proud of their achievement.

Likewise, Santa Barbara residents should be proud to be not just the birthplace of the environmental movement, but the home of an impassioned community of people working to make our community greener and cleaner.  CEC is at the forefront on sustainability, and leads us all.  Other, smaller organizations – Get Oil Out!, Heal the Ocean, the Los Padres Sierra Club, Save Naples, SB CAN,  and Surfrider, to name just a few – bring grassroots energy to local policymaking, keeping our elected officials moving in the right direction on policymaking. The Environmental Defense Center (EDC), on whose Board of Directors I am privileged to sit, depends on these and other nonprofits to help us do the legal legwork necessary to advocate for and protect the central coast from the environmental violence that is destroying so much of our planet.

Santa Barbara is an amazingly beautiful place to live. We owe thanks to all of these organizations and their supporters keeping it so.

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