Resilient Palisades Green Tip: One More Time With Feeling

The Palisadian-Post has partnered with locally founded environmental organization Resilient Palisades to deliver a “green tip” to our readers in each newspaper. This edition’s tip was written by Resilient Palisades Communications Director and Board Member Sara G. Marti.

photo by Sara G. Marti

I’d love to sit here and say, “In 2025, we filtered through the noise so you didn’t have to.” But the noise hit everyone. Fast and loud. Like air rushing past your ears on a roller coaster you didn’t choose to get on. Rebuild advice from everywhere. Policy changes mid-process. Incentives expiring mid-sentence. Experts contradicting each other. Confident takes with no local context.

Our hope is that somewhere in the middle of all of it, you started to feel a little more confident. Not because we said anything magical, but because we kept repeating what held up. We pressure-tested information and checked whether it actually applied to this place, this moment, this community.

So instead of pretending we shielded anyone from the chaos, here’s what we really did.

We put real time into soil, water, and air. We elevated testing, remediation, and bioremediation so families could make informed decisions about land that no longer felt safe. We worked on invasive plant removal and native restoration, because what grows back determines how safe our hillsides will be for decades. We fought hard in those early months to save what we could of a tree canopy that still lost 30 percent. (More about that here)

We organized a community petition with 1,000 signatures to protect children’s health and defend public land from plastic turf. When that petition was ignored, we coordinated letters, testimony, and public comments anyway. We continue to advocate for policy change around rebuilding, electrification, park safety, and public health. That fight is not over.

We showed up publicly and consistently. We published op-eds in CityWatch LA (here and here) and the Santa Monica Daily Press, a Letter to the Editor in the Los Angeles Times, and were quoted in Inside Climate News. We hosted webinars, workshops, trainings, restoration days, and community gatherings focused on safer rebuilding. We helped people navigate electrification, incentives, solar, storage, and indoor air quality by saying the same grounded things over and over.

We supported youth leadership. We guided students and scouts in hands-on habitat restoration, hosted a student field trip tied to Electrify the Rebuild, and awarded five $800 scholarships to student environmental advocates. We hope to award more in 2026 with your help.

We led restoration at Temescal Canyon Park, Santa Ynez Canyon, Will Rogers State Park, Big Tujunga Canyon, Westwood Greenway, the Rotary Site, and beyond the Palisades when others asked for help. Our Removal of Invasive Plants team has their own instagram page here.

Along the way, we were named Nonprofit of the Year, received the Los Angeles Business Council Community Impact Award, were recognized by Plant Based Treaty LA, and acknowledged by partners including LACI for leadership in resilient rebuilding.

We did none of this alone. We built deep collaborations across Palisades, Malibu, and Eaton fire communities, and with more organizations, schools, scientists, and recovery groups than we can reasonably list here.

That’s the Green Tip this final week: progress after disaster is cumulative, not flashy.

For those who like receipts:

We did say “fire” 585 times but also “resilient” 583 times.

We mentioned clean energy 504 times.

We referenced safety and healing 494 times.

We spoke up for youth 137 times.

We said love 91 times.

We said thank you 166 times.

If you’re in a position to support this work as we head into the new year, donations help us keep doing this work: resilientpalisades.org/donate

And if donating isn’t possible right now, staying connected still matters.

One more time before the year is over: thank you for being here.

With love,

Resilient Palisades