(Top) Santa Monica Councilmember Tony Vasquez holds a California Mountain King Snake during Heal the Bay's Santa Monica Pier Aquarium Dorothy Green Room Grand Opening on Saturday, January 18, 2014. (Center) Heal the Bay Associate Director Alix Hobb looks at a Western Screech Owl (Megascops kennicottii). (above) Dorothy Green's granddaughter, with Heal the Bay Chief Executive Officer Ruskin Hartley and Aquarium Director Heather Doyle, cuts the ribbon during Santa Monica Pier Aquarium Dorothy Green Room Grand Opening celebration.
The newly renovated Dorothy Green Room brings a holistic approach to water and a fresh focus on the watersheds of the Santa Monica Bay while celebrating Heal the Bay’s founder – and founding – through interactive displays and two new exhibits of live animals.
One side of the revamped space, which doubles as a classroom, illustrates an urban watershed and explores how human behavior impacts the ocean; the opposite wall is converted into a more natural watershed exhibit, including tanks featuring riparian and estuarine organisms.
Dorothy, an L.A. mother and budding environmental activist, found out that the city of Los Angeles' Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant was a disaster, dumping incompletely treated sewage into the bay and breaking the law in several different ways. Outraged, Dorothy gathered a group of like-minded citizens in her living room, in concert with local activist Howard Bennett, and Heal the Bay was born. Attorney Doug Spruance and Secretary Maxine Brickman would later facilitate the formal incorporation of the organization in 1987.
Heal the Bay sold T-shirts in Venice Beach, talked to the media, packed hearing rooms and held rallies, and ultimately Hyperion’s waiver was denied. Today, Hyperion is a world-class treatment facility, fish and dolphins no longer have fin rot and tumors, and plant and animal life has returned to the dead zones.
