A Close-Up Look At People Who Matter : They Bear in Mind How It Used to Look

The signs lead you through the Hollywood Hills, where Jon Earl and Ellen Petty are perfecting the blueprints for their vision.

The signs, some whimsical, some challenging, greet commuters as they travel the winding roads to the city. DRAGONFLY CROSSING, CAR MIGRATION, COYOTES CELEBRATING 40,000 YRS. ON THE MOUNTAIN, YOU ARE WATCHING THE NATURE CHANNEL are some of the messages Earl and Petty plant on the roadsides, hoping to sow understanding.

Off the main road, on the steps up to Earl and Petty’s home, handmade paper squirrels and raccoons welcome visitors.

They are gentle reminders that we are only tenants here. That the mountains preceded us by eons. And that perhaps, we should bear in mind how those mountains looked before we planted homes, subdivisions and pavement.

“We think it’s a good idea to educate people about what was here,” said Earl, who, with Petty five years ago formed a hands-on environmental organization called Rhapsody in Green. “People here either forget or never really knew what was here before.”

Studio City-based Rhapsody in Green gives environment-minded volunteers the chance to learn what habitats existed before development, as well as the opportunity to restore them.

“We noticed there aren’t that many groups that get people involved hands-on to restore the environment,” Earl said. There are groups that will take support, donations, signatures, but not that many that let you get your hands dirty, he said.

Rhapsody in Green is an army of about 400 volunteers who receive postcards every three months detailing projects on which they can labor. Earl and Petty then follow up with phone calls, signing people up for various details.

The group has torn down old barbed-wire fences in a condor preserve, and helped clear brush and build cages for a biologist studying captive gibbons in Santa Clarita.

It also gleans fruit from abandoned or unused citrus trees and donates the food to charities for the homeless or poor. So far, the group has picked about 100,000 pounds of fruit for Love Is Feeding Everyone and the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.

And a major project the group has undertaken is helping to restore a portion of El Segundo Dunes--what used to be thousands of acres of coastal prairie and dunes. The group has pulled up ice plant, non-native vegetation introduced in the 1950s, and is replacing it with deerweed, sunflowers and coastal buckwheat, which, Earl said, provides the only food source for the endangered El Segundo blue butterfly.

Now some of the wildlife once known to the area is returning.

“There was a burrowing owl that hadn’t been seen out there in 10 years that is coming back,” Petty said.

Petty and Earl make their living teaching environmental education in private schools and working with a program that pairs handicapped and able-bodied students for the benefit and education of both.

In 1989, they decided their passion for the environment needed another outlet. Rhapsody in Green was born. The group, which recently won a $5,000 Community Partnership Award, is hoping to expand to other regions.

Another project is Bio-regional Rhapsody, an ongoing researching and mapping of the habitats of Los Angeles--based not on what exists now, but what was there before development, Earl said. He hopes that will lead to the creation of wildlife corridors, connecting the habitats of Los Angeles.

As Earl and Petty spoke, 16-year-old Brittany Kesselman of Encino sat on the floor, working on another poster. The words she printed in block letters--borrowed from Henry David Thoreau--could be the Rhapsody in Green slogan, an explanation of Earl and Petty’s vision: The earth is more to be admired, than to be used.

For more information about Rhapsody in Green, call (213) 654-5821.