The International Day of Climate Action meant 5200+ rallies in 180+ nations — to which Blogger Beach Cleanup added 100+ activists!

Now that the big day has passed, stay involved by joining the campaigns and local nonprofits as we get closer to the Copenhagen Climate Talks in December, when the agreement to replace the Kyoto Treaty will be hashed out.

>> 350.org. Sign up for this campaign’s email list not only to stay on top of climate change issues, but also to call on world leaders to sign “an ambitious, fair, and binding global climate deal.” (what 350 means)

>> TckTckTck. This global alliance brings together both groups and individuals specifically to get people speaking out to shape what happens at the Copenhagen Climate Talks. Like 350.org, TckTckTck invites you to call on your climate leaders ” for an ambitious, fair and binding climate change agreement.”

>>BeyondTalk. The Yes Men have put their fame behind this site, which lets you pledge to engage in civil disobedience to push for a strong climate agreement at the Copenhagen Climate Talks. I’ve signed up — Will you?

>> Heal the Bay. This nonprofit environmental organization dedicated to making Southern California coastal waters and watersheds, including Santa Monica Bay, safe, healthy and clean.  If you enjoyed Blogger Beach Cleanup, sign up to join Heal the Bay’s monthly beach cleanups!

>> Sustainable Works. This Santa Monica-based nonprofit educational environmental organization offers educational classes and greening programs to help people and businesses lower their carbon footprints. Sign up for the Green Living Workshops for a crash course on living a more sustainable lifestyle.

>> C.I.C.L.E. This L.A. nonprofit promotes the bicycle as a viable, healthy, and sustainable transportation choice through fun events, classes, and talks. Check out the many classes C.I.C.L.E. offers — from learning to ride a bike to figuring out how to balance your groceries atop a two-wheeler!

>> Natural Resources Defense Council. This environmental action group’s goal’s simple: “to protect wildlife and wild places and to ensure a healthy environment for all life on earth.” Get involved by becoming a member for $10 — or by joining the Activist Network for free.

>> Net2LA. This web-savvy organization’s goal is to use social media for social good. Consider yourself a social media geek? Then join Net2LA to put your talents and knowledge to use for social good in L.A. while making like-minded friends.

Thank you to all the nonprofits for participating in Blogger Beach Cleanup — and thanks to Bryan Koch of Net2LA for taking the videos of the nonprofits’ talks!

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Blogger Beach Cleanup would not have been as successful as it was without the kind help and donations from like-minded green companies. We’d like to thank:

>> Envirosax and Green Bag Lady for providing volunteers with reusable bags — which were used even during the cleanup itself!

>> FilterForGood and Guayaki for giving volunteers an option aside from disposable plastic water bottles.

>> Clif Bar for providing snacks for volunteers.

>> Pourtal Wine Tasting Bar for hosting the post-cleanup happy hour, where I think everyone had a great time.

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The turnout at Blogger Beach Cleanup was even better than we’d hoped for! 112 people signed in — and a dozen or so more people participated without formally signing in — to pick up 39.5 pounds of trash from Santa Monica Beach!

Thanks to everyone who came out. As you know, we had a bunch of prizes donated from local green businesses and eco-nonprofits. Here are the lucky prize winners from Blogger Beach Cleanup!

Top blog recruiters:

1st place: Green Guys Media — a $50 gift certificate from SEED Restaurant

2nd place: CHICK Blog — a $50 gift certificate from The Green Life

3rd place: The Reach Magazine TV blog — a $50 gift certificate from SEED Restaurant

4th place: Take a Swig of Alf– a $50 gift certificate from SEED Restaurant

Top trash collectors:

1st place: Matt Geller, Green Guys Media — a $50 gift certificate from Co-opportunity

2nd place: Darren Moore, Ecovations — a FilterForGood prize pack

3rd place: Jen Bravo and Damien Somerset, Shift Logic — a Greenpeace prize pack,

Car-free volunteer drawing:

Cara Finken — a Clif Bar Prize Pack from Clif Bar

Nonprofit with the best web goal:

Sustainable Works — Web and social media goal-setting and goal implementation with the help of Net2LA.

Thanks to everyone for coming out to Blogger Beach Cleanup. Remember to sign up with the nonprofits who were at the event — AND at 350.org — to stay on top of climate change legislation and treaties — and our collective futures! — as we get closer to the Copenhagen Climate Talks in December, when the new Kyoto Protocol of sorts will be drawn up.

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See the photos from Blogger Beach Cleanup! And upload your own photos from the event to Flickr and tag them “bloggerbeachcleanup” so everyone will be able to find them here.

The photos are also on Facebook — so tag yourself and your friends!

Find more coverage and photos of Blogger Beach Cleanup at:

>> Eco-Vegan Gal

>> flapflap

>> Ecospire

>> Booking it Bus Style

>> LAist

>> The Daily Ocean

>> Life Without Wheels

>> Reach Magazine TV blog

>> PineMark blog

>> L.A. and O.C. Foodventures

If you attended — then wrote about or took photos of Blogger Beach Cleanup, link to them in the comments or email the link to greenlagirl@gmail.com — and I’ll add the links to this post. Remember to also submit your photos and videos to 350.org!

Photos by Bryan Koch

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No time for a whole post right now, but here’s a video put together by Whitney Lauritsen, Eco-Vegan Gal, from the Blogger Beach Cleanup:

And if you’re not sure what exactly 350 stands for, here’s Bill Mckibben on the Colbert Report to explain it to you:

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See you TODAY for Blogger Beach Cleanup on Santa Monica Beach at 4 pm — or 4:20 pm at the latest! A few last minute FYIs:

>> Tweeters: Tag your tweets with #350ppm to show the twitterverse that you’re participating in the International Day of Climate Action — a global call to action to put our world on course to get back to 350ppm (parts per million), the number that leading scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to avoid runaway climate change.

You can also follow @350 and @tcktcktck to stay on top of climate action initiatives as we get closer to the Copenhagen Climate Talks in December, when the new Kyoto treaty of sorts will be hashed out.

>> Photographers: Submit your photos from Blogger Beach Cleanup on 350.org or by emailing photos@350.org. Here are the email directions:

To submit successfully, add your photos as attachments, use your city and country as the subject, and describe your photos with a short caption in the body of your email. If a photographer needs a credit, include this in the e-mail body/caption.

Here’s 350.org’s Flickr stream.

>> Videographers: Submit your Blogger Beach Cleanup-related videos at CitizenGlobal.

>> Yerba Mate fans: Look on the side of the free Guayaki Lemon Elation drink you’ll get on the cleanup to see that the number 350′s been incorporated into the design!

See you all at Blogger Beach Cleanup in a few hours! Remember to travel green to get into the Clif Bar Prize Pack drawing — and to get there early to get one of the free reusable bags or bottles! Collect lots of trash to win other goodies — and join us for the happy hour to meet fellow environmentalist in L.A.!

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Coming to the Blogger Beach Cleanup tomorrow, Oct. 24, the International Day of Climate Action? Sign up now to get freebies, win prizes, learn from nonprofits, make friends, and enjoy happy hour with bloggers, blog readers, and other green-thinking people in L.A.!

There’ll be bloggers covering about every topic — and while I’ve been trying to group bloggers who’ve signed up to attend into topics for my posts here, here’s a motley group I simply haven’t been to categorize. Thus, they’ll be intro’d with a sentence or two from their respective blogs:

>> Zel McCarthy, soundbleed:

Dragonette are like that fuck buddy you don’t mind letting meet your friends. You know you should feel guiltier about that combination of sugar sweet vocal harmonies, catchy hooks, and sexed-up lyrics, but oh – who are we kidding – gimme some more.

>> Alf LaMont, Take a Swig of Alf and The Comedy Store

The whole thing began about a month and a half ago when one of the top 6 agencies in town sent over someone who referred to himself as a “Social Media Agent” to meet with the celebrity I work with from time to time…. Was it possible that a man well into his forties could have insight into SM?

>> Hillary Newman, Hillary Newman

Initially, I found twitter intrusive. I didn’t want to tell friends, none-the-less strangers, what I was doing from moment to moment…. To my surprise, people started to follow me…. Twitter is great when you have an interest you identify with.

>> Bill Lascher, Lascher at Large

A green half moon hangs heavily in the sky above the 10, so close to the ground it seems one could reach it by car. A minute or two later I look out the opposite window of the narrow train to see the blue and red neon outline of pagodas marking the next neighborhood Iwill travel through.

>> Stacy Cullington’s Tadpole Marketing Blog:

We’re giving the rain two green thumbs up!… Our basil is having a minor bug problem…but at least its organic!

>> Britt, The Bowie Bride:

I can’t justify wasteful wedding behavior like buying expensive china sets I’ll never use or demanding our ceremony showcase an assload of out of season flowers from New Freaking Zealand – or even using real flowers at all at this point.

>> Donavan, FunctionalCycling — That site’s currently down and thus unquotable.

See you all at Blogger Beach Cleanup tomorrow!

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If you’ve walked around downtown Santa Monica, you’ve probably seen Natural Resources Defense Council‘s super eco office building. This environmental action group’s goal’s simple: “to protect wildlife and wild places and to ensure a healthy environment for all life on earth.”

And while NRDC’s lawsuits against un-eco policies and companies may make the biggest news, NRDC also works on a more grassroots level, making it easier for people to avoid junk mail, giving people green living advice, and providing entryways for people to become environmental activists.

And at the Blogger Beach Cleanup tomorrow, Jessica Lass from NRDC will speak briefly about how you can get involved with this eco-nonprofit. Yes, there’ll be freebies and prizes and happy hour too, but come find out how you can extend your commitment to a 20-minute beach cleanup into more long-term, meaningful environmental activism!

Image via NRDC

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Local blogs let you see your city through  your neighbors eyes — and get in on the great deals about town that they’ve discovered for you. And at Blogger Beach Cleanup, you’ll see Zach from LAist and Caroline on Crack — plus these L.A.-centric blogs that’ll clue you in on where you can get the latest freebies, deals, and good eats:

>> Yolanda Evans will join the cleanup representing the popular foodie blog Eater LA, which covers the restaurant, nightlife and bar scene in this metropolis.

>> Troy Corley and Ron O’Brien at Free L.A. have an ongoing blog highlighting freebies around the city — in addition to their print budget travel guide, Free L.A.: The Ultimate Free Fun Guide to the City of Angels.

>> Those who went to Blogger Prom will recognize H.C. of L.A. and O.C. Foodventures — He’s the guy that signed you in! H.C. writes about his yummy food adventures all over SoCal.

So sign up for the Blogger Beach Cleanup! There’ll be free Clif Bars and free yerba mate drinks, free reusable bottles and totes for the first 70 volunteers to arrive, lots and lots of prizes, and a yummy happy hour at Pourtal.

Logos via Eater LA and Free LA

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Fans of plastic-free-living blog Fake Plastic Fish will get a special treat tomorrow! Beth Terry of Fake Plastic Fish flew down from Oakland last night to visit L.A. for the Plastic Pollution Coalition’s Is Plastic Washed Up? film series tonight — and tomorrow, she’ll be joining the Blogger Beach Cleanup!

Beth’s the woman behind the Take Back the Filter campaign — which helped convince Brita to start recycling its filters through a collaboration with Whole Foods and Preserve! She also keeps a weekly tally — with photos! — of her plastic consumption, throws down “Show Us Your (Plastic) Trash!” challenges, and makes her own fair trade, organic chocolate syrup at home.

Many other local eco-bloggers will be at Blogger Beach Cleanup too. A couple more you can look forward to meeting:

>> Evan Kopelson’s Green Media News covers “climate change, sustainable business, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and personal responsibility.” Evan’s also in the process of getting rid of almost all his belongings as part of his personal uber-eco challenge.

>> Joe Magee’s PineMark is a brand new company that offers a green lifestyle certification for individuals.

So sign up for the Blogger Beach Cleanup! There’ll be free Clif Bars to snack on — as well as free drinks from Guayaki. Plus, we’ve got free reusable bottles and totes for the first 70 volunteers to arrive, lots and lots of prizes, and a yummy happy hour at Pourtal.

Photos by Siel; PineMark logo via PineMark

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