Pro high speed rail group railLA invites all to the Opening Night Party for LA Beyond Cars, a curated exhibit featuring drawings, models, videos, animations, installations and interactive station design workshops. In addition to meeting some big local names in out-of-the-car thinking, you’ll get to enjoy live music, food from Drago Centro, and drinks from a cash bar.

The fast-paced fun happens Thurs., July 29, from 6 pm to 10 pm in the Jewel Box at the base of the City National Bank Plaza towers, 525 S. Flower St., downtown Los Angeles. The LA Beyond Cars exhibit will run through Aug. 28.

If you support Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition’s City of Lights program, which works to empower Latino immigrant cyclists by providing bike safety education, bike lights, and other resources, block out Aug. 12 for the City of Lights Annual Awards Dinner. There’ll be food, music, a silent auction, and an awards presentation.

The dinner happens Aug. 12 from 5:30 pm to 10 pm at the MALDEF Building, 634 S. Spring St., downtown Los Angeles. Cost: $35 online tickets before Aug. 1, $45 after.

Get to know L.A. on the streetlevel by taking the Trekking Los Angeles Urban Alfresco walking tour of MacArthur Park and Koreatown. The curated walk will introduce you to local street art and culture — and let you enjoy alfresco dining in Francis Avenue Garden.

Put together by LA Commons, Trekking LA events seek to introduce you to the diverse and colorful neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The MacArthur Park / Koreatown walk happens Sat., Aug. 15 from 3 pm to 6 pm. Buy the $25 ticket online now, because only 18 spots remain! If you miss the August walk, a tour of Leimert Park happens Sept. 5.

Santa Monica Museum of Art invites you to its second annual Cause for Creativity: Tour da Arts — where SaMoans and Angelono cyclists will unite to pedal away from oil dependency. Ride to the all-day event, which kicks off with a a spoke card art workshop at 2 pm (cost: $5), followed by a FREE C.I.C.L.E.-led cultural bike ride from 4 pm to 7 pm that stops at various locations around Santa Monica.

Cap the night with a closing party featuring music by Dublab, live t-shirt screen printing, food trucks, bike-themed vendors, whatever a “fixie zone” is, and something called “Acro Yoga.” All that happens Sun., Aug. 22. Online RSVP’s required — Sign up now, because space is limited!

Last but not least, car-free Angelenos’ beloved blog Streetsblog Los Angeles will not close down as previously feared. Instead, the blog’s throwing a Streetsblog Los Angeles Re-Launch Fundraiser and Party. There’ll be munchies, drinks, a silent auction, and general good times in a fun atmosphere.

I am helping to plan this one — so I expect all of you to be in attendance! (and also to email me at greenlagirl@gmail.com if you have any bike-themed, transit-friendly, or otherwise enviable item you’d like to donate for the silent auction). The party happens Wed., Aug. 25 from 7 pm to 11:30 pm at 11555 National Blvd., Los Angeles. Cost: $20 donation online or at the door. No one will be turned away for lack of funds, but if you don’t lack funds, don’t be stingy.

Late last year I kind of dismissed the Woolly Vagabond — an eco-friendly, plant-toting purse — as an imaginative but impractical accessory. While the purse could certainly let your plant “accompany you to the museum, on picnics and out to dinner,” as described by the green-minded product maker, I just didn’t see eco-fashionistas carrying around plants the way Hollywood celebs carry little dogs.

Now, I’m eating my words because a museum has sent out an invitation specifically to plant-toters.

The Hammer Museum invites your favorite plant to a Houseplant Vacation — a “cultural retreat for plants.” This month-long green holiday will pamper your plant as it’s never been pampered before. Not only will the lucky plants get to hang out on a light-flooded terrace, they’ll get their portrait photograph taken, experience “psychic plant healing,” learn some cultural plant history, and take in readings, performances, and musical events every Saturday.

Whose whimsical green idea is this? That would be Machine Project, the artsy L.A. nonprofit that’s collaborated with fruit foraging artist collective Fallen Fruit for Public Fruit Jams and encouraged mushroom foraging with FungiFest, among other green-leaning projects. Machine Project’s currently the Public Engagement Artist in Residence at the Hammer.

Want to get your plant pampered? Drop off your plant this Saturday, July 31, between 11 am and 6 pm. Hammer requests only healthy plants — “this is a vacation, not rehab,” notes the press release — and requires that you sign a one-page release waiver (PDF) agreeing not to hold the Hammer responsible “if my plant/s gets sick, is overserved, pollinates another plant, disappears in plant napping or otherwise, or if my plant/s enters into any other oral or written contracts while on Houseplant Vacation.”

Check out the full schedule of plant activities, RSVP for your plant to plantvacation@machineproject.com then carry your plant in your Woolly Vagabond to the Hammer this Saturday. Remember to pick your plant back up on Sun., Aug. 29 between 11 am to 6 pm, or else the Hammer will have the right “to employ or release into the wild” your best green friend.

Photo via Woolly Pocket

Today’s freebie’s for the thirsty environmentalist! One lucky green LA girl reader will win a reusable water bottle made by Good Life.

This stainless steel, BPA-free bottle is slightly heavier than what most reusables-toters are used to — because the bottle has dual walls to keep 16.9 ounces of liquids hot or cold. A vacuum seal cap keeps the bottle leak-proof for active environmentalists –

Comment by Tue., Aug. 3 to get into the drawing, which will happen Wed., Aug. 5 (more info on freebies here). U.S. addresses only.

That’s the idea behind Giiv.com, which lets you send a friend everything from a dozen donuts to a yoga class via text message to redeem at his or her leisure. Unfortunately, while Giiv.com’s idea is certainly one for which the time has come, Giiv.com doesn’t actually make waste-free giving giving easy.

First of all, most of Giiv.com’s gift certificate options are for e-tailers, not brick-and-mortar establishments. If your friend has to go online to shop anyway, doesn’t it make more sense to send an e-gift certificate by email that lets the recipient click directly to the e-tailer’s site? This feature’s especially odd for the Amazon.com gift certificates; buying and sending one via text message not only forces your friend to manually copy the gift certificate code from the text message on a phone to Amazon’s website, it also forces you to pay more because Giiv.com tacks on a 99-cent “convenience fee.”

But I had high hopes for Giiv.com’s gift certificates for brick-and-mortar establishments. Giiv.com sent me a gift certificate for an Exhale Spa Yoga class to try out — below’s what the text message looks like — so last weekend I got on my bike and wheeled down to Venice’s Exhale studio. There I handed over my Blackberry to the nice guy at check in, who said he’d never gotten a gift certificate “in this format” before, but seemed up to the challenge of helping me use it.

And help me he did — by entering in the code to find that Giiv.com’s gift of a free yoga class at Exhale was actually a $17.85 credit to spend at Exhale. Guess how much yoga classes cost at Exhale Venice? That would be $22. The check-in guy even checked with another Exhale employee to see if anything could be done about the situation — but nothing could.

Now, the Exhale experience itself was great. Once I paid the difference, I got to take a fantastic yoga class. And certainly, I can’t complain about paying $4.15 for the 1.5 hour-long experience.

But if you’d paid the $20.99 — which is what it costs to send your friend a gift certificate for a free Exhale Spa Yoga class on Giiv.com, you probably would be kind of pissed to get a “Thanks for the ‘free’ class :( ” text from her later. Okay — Your friends are probably not that passive-aggressive, but you get my point.

So I can’t recommend Giiv.com — at least not now, while the site’s still in beta and clearly has kinks to work out — but I do hope more stores and companies will start offering text message versions of gift certificates and coupons for people to use. Have you tried Giiv.com and had a better experience than I did? If so, share what happened in the comments –

Screenshot and logo via Giiv.com

>> Think brilliant thoughts — by refusing to make thoughts about money and disputes the top idea in your head. That what Paul Graham advises to ensure that you keep having brilliant ideas while taking a shower or otherwise just letting your thoughts drift. How to do this? Writes Paul: “I’ve found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn’t deserve space in my head.” So stop stressing about those troll-y comments or clickthrough rates on your blog’s ads!

>> Get out of the car and enjoy the sunny day. That’s not exactly a new idea, but the photographs of L.A.’s smoggy history were new to me. Wired’s got photos of SoCal’s smog from the 1940s through the 1960s — including the first bad one in 1943:

In the middle of World War II, Los Angeles residents believe the Japanese are attacking them with chemical warfare. A thick fog that makes people’s eyes sting and their noses run has taken hold of the city…. As residents would later find out, the fog was not from an outside attacker, but from their own vehicles and factories.

Photo of salad made with Vital Zuman Organic Farm‘s produce

Every piece of paper from both green-minded and greenwashing company seems to have that cumbersomely long yet still necessary tagline — “printed on 100% post consumer recycled fiber with vegetable-based inks” — or some version there of. And I have a prediction: That tagline’s going to get longer — especially for cash register receipts.

My prediction’s that “BPA-free” will soon be included in there somewhere. Why? Many of those receipts are covered in BPA, a.k.a. bisphenol-A, an endocrine disruptor linked to cancer, reproductive problems, and lots of other ills.

The fact that BPA coats many receipts isn’t brand new news. Last October, John C. Warner, an organic chemist who used to work for Polaroid, got widespread coverage with his revelation that many receipts contain not just a little, but a lot of BPA. However, John wasn’t interested in publishing his data, citing lack of resources in addition to a dedication to “not preaching about the bad but about diligently trying to invent the good.”

So Environmental Working Group stepped in. This green health nonprofit too is about inventing the good — but often goes about said invention by preaching about the bad. Today, EWG released a report showing not only how much BPA is on these cash receipts — but also which company is giving out the most tainted receipts.

Ready for the bad news? If you guessed that McDonald’s and KFC serve up BPA alongside their unhealthy monstrosities, you are correct:

The receipt for a McDonald’s Happy Meal™ purchased in Clinton, Conn. on April 21, 2010 had an estimated 13 milligrams of BPA. That equals the amount of BPA in 126 cans of Chef Boyardee Overstuffed Beef Ravioli in Hearty Tomato & Meat Sauce, one of the products with the highest concentrations of BPA in EWG’s 2007 tests of canned foods.

Receipts from CVS, WalMart, Safeway, and the U.S. Postal Service also contained alarming amounts of BPA. But organic foodies at Whole Foods can’t rest easy either; at least one store in the Whole Foods chain gave out BPA-tainted receipts. That means if you decided to snack healthy, bought an organic orange at Whole Foods, took the receipt handed to you, then peeled and ate the orange on your way home, you could very well have eaten the BPA that rubbed off the receipt onto your hands and onto your pricy orange.

Now, although the BPA content of these receipts are much higher than in canned foods and bottles, EWG says the risk of BPA exposure is unlikely to be proportionally higher for receipts. “The amount of BPA that enters the body after a person handles a receipt is unknown but likely a fraction of the total BPA on the paper.” Still, EWG cites a July study with the Official Food Control Authority of the Canton of Zürich in Switzerland, which found that BPA from receipts can be absorbed into the skin. “This raises the possibility that the chemical infiltrates the skin’s lower layers to enter the bloodstream directly.” And of course, if you lick your fingers or handle food after touching receipts, you could be putting BPA into your food.

What’s a BPA avoidant person who’s already banned the can and gotten a BPA-free reusable bottle to do? EWG recommends declining receipts whenever you can, washing hands before eating, storing receipts separately, and not using alcohol-based hand cleaners after handling receipts. But the receipts pose a seriously pesky problem that infiltrates all areas of life. If you buy a magazine at a bookstore, will you remember to wash your hands before, say, licking a finger to turn a page?

There is a little good news: Target, Starbucks, Bank of America ATMs and — in case Barbara Boxer’s reading this post — the U.S. Senate cafeteria, all gave out BPA-free receipts. And hopefully, as this BPA receipt issue gains traction, more companies will switch to BPA-free receipts. Because while EWG points out that the “U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has initiated a program to evaluate the safety and availability of alternatives to BPA in thermal paper,” it’s unclear how long this evaluation — let alone actual enforcement of new anti-BPA laws — will take.

Want to get from Park La Brea to the eastern edge of Koreatown — while enjoying the gorgeous SoCal weather without fighting traffic? Then get behind the 4th Street Bike Boulevard Campaign, a grassroots effort to turn the 3.6-mile stretch of 4th St. from Cochran to Hoover into a haven for cyclists and pedestrians.

Bike boulevards are basically streets that favor bike and ped traffic — but allow cars too. If such a street’s hard for you to envision, it’s because we don’t have bike boulevards in Los Angeles. Not yet, at least. If the 120 or so Angelenos who showed up for Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition‘s Walk and Ride for a Safer 4th Street event on Saturday have their way — and more people (that would be you!) join the clamor calling for a safer 4th St. — we could have our first one on 4th St. within the a few years.

What would a 4th Street Bicycle Boulevard look like? I got a sense on Saturday, when I joined the dozen or so fellow Angelenos on the 4th Street Walk (the Ride proved much more popular, attracting about 100 cyclists). LA County Bicycle Coalition volunteers had drawn extended curbs, mini parks, and car diverters in chalk to help us envision a greener, saner 4th Street, and LACBC volunteer (and river activist and artist, below in white T-shirt) Joe Linton explained these proposed features as we walked along.

Basically, the 4th Street Bicycle Boulevard Campaign calls for a revamp of 6 intersections, adding traffic-diverting mini-parks, extended curbs, and extended medians as well as traffic-slowing roundabouts. Those changes would reclaim big chunks of the road for cyclists, pedestrians, and neighborhood residents while reducing the number and slowing the speed of cars on 4th Street. See what these new, revamped intersections would look like (only 5 of the 6 intersections are pictured), thanks to Joe Linton’s design blog.

4th Street’s already considered a more bike-friendly street — especially now, since it’s got hard-won bike sharrows painted on them — which makes the street a good spot for L.A.’s first bicycle boulevard. The challenge now is to get the City of Los Angeles to commit not only to turning 4th Street into a bicycle boulevard, but also to making that bicycle boulevard a meaningfully different one that incorporates the bigger proposed structural changes — versus one that just gets a few extra bike-friendly signs.

What’s the next step to turn 4th Street Bicycle Boulevard Project into reality? According to Joe Linton, the City of Los Angeles needs to submit the project to Metro’s Call for Projects in order to get some funding. Joe estimates that the project will cost $1 million to $2 million and take a couple years to implement — though that rosy timeline assumes that many stars align for cyclists and pedestrians.

Still, now’s a good time for cyclists, since we have a mayor whose elbow may not have fractured into 8 pieces had more bike boulevards been around. To get involved with this campaign, join the LACBC — or at least follow the blog and sign up for its email list to hear about future Bicycle Boulevard events like the one held on Saturday. Beyond seeing friends, meeting new cyclists, and hearing Councilmember Tom LaBonge (above) wax lyrical about cycling, we also all got a delicious free lunch (in my case, a gigantic red velvet cupcake), courtesy of Larchmont Bungalow.

Top illustration of the proposed changes for the 4th and Normandie intersection by Joe Linton

Which yoga pants are greener — Nike’s or Adidas’? If you ask me, I’ll likely point you to Patagonia instead — but soon, an Eco Index clothing tag could help you make that decision.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Nike, Adidas, and Patagonia are among about a hundred other companies working on this Eco Index — a “software tool to help them measure the environmental impact of their apparel and footwear, from raw material to garbage dump.” The Index will debut at the Outdoor Retailer trade show in Salt Lake City next month — and on your clothes at an as-of-yet undetermined date.

The Eco Index is the kind of consumer tool that Daniel Goleman argued for in his book Ecological Intelligence — a tool that’ll help people make greener shopping decisions, thereby pushing companies towards greener practices. Instead of spending days researching different brands and trying to guesstimate which pair of jeans are indeed greener, you could simply look at a clothing tag and pick up the pair with the lower score.

Of course, as you may expect, the Eco Index is not without controversy. Wall Street Journal points out that the Index is based on a series of questions a company answers about its products — broad questions that aren’t very detailed, aren’t product-specific, and aren’t verified beyond the companies’ self-reported claims. Other discrepancies could also affect the accuracy of the Index:

Some of the points are awarded for changes with very speculative impacts. Levi’s care tags ask consumers to wash in cold water, line-dry and donate to Goodwill. All of that earns Levi’s points on the Eco Index. But that doesn’t necessarily make Levi’s greener than a pair of Wranglers, which can just as easily be dropped off at the Salvation Army.

Still, an Index like this sounds promising if done well — and widespread use of Index tags could get the general public thinking about the environmental impacts of their buying choices — though no one knows when those tags will actually show up on clothes. In the meantime, would-be-green shoppers can get some help from the GoodGuide — which even comes with a barcode-scanning iPhone app — when making decisions about food, toys, personal care products, and some household items.

There’s an even simpler way to avoid these difficult eco comparison shopping conundrums altogether: Buy less stuff, and shop pre-loved whenever possible! Do that, and you’ll save a lot of money while avoiding shopping headaches — unless what you need happen to be underwear or running shoes.

Earlier:
>> Pre-loved fashion shopping in Santa Monica: A Walking guide
>> The High cost of cheap T-shirts, or how to wreck the environment with $3

Photo by Julia’s Photography

The leak was sealed 11 days ago, but the pollution — and the lawsuits — will linger on for a while. Meanwhile, BP chief executive Tony Hayward’s expected to resign — and walk away with a payoff of up to $18.5 million. Angry? So’s everyone else. Here’s what to do about it:

>> Help BP learn how to use photoshop. Now that BP’s admitted to touching up photos of its efforts to clean up the Gulf oil Spill, Wired wants you to show BP how to greenwash better. “Apparently BP can no longer afford to employ people with even remotely reasonable Photoshop skills…. So let’s lend poor, embattled BP a hand and show them what people who actually know how to use Photoshop can do.” Submit your own handiwork — or vote on the funny photos other BP haters created.

>> Rage with Roger Ebert. If you’ve been avoiding the news like the plague because the images of the oil spill were too depressing — but now want to catch up on the news since the leak’s at least been plugged up — Roger Ebert has a quick, easy to read summary of all the reasons you should be angry at BP right now, from the safety device not used to prevent the spill to the still-empty escrow account supposed to benefit those economically affected by the spill.

>> Fight against onshore drilling. The one silver lining of the Gulf oil spill is that more people now actively oppose offshore drilling. But onshore drilling too’s a problem, environmental groups told congressional leaders in a letter last week, pointing out that “drilling for oil and gas often occurs in residential areas, yet it uses large volumes of toxic chemicals and creates large amounts of toxic waste.”

Earlier:
>> The Hilarity in water pollution and LOLing over spilt oil
>> Hands Across the Sand: How 15 minutes on the beach beats the eco-blues

>> Don’t forget: Walk and Ride for a Safer 4th Street happens tomorrow! Organized by the L.A. Bicycle Coalition, this event highlights efforts to turn 4th Street into a bike boulevard. The bike ride starts at 10 am from Pan Pacific Park, the walk — which I’ll be joining — starts at 10:30 am from 4th and Normandie and ends at Shatto Park, 3191 W. 4th St., Los Angeles — where free refreshments will await all participants.

>> I didn’t know Marc Abrams, Silver Lake’s Walking Man, but he was a familiar sight to many Angelenos. He died in his hot tub earlier this week — and fans have planned a Silver Lake Walking Man Memorial Walk that traces Marc Abrams’ usual 15-mile jaunt. All are welcome to walk on Sun., July 25 from noon to 4 pm, starting and ending at Silver Lake Recreation Center, 1850 W. Silver Lake Dr., Los Angeles.