Ellen Reid s Soundwalk: Music for hiking around Griffith Park, curated just for you kcrw.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kcrw.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Hello readers of The Wild. I first saw tightly packed ribbons of orange and black monarch butterflies in eucalyptus trees on a bluff in Goleta, Calif., decades ago. Sunlight illuminated the grove where I was standing and almost immediately, wings started to open and flutter. The butterflies resembled one collective organism slowly coming to life. I was dumbfounded by their wild beauty.
These days, fewer people may have this experience. The population of migrating Western monarchs that once traveled between Baja, Mexico, and Northern California is perilously close to collapsing. Five years ago, 28,000 butterflies migrated through the Monarch Butterfly Grove in Pismo Beach. In 2020, just 200 monarchs were counted by volunteers.
By Dr. Christine Ritchie’s estimate, about 2 million people in the United States are homebound, and an additional 5 million have trouble leaving home or need help doing so.
Yet those millions of people “tend to be
sort of invisible to society,” said Ritchie, a professor at Harvard Medical School.
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They can’t drive through mass vaccination sites or stand in line outside clinics. Even if they secure a coveted appointment spot, they can’t leave their house to get there.
Now there are doctors and nurses racing against traffic, inclement weather and a ticking clock to get to them.
Essential Arts: Immersed in a Griffith Park Soundwalk latimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from latimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.