If the members of Groovity had listened to their friends, the name of their band would be “Shit Honey.” In 2012, the members—already buddies—started playing music just for kicks, not expecting it to get serious. When it seemed like they might have something worthy of bringing to venues, they launched an impressive campaign for name suggestions.
“We had two unsuccessful name-the-band house parties. After we read all the responses, we still weren’t happy. We very quickly came up with a name a month after that,” says drummer Mike Grall.
The name they chose, Groovity, came from an in-band discussion of how they could alter the word “groove.” It was fitting because the band’s number-one objective was to get people dancing.
Unlike many dance bands who cover funk and soul classics, the members of Groovity wanted to take all the classic rock songs that people of their generation grew up with and loved, and increase the danceability factors.
“People’s sensibilities about what is worthy of dancing has improved greatly since we were kids. People are more sophisticated,” says bassist Ken Mowrey.
They’ve created some interesting mashups to funk-ify classic rock songs, like mixing a Stephen Stills song with some Aretha Franklin, or mashing up Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good” with Michael Jackson’s “Bad.” (“Not only does it sound frickin’ awesome, but the lyrical content also plays off each other,” says singer Veda Ozelle.)
INFO: 9 p.m. Friday, Aug. 25. Crow’s Nest, 2218 East Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz. $6. 476-4560.
Danny Keith will not forget the half-dozen close calls he had with coyotes and deer as his car snaked down the mountains after Valencia Road closed. For seven-and-half months, he and at least a thousand neighbors in Aptos used a windy, rural detour to go home after winter storms wiped out his normal route.
“It was usually at dusk. The road just wasn’t built to handle a thousand cars going up it everyday,” Keith says. “The back-country blind turns weren’t always predictable.”
Valencia, an arterial road of Aptos, opened this month after a culvert collapsed last winter, forcing several hundred families to use an indirect route for errands and school.
While the neighborhood celebrated a temporary bridge opening on Monday, Aug. 7, the county expects full repairs from last year’s storms to take years.
“We were the worst hit county in California,” says Public Works Director John Presleigh. “We’ve seen bad years before, in ’95 and ’82. But this was particularly bad.”
Closures impacted an incredible number of roads at one time, with storms causing major and repeated impacts on thoroughfares like Soquel San Jose Road and Highways 7, 9, 35 and 152. A major sinkhole on Nelson Road was fixed—temporarily, at least—by Public Works tying two flatbed railroad cars together.
The damage will cost $129 million across 320 locations, paid for with the help of federal funds. Public Works created an internal Recovery Unit that aims to fix 90 percent of the torn-up infrastructure within five years. Monterey County was hit with $60 million worth of damages.
The Valencia project alone cost $4 million. Like other repairs, the county has applied for federal disaster aid to fund them, expecting to pay at least $25 million of the total itself over five years.
Presleigh’s office is hiring five new design consultants on top of the county’s four project designers. Nearly all of the county’s paperwork for the repairs is in, Presleigh says, with action pending from federal and state agencies.
Some Valencia Road residents have complained about the delays. Presleigh says the repair bypassed standard Caltrans protocols after a concerted effort to install the temporary fix.
Presleigh lobbied for quicker Caltrans approval in Sacramento, since the state agency is allowed to do emergency openings, while Rep. Jimmy Panetta and Rep. Anna Eshoo spoke with the Federal Highway Administration on the federal level.
But it was a group of schoolkids who helped moved the needle. They were cut off from Valencia Elementary School, and were sent to Mar Vista Elementary School, Cabrillo College, Aptos High School and Rolling Hills Middle School instead.
“I think Caltrans woke up when they got letters from the kids,” Presleigh says, adding that Supervisors Zach Friend, Bruce McPherson and John Leopold also assisted.
Meanwhile, major arteries like Soquel Drive going into Aptos Village, and dozens of smaller rural roads, are in need of repair. Construction has started on just 9 percent of the 98 Federal Highway Administration projects and 15 percent of FEMA projects. The completion rate is about half that.
There are two types of roads the county is working on: big, arterial roads that Caltrans and the Federal Highway Administration can assist with, and smaller residential roads in the mountains, which are local roads with repairs potentially funded through California’s Office of Emergency Services and FEMA.
Public Works is coordinating with those agencies to determine which should be fixed first. Measure D is being used to cover the county’s portion of the smaller, FEMA road costs. Other costs are being covered by the Federal Highway Administration and California’s Office of Emergency Services.
Presleigh said the county was “starved for resources” before SB 1 and Measure D passed, and intended to use the funds for county road resurfacing. Now, it’s stuck doing storm repair again.
“We still want to do a progressive pavement plan,” Presleigh said. “But we’re going to have to get creative on spending money.”
At a supervisors’ meeting this month, Leopold asked Presleigh to report back in October on if the county could reduce its overhead costs to leverage more federal money.
“If you look at that report, the local match was something like $18.5 million—and there was a magic asterisk next to it that said, ‘Depending on overhead cost.’ We need to reduce those so we can get projects up and going as quickly as possible,” Leopold said.
Presleigh says that may be possible, given the large number of projects; the percentage could drop from 12.5 to 10 percent or so. His department will present more information to the supes in September.
Meanwhile, Rolling Greens, the community affected by the Valencia closure, has become closer because of the storms, Keith said. Many joined the social network Nextdoor and offered to pick up supplies in town. A yard sale is planned on Aug. 27to bring people into the neighborhood, and some community members revived an inactive neighborhood improvement association.
Lisa Woolnick, whose son was in sixth grade at Valencia when the storms closed the school, was elected president of the association in their aftermath. She’s helping plan a community party later this month, with elected officials and Public Works staff invited.
“My kid always walked to school. We had no way to get there, so we formed carpools,” Woolnick said. “Through this, we’ve become stronger.”
The Broadway Hyatt Place is barreling toward its opening, with landscapers and construction workers laboring early and late, and even putting in weekend hours. But judging from the recent mob of pickup trucks, vans and forklifts out front, one can’t help but wonder if the grand opening, set for Friday, Sep. 1 is cutting it a little close.
It is not hard to understand why the developers might want to open Labor Day weekend, after all the time and dollars they’ve poured into the project.
The Santa Cruz City Council first approved the hotel six years ago, partly in hopes that it might help clean up the Lower Ocean neighborhood. And after an exhaustive planning process, hotelier Tejal Sood came back to the City Council three years later, in 2014, to get a design modification approved. Construction on the relatively high-end, 106-room Hyatt first began two and a half years ago.
Sood and another representative from the Bayside Hotel Group, which is opening the new Hyatt, could not be reached for comment. And when GT stopped by the site, Sood—busy going over measurements with contractors—said she couldn’t talk.
Christina Glynn, communications director for Visit Santa Cruz County, says the project is on schedule, though. “They’ve pushed back the opening a couple of times,” Glynn says. “I think they really want to make sure they have everything in place.”
A hotel rep had posteda hiring notice July 1, saying they hoped to have the hotel open in August.
During the 2016 local elections, the Hyatt became a popular target, with some politicos criticizing it as a missed opportunity to build affordable housing—an understandable gripe, but one that comes with the benefit of hindsight. Some neighbors did have grave concerns about the Hyatt before its approval in 2011, but apprehension about the housing crisis was apparently secondary to the notions that the city needed to add higher-end hotel rooms and somehow clean up Ocean and Broadway, which had a larger prostitution presence back then.
Going forward, those who think Santa Cruz already has enough hotels are in for a surprise. A Marriott has begun construction near the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and the City Council approved two more hotels in June.
Even with the rise of Airbnb, which has cut into hotel profits nationwide, the best metrics available show steady demand for hotels in Santa Cruz, Glynn says, with occupancy rates, with Santa Cruz hovering around 80 percent the past three summers and above two thirds year-round.
Violent crime is a staple of action movies; we’re all so inured to violence onscreen, it’s usually just another plot point toward solving the mystery. So it’s rare to find the consequences of violence—on the victims, their families and friends, and their community—portrayed with such somber eloquence as they are in Wind River. Thoughtful, infuriating, and heartbreaking, this searing, expertly told tale of crime and punishment on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming will leave you breathless.
This is only the second movie directed by Taylor Sheridan, an actor and scriptwriter best known for writing Sicario and last year’s highly lauded Hell Or High Water. As a director here, he combines swift and cogent storytelling with an impressive sense of visual composition. The icy mountain peaks, bone-freezing cold, daunting snowdrifts, and stark, empty landscapes of one of our nation’s most notoriously brutal and brutalizing Native American reservations all become characters in the drama.
Sheridan shows how the remoteness of the region—smack in the middle of Wyoming, on a parcel of land the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined—has an isolating effect on families who live there. Far removed from the three main highways that pass through the state, the residents stuck in the cycle of hopelessness and poverty of reservation life risk moral isolation as well, from a society that has long since forgotten them.
At the center of the drama is Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a hunter and tracker of predatory animals. A loner by nature, Cory was married to an Arapaho woman (Julia Jones) with whom he is co-parenting their son. One day, up in the high country, while tracking a mountain lion that has been preying on local livestock, Cory finds the frozen body of a young woman.
Because the circumstances are suspicious, and the death occurred on federal land, the FBI sends out agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen). Operating out of Las Vegas (she was the closest agent the feds could find), Jane arrives with insufficient snow gear and an expectation that things will be done according to procedure—like calling for back-up before entering a dangerous situation. As tribal police chief Ben (the always-great Graham Greene) calmly explains, “This is the land of ‘you’re on your own.’”
With his insider’s knowledge of both the community and the surrounding wilderness, Cory joins the investigation. Outsider though she is, Jane feels passionate outrage for young women already marginalized by their heritage and gender so easily preyed upon in a society of tough guys in trucks and snowmobiles—not only aimless locals, but riggers and guards attached to an oil-drilling site pumping resources and profits off the reservation.
Director Sheridan conveys the dynamics of reservation life as background, but this is primarily a suspense thriller told with skill and urgency as the characters gear up for the inevitable dispensing of frontier justice. It’s a harrowing movie to watch, especially the flashback to the crime itself (although it might have been a little better integrated into the narrative).
But the resonance of Renner’s understated acting, moments of unexpected visual splendor, and mounting psychological intensity make it all irresistibly compelling. Resonant too is the lyrical soundtrack of haunting melodies and soft, moaning vocals by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.
Sheridan is scrupulous about casting actors of Native American blood to play Native roles. Tokala Clifford contributes a mesmerizing couple of scenes as a bad-news stoner at the outskirts of the community. And Gil Birmingham has terrific presence as Martin, the victim’s father. (Painting on his “death face” to honor his daughter, he admits to old friend Cory, “I made it up. There’s no one left to teach us.”) A quiet scene when these two taciturn men share their grief is the emotional core of this sterling, satisfying film.
WIND RIVER
***1/2 (out of four)
With Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, and Graham Greene. Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan. A Weinstein Co. release. Rated R. 107 minutes.
I’ve drank many a beer in my day, but now I can say that I’ve eaten one, too. Tabitha Stroup of Friend in Cheeses Jam Co. and Emily Thomas of Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing have teamed up to create a jelly using SCMB’s “Giant DIPA” Double IPA, and it’s a mash made in heaven (sorry, I couldn’t help myself). Amber-hued, malty and sweet with herbal hop aromas, it definitely tastes like beer … but it’s spreadable. Trust me, it’s good.
Fantastic with buttery double- and triple-crème cheeses, it also makes a dynamite glaze for pork loin and bacon, especially if that bacon then becomes a BLT. Thomas says they’ll be making a grown-up PB&J at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver with DIPA jelly and cashew butter. As Stroup frequently says of her eclectic preserves, you’re only limited by your own imagination.
Find it at SCMB’s Westside taproom, and at the Westside and Felton farmers markets.
MORE BEER
Capitola-based Sante Adairius Rustic Ales is opening a second location at 1315 Water St., in the building that previously housed Blithe and Bonny and Staff of Life—a bit easier to find than their brewery tucked away up on Kennedy Drive. Co-owner Adair Paterno reports that, “The new tasting room will be decidedly SARA, but will provide a different look and feel and overall experience. The centerpiece of the space will be a decommissioned 90-barrel foudre, which has been re-milled to serve as the back bar and tap housing.” They hope to open their doors this fall.
Meanwhile, the team that brought Beer Thirty Bottle Shop & Pourhouse to Soquel is proposing to open an additional establishment in a new commercial area called the Hangar, on Aviation Way in Watsonville. The new location will be “craft-beer-centric, with a complementary food concept,” says Kym DeWitt. Guests can expect outdoor seating, regular entertainment and a family-friendly environment. “We hope to bring career-level opportunities to South County,” says DeWitt, who cautions that there’s a lot of work to be done before the development is approved and ready to open.
The Sean Boyle Syrah 2013 only gets better with age. When I opened a bottle to pair with a couple of steaks we grilled at home, the wine’s gorgeous aromas were evident before I even poured it in the glass. Starting off with premium grapes gives wine a head start, and winemaker Craig Handley uses only the best. In this case, a lush harvest of Syrah grapes from Lester Family Vineyards.
At a recent wine event on the Lester property in Aptos, Pleasant Valley Vineyards owners Craig and Cathy Handley were pouring their superb wines—each one named after a family member.
The wine that caught my attention that day was the Sean Boyle Syrah ($40), named after their grand-nephew Sean, who has yet to reach his first decade. This delicious Syrah is awash with voluptuous fruity aromas and bold berry flavors. It’s aged exclusively in small oak barrels and is bottled unfiltered and unfined—a process gaining in popularity and which basically means the sediment is left in the wine.
“This is a huge crowd pleaser,” say the Handleys of their Syrah. “Its full berry flavors with a delicious white pepper finish are great with any red meat affairs.” And it certainly goes well with pizza. Ricco Felice, owner and chef of Felice Forno—a mobile wood-fired pizza operation—turned out a variety of tasty pies that day to pair with Pleasant Valley Vineyards’ wines.
Pleasant Valley Vineyards, 600 Pleasant Valley Road, Aptos, 288-0074. pvvines.com.
Pinot Harvest Dinner
A wonderful evening of food and wine kicks off Pinot Paradise featuring wines from the Santa Cruz Mountains. Taste exquisite wines during a wine reception, bid on magnum bottles during a silent auction, and celebrate harvest under the stars at the Pinot Harvest Dinner at Lester Family Vineyards in Aptos. All proceeds will benefit Hospice of Santa Cruz County. Tickets are $150 per attendee and include admission to the Pathway to Pinot Paradise Wine Trail in October. The Harvest Dinner event is 5-9 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 23.
Visit Santa Cruz Mountains Winegrowers Association for more info on the dinner and other Pinot Paradise events, at scmwa.com.
All the planets at one time or another turn retrograde, creating an inward-focused time. At present, Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto, Juno and Chiron are retrograde. During retrograde times, we confront the past, sort out the dross, clean, clear, eliminate and bring forth closure. Then the planet turns direct again.
Monday, after four-and-a-half months of retrograde (since April 6), Saturn—strict teacher, disciplinarian and time-keeper—turns direct (21 degrees Sagittarius). During Saturn retrogrades, we tend to things neglected and forgotten. Debts (karma) owed are remembered. Tests and challenges return, giving us time to learn the lessons again.
After Saturn turns direct once again, we are ready to assume more tasks and responsibilities, become more productive, achieve more, are on time, and apply practically what we have learned over the previous months. We have more strength, ambition, and a sense of perseverance has developed. We feel encouraged, have sounder judgment, and care for ourselves in more practical ways.
Saturn pushes us to have courage, moves us out of past habits and carefully into new rhythms. Saturn guards and guides us, teaches us to trust and assume responsibility. Saturn strengthens us and offers us failures so we can learn fortitude and patience. Saturn adjusts our abilities by offering us struggles and times when we are solitary and alone. Saturn is strict but very fair.
As the days, weeks and months unfold after the Leo solar eclipse and Saturn moving forward in Sag (both fire signs), our creativity surges and a concrete manifestation of things envisioned and hoped for comes forth.
Burning Man begins Sundayin a Mercury/Virgo retrograde. This radical, ritualed pop-up-art-culture-community-bonfire event-on Black Rock playas—where everyone is equal, nothing can be bought, and there are no rules—will have surprising events and outcomes this year. Burning Man’s principles/rules (Saturn) are on my website, nightlightnews.org.
ARIES: You find it important to have beauty, peace and harmony at home, along with nourishing and nurturing things. Look around your environments and create the needed comfort. You think about your childhood home, your parents’ marriage, the intelligence and love imparted there. You either imitate this way of living or revolutionize it.
TAURUS: You always choose to be kind, tolerant, tactful, doing no harm. This makes you very likable. You learn during these eclipse weeks that you are very creative. You also learn to provide others with more recognition. You’re sensitive, diplomatic, and often you remain silent. You have very high intelligence, which you hide. You are also, at times, mischievous and ornery. Everyone likes you.
GEMINI: It’s important to hear during these times that you are creative, intelligent, loving, cared for and appreciated. You may not verbalize these words to others often, but you need to have them spoken to you. Inform loved ones that you feel safe and secure with them. And thank them. What you seek most right now are things simple, trustworthy and genuine. Soul qualities.
CANCER: The planets are affecting you in such a way that you are more sensitive, vulnerable, aware, perceptive and intuitive. Give to yourself all that you need during this time. You may need to tend to your health and well-being with more focus. Less acidic foods, more alkaline for balance. You will feel the difference. Research Chaga (medicinal mushroom) and dried green barley grass. Use them in smoothies.
LEO: Parts of your life become more hidden for a while. In terms of love, it’s as if you closed the door and went into hiding. Secrets become interesting, you or others speak in whispers. There’s a real feeling that some essential things—people, situations, events, the past—have ended. Loss is always accompanied by sadness and melancholy. This too passes. But you realize what you are lonely for.
VIRGO: You seek someone to share your interests. You seek happiness and friendships and group interactions. You seek peacefulness, a bit of romance tinged with friendship. You waver between depth and impersonality, all the while wanting to trust. You’re here and there with your thinking. You want to feel empowered, but sometimes daily life feels wounding. Relationships change for the better.
LIBRA: A very expansive new sense of self is growing within, and you will be surprised in the future who and what you become. In relationships, you harmonize rather than challenge. In groups of friends you are the change maker, the radical social one. Someone makes you very happy. You value their love. They teach you how to love more. You protect them from harm. Safeguarding them. You don’t talk about these things. Sometimes there’s sadness.
SCORPIO: You’re recognized for your unceasing work performance. You’re seen as a bit radical, responsible, likeable, with appropriate authority, able to negotiate and be social at the same time. All in terms of your profession. There’s some ambition for something new, something managerial mixed with art, creativity and your particular talent. Opportunities come your way. Keep a sensible heart throughout. But listen to the siren calls.
SAGITTARIUS: Several things keep coming to the surface or showing up in your life. The usual things – money, sharing finances, deep intimate connections, dividing power, discussing emotional topics. All of these are important. Then there’s the unusual, where routine becomes a grave dissatisfaction. The appeal is other people, faraway places, attractive and charming and rather exotic. You are to attract and then synthesize all of it.
CAPRICORN: Pay special attention to partners, intimates, friends and those close to you. Personal, one-on-one interactions are needed by those who love you. Offer yourself, with intention and dedication, to be more present, to just love more. Observe carefully the needs of those in your life. One can radiate love yet still be unaware of the real needs of others. Do you recognize the subtle difference?
AQUARIUS: Above all other things you do this month, make sure the work environment is harmonious and peaceful, friendly and tidy, generous and a pleasure for everyone. Call for team spirit, ask everyone to be cooperative and share tasks. The outcome is everyone begins to recognize your gifts and appreciates you more and more. Wherever you are tend carefully to all resources, finances and be aware of what you value.
PISCES: There is perhaps a wounding being experienced. A feeling that a new reality is needed. The one you’ve been living in no longer serves you. This is part of the eclipse playing out, part Chiron (the wound) and Neptune (things dissolving). There is a need for change, a new environment, new ways of daily living, new rhythms, new resources and more choices. Create a magnetic field around you by visualizing the needs being fulfilled. Write, draw, paint them. Let this be your new daily creative endeavor. Then watch what happens.
Free will astrology for the week of August 23, 2017.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Welcome to Swami Moonflower’s Psychic Hygiene Hints. Ready for some mystical cleansing? Hint #1: To remove stains on your attitude, use a blend of Chardonnay wine, tears from a cathartic crying session, and dew collected before dawn. Hint #2: To eliminate glitches in your love life, polish your erogenous zones with pomegranate juice while you visualize the goddess kissing your cheek. #3: To get rid of splotches on your halo, place angel food cake on your head for two minutes, then bury the cake in holy ground while chanting, “It’s not my fault! My evil twin’s a jerk!” #4: To banish the imaginary monkey on your back, whip your shoulders with a long silk ribbon until the monkey runs away. #5: To purge negative money karma, burn a dollar bill in the flame of a green candle.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): A reader named Kameel Hawa writes that he “prefers pleasure to leisure and leisure to luxury.” That list of priorities would be excellent for you to adopt during the coming weeks. My analysis of the astrological omens suggests that you will be the recipient of extra amounts of permission, relief, approval, and ease. I won’t be surprised if you come into possession of a fresh X-factor or wild card. In my opinion, to seek luxury would be a banal waste of such precious blessings. You’ll get more health-giving benefits that will last longer if you cultivate simple enjoyments and restorative tranquility.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The coming weeks will be an excellent time to cruise past the houses where you grew up, the schools you used to attend, the hotspots where you and your old friends hung out, and the places where you first worked and had sex. In fact, I recommend a grand tour of your past. If you can’t literally visit the locations where you came of age, simply visualize them in detail. In your imagination, take a leisurely excursion through your life story. Why do I advise this exercise? Because you can help activate your future potentials by reconnecting with your roots.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): One of my favorite Cancerian artists is Penny Arcade, a New York performance artist, actress, and playwright. In this horoscope, I offer a testimonial in which she articulates the spirit you’d be wise to cultivate in the coming weeks. She says, “I am the person I know best, inside out, the one who best understands my motivations, my struggles, my triumphs. Despite occasionally betraying my best interests to keep the peace, to achieve goals, or for the sake of beloved friendships, I astound myself by my appetite for life, my unwavering curiosity into the human condition, my distrust of the status quo, my poetic soul and abiding love of beauty, my strength of character in the face of unfairness, and my optimism despite defeats and loss.”
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The Witwatersrand is a series of cliffs in South Africa. It encompasses 217 square miles. From this area, which is a tiny fraction of the Earth’s total land surface, humans have extracted 50 percent of all the gold ever mined. I regard this fact as an apt metaphor for you to meditate on in the next 12 months, Leo. If you’re alert, you will find your soul’s equivalent of Witwatersrand. What I mean is that you’ll have a golden opportunity to discover emotional and spiritual riches that will nurture your soul as it has rarely been nurtured.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): What I wish for you is a toasty coolness. I pray that you will claim a messy gift. I want you to experience an empowering surrender and a calming climax. I very much hope, Virgo, that you will finally see an obvious secret and capitalize on some unruly wisdom and take an epic trip to an intimate turning point. I trust that you’ll find a barrier that draws people together instead of keeping them apart. These wonders may sound paradoxical, and yet they’re quite possible and exactly what you need.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Psychologist James Hansell stated his opinion of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud: “He was wrong about so many things. But he was wrong in such interesting ways. He pioneered a whole new way of looking at things.” That description should provide good raw material for you to consider as you play with your approach to life in the coming weeks, Libra. Being right won’t be half as important as being willing to gaze at the world from upside-down, inside-out perspectives. So I urge you to put the emphasis on formulating experimental hypotheses, not on proving definitive theories. Be willing to ask naive questions and make educated guesses and escape your own certainties.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): You’re entering a phase of your astrological cycle when you’ll be likely to receive gifts at a higher rate than usual. Some gifts could be big, complex, and catalytic, though others may be subtle, cryptic, or even covert. While some may be useful, others could be problematic. So I want to make sure you know how important it is to be discerning about these offerings. You probably shouldn’t blindly accept all of them. For instance, don’t rashly accept a “blessing” that would indebt or obligate you to someone in ways that feel uncomfortable.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): You are currently under the influence of astrological conditions that have led to dramatic boosts of self-esteem in laboratory rats. To test the theory that this experimental evidence can be applied to humans, I authorize you to act like a charismatic egomaniac in the coming weeks. JUST KIDDING! I lied about the lab rats. And I lied about you having the authorization to act like an egomaniac. But here are the true facts: The astrological omens suggest you can and should be a lyrical swaggerer and a sensitive swashbuckler.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): I invite you to eliminate all of the following activities from your repertoire in the next three weeks: squabbling, hassling, feuding, confronting, scuffling, skirmishing, sparring, and brawling. Why is this my main message to you? Because the astrological omens tell me that everything important you need to accomplish will come from waging an intense crusade of peace, love, and understanding. The bickering and grappling stuff won’t help you achieve success even a little—and would probably undermine it.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Stockbrokers in Pakistan grew desperate when the Karachi Stock Exchange went into a tailspin. In an effort to reverse the negative trend, they performed a ritual sacrifice of ten goats in a parking lot. But their “magic” failed. Stocks continued to fade. Much later they recovered, but not in a timely manner that would suggest the sacrifice worked. I urge you to avoid their approach to fixing problems, especially now. Reliance on superstition and wishful thinking is guaranteed to keep you stuck. On the other hand, I’m happy to inform you that the coming weeks will be a highly favorable time to use disciplined research and rigorous logic to solve dilemmas.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In the coming days, maybe you could work some lines from the Biblical “Song of Solomon” into your intimate exchanges. The moment is ripe for such extravagance. Can you imagine saying things like, “Your lips are honey,” or “You are a fountain in the garden, a well of living waters”? In my opinion, it wouldn’t even be too extreme for you to murmur, “May I find the scent of your breath like apricots, and your whispers like spiced wine flowing smoothly to welcome my caresses.” If those sentiments seem too flowery, you could pluck gems from Pablo Neruda’s love sonnets. How about this one: “I want to do with you what spring does to the cherry trees.” Here’s another: “I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty.”
Homework: Each of us has a secret ignorance. What’s yours? What will you do about it? Testify at Freewillastrology.com.
“This is the most important vote of your life,” Governor Jerry Brown told lawmakers at the Senate Environmental Quality Committee hearing last month. “Maybe not of my life—I’ll be dead in five or 10 years.”
Shortly after, the cap-and-trade extension bill (AB 398) that Brown had pushed for so long passed with a two-thirds majority vote in both houses.
The cap-and-trade bill of 2013, though groundbreaking at the time, was riddled with loopholes, and did little to further its stated purpose of reducing emissions in California. The new law requires companies to purchase permits to release greenhouse gas emissions, a financial incentive to pollute less while driving revenue to fund state projects like affordable housing and the bullet train project. It also allows larger companies to purchase pollution allotments.
As a continuation of a pioneering bill, it’s a big step forward for environmental protection, and flanked by both Republican and Democrats, Brown celebrated its passage. But for a few assemblymembers, AB 398 marked a pyrrhic victory.
“I was hoping that we would get it done better, in a stronger deal that was better for the environment without so many giveaways to the oil companies,” Assemblymember Mark Stone says. “I didn’t think it would pass that easily.”
Given the way that Brown described the stakes, it may sound surprising that Stone—a staunch environmentalist, who’s introduced bills to improve the California Coastal Commission’s transparency and ban cigarette filters—would vote against his own party on climate change. But the cap-and-trade bill has upended the political climate of the state, and the contention surrounding the bill is reflective of the ultra-progressive nature of the central coast. The bill has come under fire from some progressives for not outright restricting greenhouse gas emissions. While Republican Senator Tom Berryhill and Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia were in favor of AB 398, Stone, along with mostly conservative Democrats and Republican lawmakers, voted against it—putting him in unexpected company among his fellow lawmakers, although for different reasons.
“California has been leading the country and, really the world, in climate policy, and this is definitely part of that strategy to continue the conversations,” Stone allows. But in his opinion, the bill was pushed too quickly. “I think that’s why there was some desperation around this passing—to show that California is still leading the way. That’s fine, but at what cost?”
Stone says he had thought that more Democrats would have similar reservations, allowing more time to refine the bill.
A cornerstone of the discussion around cap and trade is State Senator Bill Monning, who has long supported cap-and-trade extension and its economic opportunities. As veteran liberal Democrats representing the interests of Santa Cruz County, Monning and Stone rarely disagree on bills. Though both acknowledge that there is always more to be done, they differ on how much should be done now.
“Many of these cap-and-trade bills historically have been the result of negotiation and compromise, and this is no different,” Monning says. “What is significant about the extension through 2030 is that it brings predictability to the energy market, and will continue to have California lead the nation in terms of the development of renewable energy.”
Though the renewal was passed in late July, the cap-and-trade program isn’t new. The Global Warming Act of 2006 authorized the California Air Resources Board to implement a market-based system of greenhouse gas reduction. In 2013, the board introduced the multi-sector cap-and-trade agreement seen today. The current bill extends the expiration date to 2030 with the goal of ensuring that greenhouse emissions are reduced to 40 percent below 1990 levels.
“The question is would we be better off if we had failed to pass this extension with no targets for reduction of CO2 emissions, and no requirements on polluting industries,” Monning says. Furthermore, he says, “we use cap and trade revenues to invest in marginalized communities and low-income communities.”
The bill was a result of weeks of meetings, intense negotiations, concessions, and acquisitions. To sweeten an otherwise bitter pill for Republican voters, Brown added the suspension of fire prevention fees, which will provide some fiscal relief for rural property owners. To appease Democrats, he added an air quality measure (AB 617) and housing benefits to support low-income families.
If the bill had not passed, the cap-and-trade laws weren’t going to expire immediately. “If it weren’t for the promises on housing, there would have been some other Democrats really concerned about what this deal meant,” Stone says. “Sometimes having a little bit more time to understand implications would be helpful.”
But Brown urgently pushed for the bill to pass to renew California’s commitment to environmentalism, and possibly to re-establish the state as an environmental protection powerhouse, given the nature of the current federal administration. President Trump announced in June that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, and his administration has quietly rolled back numerous other environmental protections.
“If we had failed in passing this, we would have been back to square one and we would have been no different than the current administration in Washington D.C. in refusing to acknowledge climate change, and refusing to take any action to protect our planet,” Monning says.
Alternatives to the cap-and-trade measure include a carbon tax, which taxes fossil fuels to incentivize emission reductions; some environmentalists say it is a better option because it is much more strict on companies, and taxes all pollution, rather than just that emitted after a company has reached its “cap.”
“If California sets the caps low enough, [cap and trade] can still be a help to the environment as far as air pollution, but a carbon tax would be vastly more effective since there is a cost for every ton of pollution emitted, not just after a cap is reached,” says Cabrillo College Astronomy Chair Richard Nolthenius. “A carbon tax, which rebates the money to the citizens, would then incentivize citizens to spend on less carbon-intensive power and goods, as it should be.”
Nolthenius would like to see the cap-and-trade measure repealed, though he doubts it is likely.
“In the end, civilization will have to decide if it wants economic growth, or if it wants a global climate compatible with the civilization and species alive today,” Nolthenius says. “Growing evidence is that it cannot have both.”
Nearly half of the humans on this sweet planet—three billion and rising—live in Earth’s coastal zones. But increasing coastal development—between 2000 and 2010, new building permits were issued at a rate of 1,355 per day in shoreline counties across the U.S.—is setting the stage for a precarious future. Indeed, we’ve already begun to see its impact.
That’s why the new book by UCSC earth sciences professor Gary Griggs, Coasts in Crisis: A Global Challenge, couldn’t come at a more crucial time. As the Trump Administration actively dismantles every hard-won environmental protection it can get its hands on, and the call-to-action climate-change documentary AnInconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power plays in theaters across the country, Griggs’ book—which hits stores Aug. 30—sharpens its focus on the most vulnerable regions of all.
“With about 150 million living within just three feet of high tide, and hundreds of millions more within a few more feet, future sea-level rise may be the greatest challenge human civilization has ever faced,” writes Griggs.
Drawing on an impressive body of scientific research, Coasts in Crisis dips into geological and human history to trace our trajectory to today’s coastal megacities and beyond. His engrossing, multi-dimensional approach results in a global perspective of the dangers and dilemmas facing our coasts. Natural processes and hazards get full coverage, but the human components—including pollution and plastic debris, ocean acidification, aquatic invasive species, renewable energy, desalination, and so much more—make up the brunt of his thorough, 352-page analysis.
In a preview of Griggs’ upcoming talk at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Wednesday, Sept. 13, GT grilled him on the current state of the coasts and a future that depends on us.
Did you have an ‘aha’ moment in which you realized that our coasts were in a much more dire situation than you had ever thought?
GARY GRIGGS: I arrived in Santa Cruz 50 years ago as a young Assistant Professor at the newly opened UC Santa Cruz campus and immediately started exploring the coast, mostly the north coast, looking for places to take class field trips. While it was surfing at UCSB as an undergraduate that led me to graduate school in oceanography at Oregon State, my three years there were focused on deep-sea research and not surfing. So in the fall of 1968 I headed out to Pleasure Point and quickly discovered that the water smelled like sewage. Turns out that place was locally known as “Sewer Peak” and it was the East Cliff outfall that discharged just 200 feet offshore in about five feet of water. That experience and the first environmental studies class I taught a year later, which produced a report on the area’s environmental problems, made me aware of the issues our coast faced even a half a century ago.
If there is one thing that climate-change deniers can’t deny, it’s the scientific tracking of Earth’s melting ice caps. Along with the massive chunks of ice falling into the sea—including last month’s Antarctica iceberg, Larsen C, which you reported was the size of Santa Cruz, San Mateo, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties combined, can you share any figures for the current rate of ice melt?
One of the boats carried inland by the 2011 tsunami wound up stranded on a building in Tohoku, Japan. PHOTO: STEPHEN VAUGHAN
There are three main areas where the planet’s ice is stored, and it is primarily the melting of that ice that is raising sea level, along with a warming ocean, leading to thermal expansion of water. The mountain glaciers, or those in Alaska, the Andes, Alps, Patagonia and Himalayas, where we most often see the photographs of retreat and melting, actually are quite small in volume. If they were all to melt, which they are gradually doing, they would produce a total global sea-level rise of a little less than two feet. That’s not trivial if you live within two feet of high tide.
The big volumes are in Greenland, which has enough ice to raise sea level around the planet about 24 feet—clearly a big problem for nearly 750,000,000 people or 10 percent of the planet’s people that live within 24 feet of sea level. The elephant in the room, however, is Antarctica, which holds 61 percent of all fresh water on the planet (6,400,000 cubic miles of ice, which would cover the entire United States with 10,000 feet of ice), and enough to raise sea level about 190 feet were it all to melt.
No climate scientist believes that will happen this century or next, but we are slowly moving in that direction, and we don’t need all of the ice to melt—a few feet of sea level rise will create major problems in shoreline cities around the world. Right now our best projections are for about three feet of rise by 2100.
You note that until about a century ago, global sea levels were fairly stable, rising only about .04 inches per year, or four inches per century. What is the rate at now?
The present rate of global sea-level rise as measured precisely from satellites over the past 24 years is a little more than 13 inches per 100 years, or over three times as fast as the past century. All indications are, however, that this rates is going to continue to increase.
Perhaps part of the problem, as far as public awareness is concerned, is that 13 inches per 100 years and accelerating doesn’t sound so scary. Can you explain what this type of sea-level rise looks like for low-lying places?
Gary Griggs will talk about his book ‘Coasts in Crisis’ on Wednesday, Sept. 13, at Bookshop Santa Cruz. PHOTO: DEEPIKA SHRESTHA ROSS
Our best projections at present of global sea-level rise for the year 2100 are about three feet above the 2000 level. Today around the world, there are about 150 million people living within three feet of high tide in places like Bangladesh, Myanmar, China, as well as New Orleans and parts of the Atlantic coast of the U.S.
The impact of three feet of additional sea level on a low-lying area like downtown Capitola, which has been inundated a number of times by high tides and storm waves, is not trivial. Adding an additional foot or two of sea level makes a huge difference for any low-lying coastal community or city and the frequency of flooding. A foot or two of additional sea level would have a big impact on our Main Beach. The runways of the San Francisco International airport begin to go underwater with just 16 inches of sea level above present-day high tide.
We’ve already seen destructive storms wreak unprecedented havoc on coastal cities in recent years, like 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan, which killed more than 6,000 thousand people in the Philippines and displaced tens of thousands more. Why are these storms occurring, and do you think we are just seeing the beginning of a dangerous trend?
The number of natural disasters from floods, storms, drought and heat waves during the first decade of the 21st century has been nearly five times as high as during the 1970s—and these are all weather-related events, which are influenced by climate change.
Directly contradicting President Trump, a new draft report produced by 13 federal agencies concludes that the United States is already feeling the negative impacts of climate change. A warming Earth means longer and more frequent droughts and heat waves, and warmer water that leads to both greater evaporation and subsequently increased rainfall and flooding, and likely more energy for hurricanes, typhoons and other tropical storms. While it is difficult to blame every additional climate-related disaster on global climate change, the patterns and trends are becoming increasingly clear that conditions are changing and there are major impacts on the planet’s human population as a result.
In recent interviews, Al Gore mentioned visiting Miami and seeing fish swimming up out of storm drains during high tide—a frequent occurrence there now. You also address Miami in your book, saying it continues to build higher and higher, “as if trying to outpace the increasing rate of sea-level rise.” Not to pick on Miami, but it seems to be making an example of itself. In 2016, you write that Miami to West Palm Beach built 417 new condominium towers (with over 50,000 individual units)—and not one of them took sea-level rise into account.
The Miami-West Palm Beach-Fort Lauderdale area is already experiencing regular “tidal flooding” although the governor for some odd reason has apparently forbidden state employees from using the words “sea-level rise.” It is one of the United States’ most vulnerable areas to additional sea-level rise, which is inevitable. The challenges the Miami area faces are a result of being built essentially at sea level and being on limestone, which is like Swiss cheese so it dissolves, leaving caves and sinkholes that provide easy access to seawater, no matter how high walls are built. While the city is spending millions of dollars trying to pump water out of the city, they can’t hold back the entire Atlantic Ocean. Denial is not the name of a river in Egypt.
Where do Santa Cruz and San Francisco sit in terms of vulnerability to sea-level rise and population crowding?
The city of Santa Cruz has a population of about 60,000 in contrast to the city/county of San Francisco, with 871,000. The most vulnerable areas of Santa Cruz from both short-term incidents of elevated sea levels such as El Niños, king tides and high tides with large storm waves, are primarily the West Cliff Drive, Main Beach and Boardwalk areas, as well as the Santa Cruz Harbor, which have all been impacted in the past. The longer-term rise in sea level will probably not begin to have serious impacts for several more decades, but this will also begin to affect the downtown area and sewage treatment plant where higher sea levels will move up the San Lorenzo River Channel and raise the water table beneath downtown. This has been an issue for years.The Capitola Esplanade and the areas between Pot Belly Beach and Rio Del Mar are also areas where development has occurred either at very low elevations or on the beach, and will feel the impacts of a rising ocean more often, particularly if the storm climate intensifies. The Embarcadero in San Francisco as well as Sausalito are already exposed to high water at extreme tides today and these problems will only get worse in the future.
Under the Trump Administration, 11 national marine sanctuaries and monuments—totaling an area of 425 million acres of beaches, coral reefs and marine life habitat—could lose protections under a new plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling. What sort of risks and impacts would this pose?
Fortunately oil and gas require a certain set of conditions to form; it just doesn’t occur everywhere or we might find oil wells in everyone’s backyards. In addition, the state owns the first three miles offshore so the Trump administration has no control of these areas. There were some federal oil lease sales off of Central California back in the 1960s but prospects at the time ended up being poor so leases were abandoned. There are many offshore areas that the oil companies aren’t really interested in simply because the probabilities of finding large amounts of oil are very low and the investments to drill and develop oil fields are very high. A single large offshore platform may cost $250 million to $1 billion. With crude oil prices now just under $50/barrel (a barrel is 42 gallons), there are also many offshore areas where it simply isn’t economical to drill for oil, despite what Donald Trump may dream is out there.
Two areas of highest risk today are the Arctic, where the efforts so far have been met with serious environmental conditions, and very deep water, such as offshore Gulf of Mexico where drilling is taking place in 5,000 to 10,000 feet of water. Explosions, fires, and blowouts, such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 when 11 crew members died and about 4.9 million barrels of oil ended up in the Gulf, are some of the hazards and potential impacts.
Do you think that saving our coasts also requires a total shift in global consciousness? And if so, do you think we may be nearing that tipping point?
I believe we are at a critical point, and increasing global temperatures from greenhouse gas emissions is the major driving force. The signs surround us: longer droughts and failed crops, retreating glaciers and melting snowpacks, sea-level rise and coastal retreat, more frequent and severe climate-related natural disasters. If anyone wonders if there is a coming water crisis, ask a farmer. Coasts are at a crisis point because of both the increase in natural disasters and hazards that affect the coastal zone, but also the hundreds of millions of people that continue to move to coastal cities with all of their ocean impacts. While the U.S. under this President has turned back the clock on virtually every effort that had been made to try to bring climate change under control, California, in large part due to Governor Brown, is way out in front and leading a nationally and internationally recognized effort to do the right thing. We have shown that we can be the largest national producer of solar energy, number three in wind power, and leading in reducing carbon emissions, and still be the planet’s sixth largest economy. We can make a difference that is having a significant influence on other states and nations, thanks to an intelligent, thoughtful and focused governor who is doing the right things.
There is a Terence McKenna concept for saving the world (which he attributes, actually, to the magic mushroom). That solution is that no woman should have more than one natural child. He admits that this solution flies directly in the face of capitalism, which thrives on an exponential increase in consumers. At the same time, I don’t hear many of my child-bearing-age peers talking about population projections. Do you think that our current trajectory requires a radical reversal or decrease in population?
Paul Ehrlich and his wife [Anne, who was uncredited] wrote The Population Bomb 50 years ago (1968) and described in detail how quickly global populations were increasing and the coming problems of mass starvation due to inadequate food supplies. I recall a nationwide organization with an active Santa Cruz group, called ZPG, for Zero Population Growth. A number of things happened in subsequent years with miracle crops increasing yields, etc., as well as push back from various religious groups … and a whole series of other environmental issues took the front page. Yet today, the world population stands at 7.5 billion, having doubled since I arrived at UCSC in 1968. China and India constitute 36 percent of the total. There is simply no way the planet can support the present population at anything close to the standard of living we enjoy in the U.S. It would take four Earths to provide that standard of living. Instead, the planet gains 225,000 people every day, equivalent to 900 jumbo jets each delivering 250 people. 850,000,000 people across the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition and 21,000 of these, mostly children, die every day. The Earth also has a serious problem with access to safe drinking water and sanitation, with more people having cell phones than toilets. A child dies every 90 seconds because of lack of access to clean water and sanitation. The Earth simply doesn’t have the resources to support the present population with adequate food, water and sanitation.
Each of your chapters end with a ‘Where do we go from here?’ section, intended to encourage people to act individually and collectively to restore, preserve and protect our vital coastal environments. What are the most important individual and collective actions we can take?
Following many talks I have given on coastal issues to off-campus groups, I often am asked “What can we do?” My first response has always until now been “VOTE.” Well, that didn’t work nationally, but it still makes a big difference closer to home. Our local and state representatives have huge impacts on coastal issues. There are also many opportunities to get involved with organizations or facilities who work on public education and coastal or ocean conservation: the Seymour Marine Discovery Center and Sanctuary Exploration Center, Save Our Shores, Surfriders, and many others who are working to improve our coastal environment through public education and advocacy.
Gary Griggs presents Coasts in Crisis: A Global Challenge at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 13 at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Free.
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