Southland pitches in to help combat global warming

From picking up litter in the Angeles National Forest to petition-signing in Ventura, Southern Californians joined in a nationwide effort Saturday to push Congress to take immediate action on global warming.

The grass-roots effort, inspired by a Vermont writer and six recent college graduates, called on Americans to urge Congress to “step it up” and try to reduce carbon emissions in the United States by 80% by 2050.

For some participants in Southern California, their efforts were a first.

“I really haven’t done anything proactive to bring attention to climate change, and I feel it was time to act, instead of watching from the sidelines,” said Allison Conant of Studio City, who brought a friend to a Step It Up litter-collecting event in Big Santa Anita Canyon, just north of Arcadia.

Conant, a high school teacher, is an avid hiker and outdoorswoman. “It’s time for me to reciprocate and start taking care of the things I value,” she said.

Standing nearby was Rickey Smith, who organized the event and provided trash bags for hikers. “We’re doing it to let Congress know that the citizens, their constituents, would like for them to make this a priority,” said Smith, owner of an organic food company.

At the farmers market in downtown Ventura, Elzbet Diaz de Leon asked people to promise, in writing, what they would do to reduce global warming. Instead of paper, participants wrote on old clothes donated by thrift stores. They then pinned the garments to a clothesline that Diaz de Leon had set up, a symbol of a simple move that people can take to save energy, and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Go veggie, buy local,” someone wrote on a white shirt decorated with a monkey. Another message, on a yellow polo shirt, said, “Ride my motorcycle, save gas.” And a white tank top simply said, “walk more.”

Other events planned in the region included a family hike in the Hollywood Hills and an Earth Day festival in Santa Monica.

More than 1,300 events were planned nationwide, although organizers were unable to immediately verify whether all of them occurred. But many did.

New Orleans kicked off the Step It Up campaign late Friday, with hundreds of people joining hands on the levees, highlighting the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, a storm made more intense, organizers said, by warmer ocean waters.

In New York City, thousands of people clad in blue, representing a “Sea of People,” gathered Saturday in Battery Park to mark lower Manhattan’s new shoreline if global warming melts glaciers and triggers a rise in sea levels, organizers said.

And in Key West, Fla., divers were photographed underwater near a coral reef holding a homemade Step It Up banner, underscoring the damage that reefs could suffer if sea temperatures rise.

By late Saturday, the organizers’ website, StepItUp2007.org, posted photographs detailing events at colleges, churches and town squares.

“It’s been staggering to all of us,” Bill McKibben, who has been heading Step It Up, said of the response.

McKibben, the author of the global warming book “The End of Nature,” has been working with six graduates of Middlebury College in Vermont since January to promote the campaign through the website, e-mails, blogs and word of mouth.

In a telephone interview, McKibben said he was inspired to launch the campaign after politicians in Vermont took note of an anti-global warming march he helped organize, which drew 1,000 people. A march on Washington was rejected because “we didn’t have the money or the skill, and we really didn’t want people gallivanting across the continent spewing carbon dioxide in their wake” to make their voices heard.

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ron.lin@latimes.com