Las Urbanistas

Perhaps it’s only fitting for a state that so openly celebrates its sunshine. Still, the growing popularity of household solar power is an encouraging sign for the thousands of solar enthusiasts and vendors gathering in Long Beach this week.

“Those builders are seeing that they’ll get more buyers coming to their developments when they have solar. They sell like hot cakes,” said Bernadette del Chiaro, energy specialist at the advocacy group Environment California.

Julie Blumden, a vice president at SunPower Corp., a San Jose-based manufacturer of solar roof tiles, said builders using solar were selling homes faster than nonsolar competitors — an important factor in a slow market. “The increase in sales velocity is actually paying for the solar systems,” she said.

SunPower, which sells its solar tiles to builders including Lennar Homes and Grupe Co., said it had orders to provide solar systems for 3,000 new homes in California in the coming years.

“The last time we saw interest in solar that was anything close to this was back in the 1980s, the first time there were federal tax credits for solar energy,” said Julia Judd Hamm, executive director of the Solar Electric Power Assn. and co-chair of the Solar Power 2007 conference underway at the Long Beach Convention Center. “But the numbers then aren’t even comparable to what we’re seeing now.”

Solar power is hotter than ever, helped by California’s ambitious Million Solar Roofs rebate program, federal tax credits and growing public and political support for renewable power of all kinds. The U.S. solar industry saw record growth last year, with California the largest market by far, according to a study by the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development. And 2007 is shaping up to be another big year, industry officials say.

The boom also has swelled the community of solar products and pitchmen.

Both will be on display at the solar conference and expo, which is expected to draw more than 11,000 attendees in Long Beach, up from 8,500 at last year’s event in San Jose, organizers say. Tonight, the show is free to the public from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Exhibitors will be hawking photovoltaic solar panels in all forms, with some companies showing off systems that embed the technology in carports, roofing tiles and other structures. Some will be targeting individual homeowners, while others will be angling for business with utilities that want to boost their use of renewable power.

California’s largest electric utilities, including Edison International’s Southern California Edison Co., PG&E Corp.’s Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Sempra Energy’s San Diego Gas & Electric Co., have signed deals to build power-plant-sized solar facilities in and around the Mojave Desert or negotiated contracts with companies putting up such plants.

“Obviously, there are a nearly unlimited number of rooftops available in California and across the country” for individual solar power production, Hamm said. “At the same time, the whole concept of utility-scale plants is really just starting to gain momentum. So it’s going to be a combination of the two.”

California’s $3.3-billion Million Solar Roofs program is based on the notion that businesses and homeowners would install solar systems faster if the cost was partially offset by rebates and incentives. The goal is to create 3,000 megawatts of new solar power in California by 2017 and to build solar power systems into half of all new homes by 2015.

“We were at 1% in 2004, and we’re probably only at about 5% of all new homes right now,” said Del Chiaro of Environment California. “It’s good growth, but we’re going to have to ramp up quite significantly to get to that 50% mark.”

The solar power industry is drawing its share of star power.

Cable television mogul Ted Turner, who will deliver one of the keynote speeches launching the show today, teamed up this year with New Jersey solar developer Dome-Tech Solar to form a venture called DT Solar. Turner, chairman of Turner Enterprises Inc., said the renamed solar company would continue its focus on designing and installing large-scale projects and was expanding into California and other U.S. markets.

“Clean alternative energy is going to be a huge market because it’s going to be done all over the world and it’s got to be done right away. We’re out of time,” Turner said.

“Solar has probably the most potential because the sun is everywhere.”

Hamm and others are encouraged by the explosion of start-up companies and new products in the solar industry, as well as by the technology’s growing popularity with the public. But she knows solar is still a small fry in the electricity world.

“I don’t think anybody in the solar industry thinks that solar is the answer and is eventually going to take over,” she said. “Right now, solar electricity is about one-tenth to two-tenths of a percent of the entire U.S. energy mix. It’s barely even a dot on the radar screen.”

The college senior took the tree on an impulse, though each tree recipient was required to fill out a “pledge to plant,” a form smaller than an index card and a signature feature of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s plan to plant 1 million trees across Los Angeles.

Six weeks later, Barra’s leafy friend has yet to make contact with the soil. Because Barra has no land of her own, the tree sits in her apartment in Redlands, roughly 60 miles from Los Angeles.

Villaraigosa has trumpeted his Million Trees LA initiative as a cornerstone of his environmental agenda, bringing it up before audiences as far away as London and Hong Kong. Each time, the mayor’s refrain has been the same: “We’re planting 1 million trees,” a phrase that brings to mind a populace working harmoniously to transform Los Angeles into a verdant forest.

The reality, however, is that, in many cases, organizers are not so much planting trees as giving them away, offering them up by the hundreds at fairs, festivals and farmers markets, many of them in the summer in a year of intense drought.

So far, no one has checked to see whether those trees have been planted, are still alive or even are in Los Angeles, one of several cities pursuing massive tree initiatives.

More than two years into his term, Villaraigosa is roughly one-tenth of the way toward his tree-planting goal. Of the roughly 110,000 he lists as planted, more than half — 51% — were given away to the public. Of those given away, more than a third were seedlings: slender wisps that die unless they are planted immediately, tree advocates say.

The giveaway strategy has proved controversial among the city’s environmentalists, who praise the mayor for focusing on trees yet worry that the program has been too fixated on a numerical goal.

“It’s giving away trees to get your numbers up,” said Peter Lassen, a member of the city’s Community Forest Advisory Committee.

The issue is especially relevant now that Villaraigosa aides say they expect as many as 70% of the trees to be distributed to private property owners: 700,000 trees over the life of the program.

With each weekend giveaway, more people have filled out the pledge cards. And Barra’s experience is hardly unique.

Teacher Yvette Davis took an olive tree and an African sumac from a Million Trees booth the same day as Barra. Both went onto a patio.

Then there’s Koreatown resident Keita Mellion, a 26-year-old musician who also picked up a free tree at the jazz festival. Mellion has struggled to keep his seedling alive since August, when he went out of town for a week and a half and made no plans for watering it.

“I don’t think the environment is very conducive to it,” said Mellion, describing the tree that sits on his apartment patio, still encased in its one-inch plastic container. “It looks dried up.”

Although Million Tree coordinator Lisa Sarno said Villaraigosa’s team expects one out of every four trees to die, Lassen said the usual mortality rate for a tree given away at a fair is at least 50%.

The spur-of-the-moment tree adoptions are drawing sharp questions from Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, whose district has the fewest shade trees in the city, according to a city survey. Hahn said visitors to a festival are not necessarily dependable candidates for expanding the city’s urban forest.

“It’s sort of like adopting a bunny at Easter,” she said. “People say, ‘This will be fun.’ And then it falls by the wayside. They don’t have time, they go on vacation, and they’re not really committed to it. Only the problem with [the trees] is you can’t give them back. They just die.”

Villaraigosa’s tree team defended the 187 tree adoption events held so far, saying they are part of a civic engagement process that is essential to the program’s long-term success. They also said they will develop a follow-up system by the end of the year.

“People love things that are free,” said public works commissioner Cynthia Ruiz, the mayor’s spokeswoman on the program. “And when they learn about the benefits of the trees, it’s a win-win for everyone.”

Villaraigosa’s office says the city will be noticeably greener once the project is finished. And although the mayor’s team said in July that it expected to reach 1 million by 2012, Ruiz said that deadline is increasingly less important.

“I’m not so much focused on the time frame,” she said. “I’m just focused on having a successful million tree program.”

In some ways, the Million Trees initiative resembles a larger agenda promoted by Villaraigosa immediately before and after he took office.

Since his election in 2005, the mayor has retreated from his plan for seizing control of the Los Angeles Unified School District, settling for a few dozen “partnership” schools. Despite his promise to get more money out of Sacramento, Villaraigosa watched helplessly this year as state lawmakers raided local transit funding to balance their budget.

Still, few programs had as much difficulty gaining traction as the tree initiative, which has been repeatedly reworked. When the program was launched, Villaraigosa originally promised to add 300,000 new trees in the city’s parks. As of July, the Department of Recreation and Parks had planted 4,200, according to the mayor’s office.

Although Million Trees was billed as a $70-million program when it was rolled out last year, the mayor has raised just $3.2 million in private donations so far; $11.2 million has come from public agencies, four-fifths of it from the Department of Water and Power and the Port of Los Angeles.

Backers of the program point to its tangible successes: rows of sycamores, oaks and citrus trees added to neighborhoods that include Cypress Park, El Sereno and Boyle Heights.

Furthermore, nonprofit groups involved in the program say it should be judged not only on the numbers but also on its other benefits, from tree-care workshops to classes that will teach 8,000 students the value of having shade to cool the city.

“If you have a kid that walks home from school with a seedling and learns about what the tree can contribute to the environment, there’s a value there that transcends the tree’s actual survival,” said Larry Smith, who heads the nonprofit North East Trees.

Behind the scenes, environmental groups long resisted the 1 million goal, saying such a number is arbitrary and could lead to hastily offered plants and fewer long-term benefits.

Tree advocates recommended that Villaraigosa take 10 years, not four, to reach his target, Smith said.

Meanwhile, one group decided it would rather hold just one tree giveaway each year: a massive citywide adoption of fruit trees in January, the height of the rainy season.

Andy Lipkis, president and founder of Tree People, said his group is pursuing the slower, more painstaking work of showing residents how to plant and care for a tree over the long term, even if that results in fewer new trees.

“We didn’t want to buy into a numerical goal, not because numbers aren’t important but because we’ve seen that whenever they’re locked into a numerical goal, no matter what their higher goals were, at some point, they focus just on getting the numbers,” he said.

Tree People embarked on a campaign similar to Villaraigosa’s nearly three decades ago, asking Angelenos to plant 1 million trees in preparation for the 1984 Olympics.

But unlike the mayor, Tree People did not consider a giveaway tree as planted unless the owners went to the trouble of mailing back a postcard stating it had gone into the ground.

Villaraigosa’s Million Trees program was formally launched one year ago, after 12 months of planning with half a dozen tree organizations. The mayor said it would beautify the city while creating shade to cool its low-income neighborhoods.

The concept was based largely on a “canopy analysis,” a study that examined the places that had the fewest shade trees. Not surprisingly, the survey found that neighborhoods with large, mature trees — the kind that form a soaring arc over a street — were usually the ones with the greatest wealth. Consider the giant jacarandas that tower over sections of Sherman Oaks or the camphor trees that line the streets of Hancock Park.

With tree cover the thinnest south of the 10 Freeway, the Million Trees initiative has gone to such places as the jazz festival in Leimert Park, Ralphs supermarket on Crenshaw Boulevard and the farmers market in Watts.

On a hot day in July, the Koreatown Youth and Community Center — one of the groups carrying out the Million Tree program — provided 174 trees to patrons at the Watts market, held each Saturday in the parking lot of Ted Watkins Park.

Two-thirds of them were seedlings.

Yet seedlings are the most hotly contested component of Villaraigosa’s arboreal initiative.

Smith predicted that no more than one in four will survive.

The tree could dry up “just between the time you put it in your car and you take it home,” Smith said.

Sarno, Villaraigosa’s top advisor on the trees program, said the mayor plans to reduce the program’s reliance on seedlings. But that decision was made after more than 20,000 seedlings had been given out.

In May, tree groups distributed 2,300 seedlings at the two-day UCLA Jazz & Reggae Festival. And in June, organizers gave away 338 outside La Curacao, a department store in Pico-Union popular among Central-American immigrants.

The seedlings demonstrate how difficult it is to add trees in a city with a high concentration of renters and low-income residents.

Million Tree participants would much rather give away trees in one- and five-gallon pots, said Dore Burry, environmental manager for the Koreatown Youth and Community Center. The problem, he said, is that the people who approach his booth at festivals and fairs frequently want something they can pop into a shopping bag.

“In South-Central, you don’t have sprawling estates where they have open space,” he said. “But they’re willing to plant a seedling, because they have 10 to 15 years before they have to worry about it.”

Hahn said she picked up three seedlings at various events over the years, none of them affiliated with the mayor’s initiative. Two died and one never made it into the ground, she said.

Even the mayor’s employees have been slow to get seedlings into the soil. One fragile seedling, which has a Million Trees sticker on its plastic pot, sits on the carpet on the mezzanine of City Hall.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

A key battle in the effort to restore Tahoe’s once-pristine waters to crystal clarity is being waged in little-known marshland on the Upper Truckee River

 

Bruce Eisner tromped past a half-dozen geese lolling in the water, marched across the muddy shoreline and stopped on the grassy bank of the Upper Truckee River.

It was a brilliant warm day at Lake Tahoe, the forested mountains rising spectacularly all around, but Eisner was focused on a bit of scenery that few people on the bustling south shore even notice.

As the program manager for the California Tahoe Conservancy, his work and passion is the restoration of the Upper Truckee Marsh, the largest wetlands system in the Lake Tahoe Basin and the source of about a third of all the water - and most of the sediment - that flows into the famous lake.

“That’s the man-made channel,” he said, pointing from the bank upriver toward a long, straight water-filled gully carved into the earth. “The river was altered so significantly, it became like a ditch.”

The marsh and river system, next to the Tahoe Keys Marina in the heart of South Lake Tahoe, is where one of the biggest pushes is being made to restore the water of Lake Tahoe to the crystal-clear prism it was before development brought pollution.

The effort is, in many respects, a symbol for the entire region, which is still suffering from the effects of massive home and commercial construction from the 1950s through the 1970s. Scientists believe the buildings, asphalt and lack of proper drainage are responsible for sending pollutants flowing into the once-pristine lake, causing algae buildup and drastically reducing water clarity over the past 40 years.

The drainage issues are exacerbated by vehicles spewing air pollution and dripping oil and gasoline and by conflagrations like the recent Angora Fire, which consumed large sections of forest that was overgrown as a result of fire-protection activities over the past century.

More than 50 public and private organizations, led by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and the Tahoe Conservancy, have joined forces over the past decade to address the problem, creating the Lake Tahoe Environmental Improvement Program. It has become a national campaign, fueled in part by the ubiquitous “Keep Tahoe Blue” bumper stickers from the League to Save Lake Tahoe.

One of the top priorities is the Upper Truckee Marsh, which once covered 1,100 acres. It was partially filled with tons of dirt, and the river was channelized by developers starting in the 1950s. The plan was to build a massive lakeside housing development, but lawsuits blocked the way.

Years of litigation resulted in the 1988 purchase by the Tahoe Conservancy of 208 acres and then, in 2000, of the remaining 311 acres of undeveloped marshland, including 1,400 feet along the lake shore. The rest is still privately owned.

More than 80,000 cubic yards of landfill has been removed, and 11 acres of marshland has been restored, but the Upper Truckee and its primary tributary, Trout Creek, are still the single largest source of sediment flowing into the lake.

It will take years, and millions of dollars, to restore the rest of the marsh and set the river on a more natural course through the wetlands. Still, the project is considered crucial in the fight to improve the clarity of Lake Tahoe, the measuring stick by which environmentalists assess the ecosystem of the entire region.

“A wetland like this, at the terminus of a river, is really the last place where the heavy sediments can be deposited,” Eisner said. “The wetlands act like a sponge, sucking up the bad stuff before it enters the lake.”

The problem isn’t limited to the Upper Truckee. About 75 percent of Tahoe marshlands and 50 percent of the meadow habitat was altered during the building boom. Not far from the marsh project is a giant intersection known as “The Y,” a place where a person can see only buildings, asphalt and concrete without a single stretch of open ground or natural vegetation.

“We would like to see this redeveloped,” said Julie Regan, communications and legislative affairs chief for the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, which was created by California and Nevada in 1969 with the goal of protecting Lake Tahoe. “It’s this kind of coverage of the ground that has more impact on the lake than anything else.”

The environmental push in Lake Tahoe began in earnest in 1997 when President Bill Clinton held the first of what has become an annual forum on the lake ecosystem, a meeting that led to the creation of the Environmental Improvement Program.

Clinton reprised his role two weeks ago on the 10th anniversary of that gathering, telling a crowd of more than 1,000 people, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that “we owe the world the preservation of Lake Tahoe.”

“It’s not just for you, your children and your grandchildren,” he said. “It’s for everyone who might ever visit.”

Federal officials announced they would contribute another $45 million to the restoration effort. Over the past decade, $1.1 billion has been spent on 266 restoration projects around the lake, from new roads and drainage to runoff basins and stiff construction requirements.

In all, more than 3,000 acres of private property have been purchased for open space and public use, 739 acres of wetlands have been restored, 374 acres of denuded land have been revegetated, and public pathways and mass transportation has been improved. The U.S. Forest Service and California’s state park system, which own 85 percent of the land area in the Tahoe Basin, have thinned more than 21,000 acres of overgrown forest in an effort to reduce fire danger and prevent erosion.

Despite all the efforts, conditions appear to be getting worse.

The lake is warmer and soupier than ever before, according to a 45-page study released in August by UC Davis scientists. The report, the most comprehensive ever done on the lake, outlines significant changes in weather patterns over the years, including less snowfall and more rain, deteriorating lake clarity and increasing water temperature in the Lake Tahoe Basin, which is encouraging invasions of exotic fish and plant species.

The average temperature of the surface water in July has increased almost 5 degrees since 1999. On July 26, 2006, it was 78 degrees, the warmest in Lake Tahoe’s recorded history, according to the report.

As of last year, the study found, Lake Tahoe was clear to an average depth of 67.7 feet. That’s 4.6 feet less than in 2005. When measurements began in 1968, the lake was clear to an average depth of 102.4 feet.

Regan insisted things are improving, but clearing the lake of pollutants and sediment may take awhile. Lake Tahoe is the second-deepest lake in the nation behind Oregon’s Crater Lake. It is so deep, at 1,645 feet, that a drop of water entering from one of its 63 tributaries will take 700 years to find its way out, according to scientists.

“We’re actually fixing a lot of the environmental damage that occurred in the past,” said Regan, pointing out that only 5,000 of the 42,000 developed properties in the Lake Tahoe Basin were built within the past 20 years.

“Healing the lake is a long process,” she said. “The scientists say it is possible to get back to 100 feet clarity in 20 or 30 years if we make some hard choices.”

Redevelopment is one of the choices that might begin to pay dividends. The Tahoe City Public Utility District recently completed a major renovation of the dam separating the lake from the Truckee River, building a park plaza and bicycle/pedestrian trail.

In an area where plumes of brown runoff could once be seen flowing into the river and lake, native vegetation, gutters, drains and an underground filtration system now capture storm water.

A newly built park at Commons Beach uses similar drainage techniques to reduce runoff into the lake. Miles of bicycle trails are being laid and sidewalks with drainage systems have been installed throughout Tahoe City.

“The reason it was done was to capture the water and improve the drainage and we took it a step further and decided if we are going to do that, let’s make it a walkable town,” said Ron Treabess, director of partnerships and planning for the North Lake Tahoe Resort Association, a nonprofit organization that works with Placer County on how to spend hotel tax money. “We need it for the people who live here. We need it for the visitors and to take care of the lake.”

Similar redevelopment projects are being planned around the lake. Officials also hope to improve bus and shuttle service in the region and establish local and cross-lake ferry systems to ease congestion on the roadways.

Ultimately, keeping Lake Tahoe blue as the bumper sticker commands will require a long-term commitment and collaborative effort among all the stake-holders, including homeowners.

Eisner said he believes the restoration of the Upper Truckee marsh can be completed by 2010, but, like most projects in Lake Tahoe, it will take a collective will to overcome the inevitable squabbles over exactly how the project should proceed.

“Restoring the lake and the various related habitat features is not a decade process, it is a multi-decade process,” Eisner said. “This is a big lake, and it is not going to change overnight.”

Online resources

Lake Tahoe Environment Improvement Program:

links.sfgate.com/ZRQ

Tahoe Regional Planning Agency:

www.trpa.org

Tahoe Conservancy:

www.tahoecons.ca.gov

League to Save Lake Tahoe:

www.keeptahoeblue.org

E-mail Peter Fimrite at pfimrite@sfchronicle.com

“We’re forecasting 111 for Wednesday, 109 for Thursday, and 110 again on Friday,” says Keith Kincaid, a forecaster with the National Weather Service here. But if the temperature doesn’t hit 110 on those days, he adds, “we have had 110-degree days in September before.”

This summer is hot elsewhere, to be sure. But in few places can you fry an egg on a sidewalk as quickly and thoroughly as you can here. And you’d have to fry a lot of them: Experts say the main reason the number of 110-degree-or-higher days has risen so steadily – and steeply – is rapid growth. In the 1950s, for example, the temperature rose to 110 or higher an average of 6.7 days per year. In the 1960s it was 10.3 days per year; in the 1980s it was 19 days per year, and in the 2000s (through Aug. 21, 2007), 21.9 per year, according to the National Weather Service.

For Westerners living here, it’s about as much fun as an earthquake, a drought, or, well, a 110-degree day. But it does have people’s attention. True, it’s not as difficult as this summer’s devastating floods or fires elsewhere in the US. Many people have swimming pools, and most have air conditioning. But that, too, adds to the problem of the heat-island effect, experts say.

“Every time you use that mechanical air conditioner, you’re throwing hot air back into the environment,” says Jay Golden, an expert on urban climate and energy at Arizona State University in Tempe. “It’s not only the sun and the pavement, but we’re generating more heat because of human adaptation.” And that’s where global warming comes in: The hotter it is, the more we need to cool off; and the more we try to cool off – with air conditioning, for instance – the more heat-trapping greenhouse gases and “waste energy” we create, feeding both phenomena.

No escape in the Phoenix nights

The lows at night are rising, too. Three decades ago, the nighttime low here was about 30 degrees cooler than the days. Today, it is on average only 20 degrees cooler. That’s because cities are slower to cool off at night, retaining their heat in roads and buildings.

Dr. Golden points to differing temperatures between downtown Phoenix and a rural weather station at the Casa Grande National Monument, about 50 miles southeast. In 1950, he says, it was only six degrees warmer in Phoenix than at the Casa Grande Monument. By 2000, the temperature in Phoenix was 12 degrees higher. Now, it is almost 14 degrees warmer in the city than in the adjacent rural areas.

That has a huge impact on water consumption and electricity generation, he says. Researchers in his department recently calculated the correlation between nighttime temperatures and water consumption. “A one-degree nighttime [temperature] increase equals 677 gallons more on average per household per year,” he says – due as much to evaporation from pools, irrigation, and agriculture as to human consumption. Golden and his colleagues study these rises in temperatures for urban areas from here to London and Beijing.

“We are trying to do two things,” Golden says. “One is to quantify the impacts from this national trend of climate change in the broad context…. Then, we try to provide policymakers sound science and engineering to understand what the impacts are.”

Looking toward solutions

Here in the Phoenix area, for example, 40 percent of the heat-island effect is due to paved surfaces, according to Golden. “We’re trying to transition to pervious pavement, which would allow for water penetration,” he says.

That, he adds, would support the growth of urban vegetation, which is typically removed for new building projects. And urban vegetation planted at intervals, as well as the water pervious pavement retains, would lead to cooler temperatures at night.

“If we were to take all the surfaced parking lots in this city and cover them with 50 percent tree cover,” that would significantly decrease the surface temperatures, he says. His department is also studying the survival methods of this area’s early inhabitants, such as the Hohokam with their earthen structures.

Today, two-story houses are popular, he says. But what if policymakers were to ban future building of two-story houses – or at least upper floors – in order to make buildings shorter, and less prone to trapping heat. Instead, housing plans could include basements, he says, which would naturally remain cooler – though the prospect of lower levels has long been considered too expensive or difficult, despite the plethora of inground pools.

The good news about these rises in temperatures, if there is any, Golden says, is that local governments are beginning to pay attention to how they design cities, how closely they space houses, and how much forestry and agriculture they plan.

Phoenix, for example, is pushing for more open-space parks with trees downtown. And the city of Mesa is offering $500 rebates to residents who convert their yards from lawns to xeriscape, including desert trees that provide canopy shade.

NEWARK, Del. — For Americans on the move, a rest stop on the East Coast’s main drag, Interstate 95, seems an unlikely setting for a revolution. But to a growing number of horticulturalists the vegetation stretching beyond the gas pumps toward the highway median might as well be marching behind a fife and drum.

Dark green switchgrass stands four feet tall. Asters, amonsia with tiny blue flowers, and flowering white thoroughwort nestle there, in place of a simple lawn. Down the road, the cloverleaf for I-95 and Route 896 is filled with golden Indiangrass, its gossamer flowers riffling as trucks whiz by.

This is the meadow vista when Delaware was a colony, and before. Now these regional plantings are increasingly deployed by highway gardeners around the country who see themselves as heirs of an environmental Enlightenment. Their credo: get the mowers out of the 12 million acres of roadsides and median strips around the United States, and let the wildflowers and grasses grow.

In part as a frugal move — not mowing can save states tens of thousands of dollars each year — at least a dozen states including Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Vermont and Washington State , have increased their inventory of native plantings. Roadsides, they say, are the national front porch. Why, then, should they look like an English formal garden or a Scottish golf course? Why shouldn’t they mimic the land as it was before highways?

In the words of the University of Delaware horticulturist, Susan S. Barton, an adviser to the state’s Department of Transportation: “We’re doing it so when you’re driving around Delaware you know you’re in Delaware, not in the tropics.”

But the movement, which dates back well before Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification project, beginning before World War II in Midwestern states, has more heart than muscle. Roadsides fulfill a variety of engineering functions. They must provide clear lines of sight and easy drainage. As for aesthetics, a Delaware poll showed the public prizes neatness more than nativeness.

And so the native plant pushers must fight endless battles with their economic and aesthetic opponents — turf-grass vendors, lawnmower jockeys who make a living cutting 20-foot median swaths in the summer sun, or garden clubs that favor manicured beds of tulips, poppies and lilies over meadow grasses that can look downright blowsy.

Jeanette Carey, who with her husband, George, operates a farm in southern Delaware, said the native grasses “just look awful.”

Her husband, a state representative, said many neighbors complained after the median grasses grew tall. “There was nothing but weeds in the middle of the road. It should look like a lawn, mowed,” Ms. Carey said.

She added, “Everybody who called us said they travel, and all the other states look neat.”

Thomas Yoakum, an environmental manager with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, wants to give native grasses a chance. But some experiments, like the switchgrass planted near Bedford, Pa., on U.S. 30, left the general impression of a botched hair transplant.Jon Johnson, a research support associate with the Roadside Vegetation Management Project of the Pennsylvania State University, worries that during droughts, switchgrass is highly flammable, and a tossed cigarette butt could cause a road closure.

Other states have joined the native plant revolution, at least in theory. Over 5,000 species of wildflowers and grasses flourish along Texas roadsides. Nebraska has limited mowing on its right-of-ways, a practice that provided some wildlife habitat; in years of drought native grasses can be harvested to provide hay for the cattle industry.

As Jane Lareau of the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League put it, “I would love people to see things that are native, not a stupid poppy or canna lily.” But some states take more traditional tacks. North Carolina, for instance, plants acres of ox-eye daisies every year, though they are considered a noxious weed in other states. Tennessee, a western neighbor, has ox-eye daisies on its list of invasive plants and wants to be rid of it.

“Ox-eye daisies are the bane of my existence,” said Bonnie L. Harper-Lore, a Minnesota-based restoration ecologist for the Federal Highway Administration.

Derek C. Smith, a roadside environmental engineer in North Carolina, happily pleads guilty to daisy-pushing. His state’s highway vegetation program, paid for in part by fees from vanity license plates, is a source of great pride..

While native plants make up about one-third of the state’s inventory, compared with as little as 10 percent in the 1980s, Mr. Smith said, “our citizens like a lot of the nonnative plants, bright red poppies and the like.”

If the native plant advocates gain more traction, they can thank champions like Calvin Ernst, 66, a highly successful seed seller from Meadville, Pa. His shyness belies a canny eye for what will grow and what will sell, and a passion for taking the landscapes of his region near Lake Erie back to their roots, literally.

Years ago, Mr. Ernst was a proponent of a creeping, bushy plant with small leaves called crownvetch, which is now a staple of Pennsylvania highways, particularly in the Alleghenies. Highway engineers prize its ability to grow fast and to thrive in poor soils and on steep hillsides. When the Interstate System was being built in the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Ernst found himself selling crownvetch around the country and making a tidy profit doing so.

That was then. Now crownvetch is a villain of native plant proponents, seen as an invasive bully whose presence discourages the growth of native flowers and shrubs. (Nonnative, or exotic plants, often have a biological edge over natives, since they often have fewer natural enemies.)

Ernst Conservation Seeds, where Mr. Ernst is the general partner, still sells crownvetch seeds to the state, but about three-quarters of its wares are now seeds for native plants, collected by hand from Appalachian forests or Carolina marshlands. On the Delaware stretch of Interstate 95, the seeds have blossomed into broom sedge, switchgrass and little bluestem grass.Ms. Barton, the horticulturist in Delaware, said that of the 13,414 acres that the Department of Transportation has planted, about 3 percent or about 425 acres are with native plants.

The biggest benefit for the state is potential savings on mowing. Native plants need to be left alone to grow to their full height.

On the nonnative areas, routine mowing eight times annually costs $162.72 an acre using state workers or $800 an acre using contractors. On the native plots, mowing once yearly costs $20.34 per acre with state personnel or $100 per acre with contractors, Ms. Barton said.

Joseph Wright, who runs the mowing program in southern Delaware, said his mowers have trouble digesting tall stands of native plants and often break down.

Where Mr. Wright does not mow, local farmers, like Fred Bennett, 82, in southern Delawaresometimes move in. “In front of my house I mow it every week,” Mr. Bennett said. “I like long hair on a woman but not on a man and not growing around my house.”

On Sunday, at least 51 people were confirmed dead in the worst series of fires to hit Greece in decades. And still, fires, many of them blamed on arsonists, continued to spread across the country, fanned by gale-force winds and fed by vegetation dried out from long months of drought.

Now, as authorities struggle to deal with the immediate crisis, the fires have pushed the environment to the top of the political agenda in a country where such issues previously won little attention. With Greek national elections less than three weeks away, questions are being raised about how seriously the government takes the protection of the country’s open spaces.

Calling the fires an “unspeakable tragedy,” Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis declared a state of emergency Saturday, along with three days of mourning. For the time being, campaigning in the election has been called off and some analysts suggest that the election may even be delayed. Indeed, the fires have spawned outrage and anger across the country.

“Right now we’re in state of hiatus, and no one knows how it will finally shake out, but clearly it will be a key issue,” says John Psaropoulos, editor of the Athens News, from near Zaharo, one of the hardest hit areas of Greece where dozens have been killed.

This has been one of the hottest and driest summers in recent history, and much of southern Europe has been plagued by forest fires. In Greece, the dry conditions have played a role. But many of the fires, government and forestry experts say, have been set by arsonists, hoping to clear land for development.

“So many fires breaking out simultaneously in so many parts of the country cannot be a coincidence,” Mr. Karamanlis said in a nationally televised address Saturday. “The state will do everything it can to find those responsible and punish them.”

Already, at least three people have been arrested for setting this weekend’s fires; one, accused of setting a blaze that killed six people, is being charged for murder as well as for arson. But in the past, local activists say, the state has had a poor record of catching and prosecuting these types of arsonists. The problem persists, they say, and in large part perpetrators have previously gotten away with it.

“Most of the reasons concern changing of land use – from forest to something else [such as] construction, or building, or to grazing, or agriculture,” explains Nikos Georgiadis, head forest officer for the Greek office of WWF (the World Wildlife Fund). “But the response from the government has not been effective at all.”

But there is beginning to be a backlash against government inaction – as Greek villagers desperately battle blazes using garden hoses and buckets of water – that is likely to intensify as a result of this weekend’s fires.

Earlier this summer, after a fire burned one of the last remaining forests on Mount Parnitha, near Athens, thousands of people took the streets outside the Greek parliament demanding more action from the government to protect forests and ensure that burned areas were replanted.

Many observers saw that fire as a turning point in local politics toward a greater green consciousness.

“People in Athens, but also around Greece, are becoming more green,” says Dr. Georgiadis, who said that hundreds of people called the WWF office in the aftermath of that fire, outraged and offering to help. “Since the response that we got after the big forest fire on Parnitha mountain, there is a big change. More and more people became sensitive on environmental matters.”

Greece has one of the worst records in the European Union on environmental issues, and on forest protection in particular. Environmental groups say recycling is in its infancy, development is largely unregulated, and protected areas neglected.

Although forested areas cannot legally be built on, that law is difficult to enforce because Greece – unlike every other country in the European Union – has no national record of what land is forested.

For now, the country is focusing on putting out the blazes and helping those affected. Thousands are now homeless and whole villages destroyed. At least 12 countries have responded to Greece’s plea for international help.

But ultimately, says Georgiadis, Greece must develop a long-term plan for saving its natural spaces.

“Forests are an ecosystem that needs time to grow, time to manage,” he says. “It’s not something you can do in one or two weeks.”