Valley Celebrants Mark Earth Day’s 25th Year : Environment: Event is saluted in variety of ways, from a charity march at Universal Studios to box lunches in Agoura Hills.

The San Fernando Valley marked Earth Day’s 25th anniversary Saturday with as much kitsch and commercialism as concern--the ultimate proof, environmentalists say, that the ideals of the once-radical green movement have gone mainstream.

At Universal Studios, comedian Paula Poundstone hosted a 10-kilometer charity march, while in Woodland Hills, opponents of development plans for Ahmanson Ranch touted a demonstration led by a 16-foot kangaroo.

In Agoura Hills, restaurants hawked special Earth Day box lunches, the TreePeople instructed Mulholland Drive visitors on how to plant organic gardens, and Allen Edwards--prosecutor Marcia Clark’s Studio City hairstylist--used the occasion to announce a “cut-a-thon” for next weekend, with proceeds promised to the Give to the Earth Foundation.

But if Earth Day has come full circle--from humble beginnings to a worldwide phenomenon and now to the ignominy of sparsely attended fairs--environmentalists say that in the interim a movement spawned largely by the likes of Earth Day and its backers made our drinking water clearer, our parkland more plentiful and our air more breathable.

“The true measure is what has been accomplished, not how many people attend events,” said Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. “Half of the things talked about on the first Earth Day, our society has addressed and solved or is on its way to solving.”

Consider air pollution, said Arthur Winer, director of the environmental science and engineering program at UCLA’s School of Public Health.

Despite doubling our population in the past 20 years, and tripling the number of miles driven, air pollution in the Los Angeles Basin has been cut in half, Winer said--crediting a movement that began with symbolic celebrations such as Earth Day in the early 1970s, he said. Fifteen years ago, he said, Los Angeles violated the lead standard in air every day because of leaded gasoline. Today, the problem has been eliminated.

“In the face of enormous growth in the region, we’ve actually made enormous improvements in air quality,” Winer said. “If we think about what air quality would be with all that growth if we hadn’t done these programs, it’s sobering.”

In 1976, for instance, the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) issued 43 Stage 1 smog alerts in Reseda for air that was very unhealthful, and one Stage 2 alert for hazardous air. In 1994, Reseda had none of either type of alert, AQMD Senior Meteorologist Joe Cassmassi said.

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In 1970, Burbank recorded an ozone concentration of 0.35 parts per million on its unhealthiest day that year. In 1993, Burbank’s air never got worse than 0.18 parts per million, Cassmassi said.

Similarly, protecting the Santa Monica Mountains from development was virtually unheard of before the inception of Earth Day in 1970, Edmiston said.

“The expectation at that time was that all the Santa Monica Mountains would look like the Hollywood Hills,” Edmiston said. “For zoning in 1965, the standard was one house per acre--and there are 350,000 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains. That gives you an idea.”

Today, he notes proudly, the conservancy protects nearly 25,000 of those acres from development.

“It was in response to the egregiously pro-development action by the (board of) supervisors that this environmental movement got under way,” Edmiston said.

As for the quality of local water, it was the green movement that spurred the identification of potential hazards, said Mel Suffet, a UCLA professor of environmental chemistry.

“In the past 25 years, we’ve been beginning to clean up the problems created by the Industrial Revolution over the last 100 years,” Suffet said. “It has not happened as quickly as we would have liked, but we are cleaning up our great grandfathers’ mistakes and trying not to have them happen in the future.”

Burbank, Glendale and North Hollywood have been designated as Superfund cleanup sites because over the years cleaning solvent has seeped into municipal water supply wells--clearly a serious problem, Suffet said.

But he and others said that the fact that the problem was identified, targeted for cleanup efforts, and studied for ways to avoid future problems is representative of a series of actions that would have been unheard of 25 years ago.

“Earth Day is an awareness,” Suffet said. “People became aware that they can help solve the problems and have done so by making the politicians aware that they’re out there.”

Jill Swift, a longtime environmental activist from Tarzana and president of Friends of Caballero Canyon, said if Earth Day seems less relevant today, it is because so many of its original tenets have already been incorporated into the mainstream.

The waning participation she has noticed at Earth Day events in recent years, she said, is most likely a result of people becoming more environmentally active in their everyday lives.

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“There is a subtle recognition of Earth Day that is not reflected in attendance at some of these events,” Swift said. “I believe that the day is not as important as what the organizations and individuals are doing about the environment.”

Recycling is perhaps the best example of a program universally recognized as important, said Councilwoman Laura Chick, chair of the city’s Environmental Quality and Waste Management Committee.

“From the ‘70s to where we we are now, we’ve made fantastic progress,” said Chick, who represents the West Valley. “There are things now that we are concerned about that we never thought about before.”

The city measures participation in its curbside recycling program on the number of people each month who put out yellow bins of aluminum cans, plastics, glass and tin, and pile newspapers, cardboard, paper and magazines next to them.

Throughout Los Angeles as a whole, about 50% of people recycle, said Drew Sones, the city’s assistant director of the Bureau of Sanitation. In the Valley, where residents can also recycle yard trimmings, about 60% of the households participate, Sones said.

Put another way, 40% of the Valley’s trash that used to go into landfills is now recycled, Sones said.

All of this is not to say that the Valley and the rest of Los Angeles does not have a long way to go, the environmentalists say. But these statistics show that people care about the health of their environment and are willing to support activities and legislation that make their surroundings better.

“You always have had people who said, ‘Save wildlife,’ like Bambi lovers,” the conservancy’s Edmiston said. “You always have had people who said, ‘Prevent forest fires,’ like Smokey the Bear. You’ve had for hundreds of years people saying, ‘Save the big trees,’ but it was always saving some small, little portion.

“What Earth Day symbolized was this connectivity, that we’re not talking about this small portion, were talking about the whole,” Edmiston said.

Kitsch or not, Swift added, the more thoughtful events of this and previous Earth Days make it an important day to keep.

And if events such as a planned kangaroo-bank protest seem campy, it is at least consistent with Earth Day tradition. Twenty-five years ago, protesters paraded in gas masks to protest filthy air, buried a car engine to protest traffic congestion and participated in other acts of “urban protest.”

“I think it’s the result of the people involved in Earth Day who have raised the consciousness of the community,” Swift said. “I think that some of the events have gotten silly because they decided that there is a fringe movement that hasn’t gotten involved and they use that as an enticement to get people involved.”

Taking out one day to remind people of the importance of protecting the environment, Edmiston agreed, is crucial.

“Millions of people want to get out into nature,” Edmiston said. “Maybe Earth Day is the time we go into parks and green spaces and smell some flowers. Our society would be a hell of a lot better off for doing that.”

* RALLY: Anniversary marked in Washington. A32