Category: Events

In Collaboration with the Ojai Film Festival, the Ojai Green Coalition will be hosting a screening of the documentary film, Evolution of Organic at the Ojai Art Center.  A panel discussion with the director and local agricultural farmers and ag professionals will follow the screening, and a food and drink reception with exhibitors will immediately follow the panel discussion in the main gallery of the Art Center.

Evolution of Organic offers the story of organic agriculture, as told by those who built the movement.  The film follows the crews of agricultural rebels who created the cultural transformation in the way we grow and eat our food:  “Creating health in the soil creates health in the ecosystem creates health in the atmosphere – and it all cycles around.”

View the Evolution of Organic Trailer here

For more information, contact the OVGC at tod@ojaivalleygreencoalition.org

A COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE CITY OF OJAI, THE OJAI VALLEY GREEN  COALITION, AND OJAI PERMACULTURE:

Come join us for the first landscape design workshop for the revitalized Ojai Community Demonstration Garden! This will be the first in a series of collaborative educational workshops organized by the Ojai Valley Green Coalition designed to generate informed community participation and input for a new Ojai Community Demonstration Garden strategic design.

Location: Ojai Community Demonstration Garden behind Ojai City Hall, 401 S Ventura St, Ojai, CA

The workshop will be led by Connor Love Jones,  a certified permaculture designer and teacher with a lifelong fascination for ecology, anthropology, and traditional food systems. His discoveries led him to the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia at the age of 18 where he became certified to design and teach. Since then he has founded East End Eden, a 10 acre family operated permaculture demonstration site in Ojai, California where he teaches regular workshops. Connor also has a permaculture design and consulting company that offers clients sound advice for improving their yields and land value through applied ecological design.

Connor’s services for this workshop have been generously underwritten by a donor, making this a unique opportunity to to affordably learn about the principles of Permaculture design AND apply Permaculture design to the Ojai Community Demonstration Garden.  Please register for this two day workshop at the link below

Click here to register.

SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE FOR ARTISANS WHO HAVE LOST THEIR HOME IN THE THOMAS FIRE

As Ojai and Ventura County Residents recover from the Thomas fire and flood, there has been a surge of interest in habitat restoration, sustainability and local engagement. With our new location, Libbey Park, in the heart of downtown Ojai, and a coalition of environmental non-profits co-marketing the event, 2018’s Earth day is on track to draw record participants.

Please fill complete your vendor application here:

https://goo.gl/forms/PhO3IoSAKBaVsfMo1

Thanks!

Noah Crowe and Noel Douglas

For any questions you may contact
Noel @ noel@ojaivalleygreencoalition.org

Could ocean plants such as kelp become “the new kale?” That’s the dream of many in the burgeoning world of marine aquaculture — including Dan Marquez in Goleta.
In the same way that kale, an all but unknown vegetable twenty-five years ago, became a common food for the health-minded — “the national food of Ojai,” some joke — the hope is that kelp, the most elemental of all seaweeds, could be grown for consumption. At the same time this initiative could help foster clean and healthy oceans along the California coast, which have been badly hurt by acidification, pollution, and the near-extinction of the California sea otter.
At an Oceans in Peril event co-sponsored at the Ojai Retreat by the Green Coalition earlier this month, attendees heard sea farmer Dan Marquez of Goleta explain the benefits of kelp, the challenges of growing it off the coast in Goleta, and the opportunities kelp offers as a food and as an ingredient in cosmetics.
“Kelp is the filtration system for the oceans, and the largest sequesterer of carbon on the planet,” said Marquez. “Kelp sequesters more carbon than land-based plants or trees. One study found that if we could farm 9 percent of the ocean, we could feed the ocean, reduce our need for fossil fuels, and stop the acidification process.”
Marquez, who has worked closely with leading kelp farmer Bren Smith on the East Coast to learn aquaculture, and explore the possibility of his farm becoming a floating classroom, said that the California coast once had vast undersea forests of kelp. Kelp is a keystone species, he explained, comparable to the coast redwood in its ability to foster the growth and activity of countless other species.
“The kelp forests along the coasts of Southern California are considered to be some of the most productive and diverse ecosystems on the planet,” according to a UC Davis study. A report from the National Marine Sanctuaries cites that over the last 100 years they have been set back by coastal pollution, harvesting for use in fertilizer, grazing by fish and sea urchins, warming waters, and storms,.
“My main goal is to help the ocean get healthy again,” Marquez said. “It needs our help; we’ve done some really bad things to it. That’s my focus, but it’s really crazy how beneficial kelp is to us. Every other breath we take comes from the ocean.”


Marquez in his boat, photo courtesy of Pharmersea.com

Photo at Top: Dan Marquez of PharmerSea speaks at Oceans in Peril event sponsored by OVGC on October 12, 2017 at Ojai Retreat