Southern California — home to Disneyland, the mother of all amusement parks — welcomed a new attraction this month. But this theme park has no Mickey Mouse or roller coasters and is housed inside a mall instead of spread out over a swath of space.

Called Environmentaland, it is more of an interactive museum that has taken the environment as its theme.

The goal is to show there are “no free rides in life,” said Eric Ritz, executive director of Global Inheritance. The nonprofit opened the self-proclaimed first environmental theme park this month in Hollywood.

“We promote more along the lines of common sense rather than being green,” Ritz said.

Visitors can ride a see-saw on an energy playground to power up their cell phone, putt on a desert mini golf course and fly airplanes from recycled paper. This past weekend, visitors could arm wrestle a polar bear in a climate change quiz challenge for a chance to win prizes.

Ritz, a 36-year-old former advertising executive and long-time activist, started Global Inheritance in 2002. The nonprofit has passion projects, like Environmentaland, but pays the bills through working with companies like Walt Disney’s ESPN and on events like Fox’s Teen Choice Awards.

Ritz admits the name Environmentaland is “kind of preposterous.”

“But that’s the point,” he added.

He said that the name is a play on words that takes on the idea of theme parks, that are the “poster child of excessiveness,” he said.

Visitors who show a bus or subway pass get free admission; otherwise, there is a suggested donation of $3.

Environmentaland is open at the Hollywood & Highland shopping center in Los Angeles through October 2009. In the spring, the nonprofit hopes to take the theme park on the road to malls in cities like Chicago, New York and Boise.

“When we’re placed on the Earth, we have a certain responsibility to give back or evolve in a very positive way. People go and they take and take and take and they don’t give. If that’s what we do, we’re going to be in a very bad shape very soon,” Ritz said.

(Writing and reporting by Laura Isensee)

(Photo credit: Courtesy of Global Inheritance. The nonprofit displayed alternative energy golf carts at Coachella and Stagecoach festivals this year.)

To help prepare myself for the water series we’ve been running, I went to the movies. Or brought home a DVD, anyway. I rented “Chinatown,” the fictional 1974 Roman Polanski movie with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, which is all about the growth of Los Angeles and the search/theft for water.

 Considering that the current Las Vegas water chief, one of the most respected urban conservation advocates, is working on a much-criticized pipeline to take water from Northern Nevada at the same time Las Vegas cuts water use , this old movie may still have something to teach.

Chinatown, where the main character Jake used to work, is reviled as a place that’s just too complicated and hard to understand. Thus the phrase “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” I took Chinatown as a metaphor for the obscurity of the water debate, and it is still complicated.

You can pick up fascinating histories and attempts to understand what’s going on, from our package, to James Powell’s “Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West,” to an early foray into the subject, “Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water.”

But readers might find it interesting to read a short history of water engineer William Mulholland building the aqueduct for Los Angeles in “Cadillac Desert” or Wikipedia and then rent “Chinatown,” for a cultured look at the long history of water.

Photo credit: Reuters/Sam Mircovich (Storm clouds gather over Los Angeles, February 2009).

The fast-growing U.S. Southwest has a problem: too many people, not enough water.

But then, what do you expect when you build cities like Las Vegas in the middle of a desert?

My colleagues Tim Gaynor and Steve Gorman have done a story on this, looking at the water woes of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. You can see their report here and other stories from our water package here.

Tim joined the “water warriors” of Las Vegas, city investigators who enforce restrictions on usage; Steve looked at the dire situation in Los Angeles, America’s second largest city.

Tim accompanied waste water investigator Dennis Demera as he followed a tell-tale trickle of water up the dusty concrete gutter to a house in suburban Las Vegas, the United States’ driest big city.

This is one of the violations that we look for,”  Demera said, pointing to a broken sprinkler head in the sparse lawn of the detached home in residential Surfline Drive.

A water cop employed by the Southern Nevada Water Authority, it is Demera’s job to claw back wasted water one gallon at a time — and it’s a job for our times.

 Most of the U.S. Southwest’s fast growing cities are built either in the scalding deserts or on their fringes, where H2O has always been a scarce resource.

Now as the area is hit by droughts and higher temperatures, possibly linked to climate change, water scarcity is driving those desert cities to respond to scarcity in a variety of ways.

It begs the question: should cities of such size exist in such places in the first place? Is this kind of urban growth really sustainable into the future? What do you think?

Photo credit: Reuters/David Becker (Las Vegas water sleuth Dennis Demera looks for leaks, February 2009)

Today, Reuters ran a story about the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports’ aggressive plan to slash pollutants — mostly exhaust from diesel engines — that have harmed air quality and contributed to health concerns in the local communities.  In implementing the plan, the ports have butted heads with some of the industries that they do business with, such as shippers, railroads and truckers.

Nevertheless, the plan is moving full steam ahead, so to speak.

During the course of reporting this story, we visited both ports to get an up-close view of some of the measures they are taking. The two videos below demonstrate two of those efforts, one at each port.

The first, from the Port of Long Beach, shows a technology to cap and collect emissions from a ship’s engines using a 2,500-pound “bonnet” made by Advanced Cleanup Technologies Inc. The bonnet is lifted about 150 feet in the air to collect the exhaust from the ship’s auxiliary engines, which is then vaccuumed into a treatment system to remove the pollutants. The video first shows the bonnet affixed to the top of the ship, and later shows it being removed, allowing the dirty black smoke to escape into the atmosphere.

The next video shows a heavy-duty no-emissions electric truck at the Port of Los Angeles. The truck, made by Balqon Corporation, runs on batteries and is used to haul containers around the port. Michael Fluegal, who drives the truck, is interviewed inside the trucks’ cab about how this vehicle is different from the diesel-engine trucks he is used to. The port has ordered 20 more of these trucks and five on-road electric trucks.

– Additional reporting by Syantani Chatterjee

Looking for clean air and lots of greenery? Los Angeles is probably not the first place that comes to mind.

Still, the city as famous for traffic and smog as it is for sunshine and celebrities is working hard to earn the mantle of the greenest big city in America.

In its latest move, the L.A. City Council this week passed a law that will require all new building projects bigger than 50 units or 50,000 square feet to comply with the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) building standards. The city claims the move will cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 80,000 tons by 2012 — the equivalent of taking 15,000 cars off the road.

Mayor Antonio Villairagosa says the goal is the most aggressive of any big U.S. city. It is part of a broader plan the mayor laid out last year to reduce L.A.’s carbon footprint by 35 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.0

Still, critics point out that L.A.’s plan is not as aggressive as the one being pursued up North, in San Francisco — a debate the “Los Angeles Times” chronicled on Tuesday. In the story, advocates said L.A.’s move will have more of an impact on the environment because it covers so much more ground than San Francisco.

In the meantime, L.A. might have to take on an even bigger challenge — convincing the public that it can really go green.

As one LAT reader commented: “Los Angeles green? Only with paint.”