News of the Arroyo
Title: | Student saves wilderness as park |
Subtitle: | |
Date: | 2004-08-24 |
Summary: | August 24, 2004 - Lily Don is an Arroyo Seco hero. |
Author: | Emanuel Parker, Staff Writer |
Publication: | Pasadena Star News |
Content: | By Emanuel Parker , Staff Writer SOUTH PASADENA -- A South Pasadena High School junior has won a national environmental leadership award for waging a four-year campaign to save South Pasadena\'s last remaining wilderness area and turn it into a city park. Lily Dong, 16, who was born in China and came to Southern California when she was 10, will receive a Brower Youth Award, a prestigious prize that recognizes young environmental activists and rewards them with $3,000 cash. The award is named after David Brower, an environmentalist who modernized the Sierra Club in the 1950s and 60s and founded the San Francisco- based, nonprofit Earth Island Institute in 1982, which presents the awards and nurtures projects and leaders in environmental advocacy. The Arroyo Seco-South Pasadena Woodland and Wildlife Park is scheduled to open Oct. 16, said Cara McLane, who designed it and works for the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, a joint powers agency of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. A $250,000 grant obtained by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, when he was a state senator, will convert the land into a park with native plants, paths, a water retention basin, outdoor classroom areas and signs explaining the park\'s plants and wildlife, McLane said. Dong founded the Arroyo Field Science Club to help preserve the park and will use the cash award to buy equipment for the club, for college and to help her parents. The three-acre park is at the intersection of Pasadena and Sycamore avenues its entrance is marked by a kiosk and a brick wall. Dong said there were plans to use it for a private school. In middle school, Dong joined students attracted to the site by its peaceful setting. They visited it weekly and tried to keep it clean. When classmates graduated and dropped the project, Dong picked it up. She attended numerous City Council and task force meetings where the fate of the site was debated and lobbied to turn it into a park. \"I suggested what kind of features the park should have; better trails, cleaning the rocky soil and widening some of the trails, features like a kiosk and display cases,\' she said. She and 15 to 20 club members photographed and documented the life cycles of the park\'s plants and animals, cleared trails, planted native plants and removed trash. \"It\'s going to be a restoration of three different plant communities; an oaks savanna, California walnut and Sycamore riparian,\' McLane said. \"It\'s going to retain the same character it has now, a very natural feel, a little bit wild, and will feature California native plants and function as a different type of open space for the city.\' Dong and five other Browser Award winners are scheduled to be honored at a public ceremony Sept. 30 in Berkeley. Tree-sitter Julia Butterfly Hill will be one of the hosts. Meanwhile, Dong is thinking about college and wants to attend a University of California campus or an Ivy League school. She\'s also invented her own major called \"ecogmathematics.\' \"It involves the three sciences of ecology, cognitive science and math. I want to use those three subjects interchangeably to study the landscape and topology of the environment and how the brain works and uses math.\' She likes American schools more than those of mainland China. \"Here students can think creatively, and here you can do a lot of projects and get involved in the community and learn to serve other people,\' Dong said. She is an only child of Rong Fu Dong, an assembler and packager, and Xiao Ling Zhou, who cares for elderly hospital patients. Emanuel Parker can be reached at (626) 578-6300, Ext. 4475, or by e-mail at emanuel.parker@sgvn.com . |
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