We have entered the last year on the Mayan solar calendar. Now what?

Super volcanoes erupt as earthquakes tear the Earth’s crust apart, and meteor showers rain down on cities around the world. These are the visions of Dec. 21, 2012 promoted in the media, with the History Channel and 2012forum.com leading the way.

The prophecy, according to doomsday believers, comes from an inscription on a structure known as Monument Six at Tortuguero, an archaeological site in Tabasco, Mexico. The last eight words of the epitaph translate roughly in English to, “The deity of the end of this cycle will oversee ceremonies on the last day of this cycle.” It is considered the only known inscription referencing the end of an era in 2012.

Most Santa Cruzans, however, aren't preparing for the end of times, even as humanity moved into the last complete year of the Mayan solar calendar on July 25. The calendar is called the Haab, and has 13, 28-day months. The 365th day, a day belonging to none of the 13 months, is left as a day to reflect on hopes for the future, which the Maya called “a day out of time.”

From begonias to possible FEMA relief, the city moves on from the floods

Capitola has a couple different things to look forward to these days, including both the 59th Annual Begonia Festival, as well as the possibility of receiving federal relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to help repair damages it suffered from flooding in March.

The damage done in Capitola was due to a series of storms that raged throughout California, altogether causing about $44.5 million in needed repairs—just above FEMA’s $44 million requirement for damage caused by any one event. However, FEMA soon determined that the storms were isolated incidents rather than one larger disaster, and announced in June that they would not be giving relief. This left Santa Cruz County with an estimated $17 million in damages.

Seeking to change life in a Kenyan village
Therese Hjelm speaks directly and with purpose. Her wide eyes rarely break contact, and her voice is steady and pleasant. With this demeanor, it’s not hard to imagine her easily convincing people to donate to her cause.

That cause is this: she wants to raise enough money to build two wells in the Ewaso Nyiro region of Kenya, so that local girls can spend their time going to school instead of walking six to eight miles each way to the nearest river, where they obtain all of the water their village uses for drinking and for all other purposes.

“The Masai women have an indentation here on their head,” Hjelm says, pointing to the top of her forehead, “because they have a strap that they hook up to the water buckets that they’re carrying. You can imagine walking seven, eight, nine, 10 miles with these on their back. I mean, it’s amazing. The women are so strong. They’re incredible.”

The question arises for protestors as SmartMeters are installed in Santa Cruz County

Some 90 million SmartMeters are already in use around the world, with more on their way. Santa Cruz County, one of the last places in PG&E’s service area to receive the automated metering technology, had become something of a SmartMeter safe haven.

But although Santa Cruz County imposed a SmartMeter moratorium last June, recent events have gotten locals wondering just how effective that dissenting effort will be in the fight to keep SmartMeters at bay.

Do sea creatures have their own traffic rules?
Beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, fast-moving highways of migrating predators cross the hemisphere to feed and mate.

Researchers from UC Santa Cruz recently mapped these migratory routes, which intersect in two distinct hotspots—one off the West Coast in the California Current, and the other in the North Pacific Transition Zone between Hawaii and Alaska. Published June 22 by the academic journal Nature, the findings offer the first large-scale analysis of oceanic migratory systems, and provide a glimpse into the critical need for conservation in high-traffic areas.

A look at the realities of commercial fishing in the Santa Cruz Harbor
"The fleet is dying. There's nobody left," says Christian Zajac, spinning a fishing hook in his hands and standing on the deck of his 1932 Monterey-style fishing boat.

Zajac has been fishing black cod, salmon and rockfish in the Santa Cruz Harbor for 30 years, and has seen the Diaspora of fishermen first hand. He says the decline began within the last 15 years when restrictions were placed on fishing for rockfish in designated areas along the coast, and then plummeted further as the salmon population declined.

Climate change is happening—how prepared is Santa Cruz to deal with the impacts?
When Chuck Tremper wrote his book “As the Oceans Rise: Meeting the Challenges of Global Warming” in 2008, he had hopes that the tome would soon be outdated.

But, three years later, seated on the sunny deck of Ecology Action’s new headquarters (Tremper is the nonprofit’s vice president of general services), he laments that his earlier vision proved too optimistic. “The remarkable and sad thing about the book,” he says,  “is that almost nothing has changed—I could write that book today and it wouldn’t be very different.”

We may not be a sustainable “Civilization 2.0” quite yet, as the book anticipated, but Tremper admits that the Santa Cruz area has made some strides. Among them was the 2007 Climate Action Compact, a commitment to leadership on climate change signed by the city and county of Santa Cruz and UC Santa Cruz, and its subsequent effects.

An academic approach to the water conservation conversation
Water municipalities are like submarines. They bumble along with abundant supplies and little concerns until they hit a rock, or maybe several rocks—or at least so says Australian researcher Zoe Sofoulis. In her analogy, these “rocks” are things like environmental changes and public awareness. It's when that submarine hits those rocks that the structure begins to give way and shift.

Sofoulis, an adjunct research fellow at the University of Western Sydney, recently put an academic spin on the issue of water conservation for the three-dozen Santa Cruzans who gathered at India Joze Restaurant on Wednesday, June 8 to hear her speak. The event was titled "Changing our Relationship to Water," and was organized by Transition Santa Cruz.

State Conservation Corp initiates first veterans’ backcountry trail crew
Assimilating back into society after serving in the military is anything but an easy process. But thanks to a new partnership between a California agency and the Veterans Green Corp (VGC), there’s a new, nature-filled way for veterans to spend this transition period—and give our state parks some much-needed TLC while they’re at it.

This year, the California Conservation Corps' (CCC) Backcountry Trails Program, which is aimed at preserving California's wilderness areas by making them safer and more accessible to the public, partnered with VGC to establish the first ever veterans’ Backcountry Trail Crew. The crew is comprised of 15 men and women, including nine military veterans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

New 25-year conservation plan looks at the county’s ecological future
A long history of environmental protection in Santa Cruz County has helped spare much of its land from development. More than a century ago, Big Basin—the first state park in California—was founded in the Santa Cruz Mountains, saving a large number of old-growth redwoods from logging. Today, 27 percent of the county’s land is in parks, public land, or is otherwise protected through conservation easements.

Nevertheless, many in Santa Cruz see the natural environment as under threat. The Land Trust of Santa Cruz County, a local environmental nonprofit established in 1978, estimates that by 2035, the population in the Monterey Bay region will increase by 146,000, 35,000 of which will be in Santa Cruz County. More people means increased urban and rural development—more houses, more roads, and greater stress on already taxed natural resources. Add to this the unknowns of climate change, and Santa Cruz County could be facing a challenging future.