The Brief

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, all the way through Christmas, online shopping spikes throughout the holiday season. It’s convenient and can be necessary.

But that convenience also has real consequences for communities and the planet.

“I think sometimes we don't take time to consider what the impacts are for real human beings,” said Ellen Reese, professor of Society, Environment and Health Equity at UC Riverside and co-author of the book Unsustainable: Amazon, Warehousing, and the Politics of Exploitation.

“There's definitely the whole politics of consumption, whether we actually need all of these goods that we're purchasing and are there other ways to show our love for each other besides buying a present,” Reese said. “But [when we do need to buy gifts] then we need to consider, where are all these goods being sourced?”

It's not just something to consider during the holidays. Over the last two decades, more than a billion square feet of warehouses have been built in the Inland Empire to support e-commerce. That boom has led to higher rates of health-harming and planet-heating pollution in the region. For example, the increase in online shopping in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic led to an 18% increase in Amazon’s carbon emissions in 2021, the company reported.

Warehouses dominate the Inland Empire

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Jesse Lerner

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Courtesy of Riverside Art Museum

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The impacts of online shopping in the IE

Jorge Osvaldo Heredia used to work in warehouses and remembers how there’d be a boost in hiring and longer, busier hours for him and his fellow warehouse workers during the holidays. But after the holiday season many of those jobs would end.

Osvaldo Heredia, now the executive director of the Garcia Center for the Arts in San Bernardino, said as warehouses have boomed, local businesses — and local jobs — have dried up.

“A lot of our local shops have been closing down and I really do attribute that a lot to online shopping,” Osvaldo Heredia said.

Jorge Osvaldo Heredia is the executive director of the Garcia Center for the Arts in San Bernardino.

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Fabian Torres

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LAist

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For example, in recent years the city’s only art supply store shut down, making the nearest brick-and-mortar store in Riverside. In response, the Garcia Center recently launched an art supply shop that also showcases and sells work made by local artists, as well as provides studio space. It’s called Mercado 536.

It’s a far cry from an online shopping experience, said Yulissa Mendoza, a local artist who helped open the shop.

“Not only are you buying something from someone that is handmade, you will probably run into them as well,” she said.

Local artists' work on display at Mercado 536.

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Courtesy of Yulissa Mendoza

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Osvaldo Heredia said more local, small businesses not only boosts diversity in local jobs, but also improves the quality of life for residents.

“We're doing what we can to work with the people in our community and really try to create a grassroots movement to improve our city for the better,” he said.

As warehouses and industry take up more space, another mode of local shopping — swap meets — have also dwindled in the area, said Darby Osnaya, who grew up in Colton and is a promotore, or community organizer, with the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice.

“To ask people to shop local can be very tough and demanding," Osnaya said. "Ideally, if we can have swap meets and farmers markets that we can go to, that would be great. But there's none here in Colton.”

That’s a reason why the People’s Collective is working with the Garcia Center and other local partners to hold a regular Eco-Tianguis, or eco-friendly swap meet and open-air market. The group held its first Eco-Tianguis last March, featuring local vendors, a clothing swap and plenty of food.

But Osnaya said people shouldn’t feel guilty about online shopping or shopping at big box stores, especially if it’s necessary for their budget or accessibility needs.

“I always try to be consumer conscious, however I know that's not the end all be all of fixing the problem,” Osnaya said.

An image created by San Bernardino artist Brenda Angels (@basoulcreates) depicts a vision of a thriving economy that runs on local businesses. It was part of the promotion for the the People's Collective for Environmental Justice's first Eco-Tianguis.

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Courtesy of Alicia Aguayo

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Is shopping local better for the climate? 

The climate impact of shopping local depends on how the product you’re buying is made and transported, as well as how far or what mode of travel you use to get it. When you shop at small local businesses, you can usually talk to the business owner or manager about those things.

But more often than not, when we shop at a local business, instead of big box stores or online, there are fewer emissions associated with our buying. And more money stays in the local economy, rather than going to large corporate retailers, which are responsible for roughly 25% of planet-heating pollution (though they say they are working to change that).

“When you shop local, $68 of every $100 that you spend stays in the local economy,” said Courtney Chatterson with the city of Long Beach’s Economic Development Department. “So that means that when you're shopping local, you're not just getting the things that you want, but you're investing in local people.”

The city of Long Beach recently launched its Shop Long Beach initiative, where buyers earn rewards for shopping at local small businesses.

Shopping 'glocal'

I wanted to check out some of the local businesses near the ports, where about 40% of the nation’s goods come through. In Long Beach, I met up with Teresa Baxter of local shop Fair Trade Long Beach, which is also part of the Shop Long Beach initiative.

“You're going to see a bunch of little nooks and crannies in this store,” said Baxter. “That's because we're a retail collective, so everybody here represents 20 different fair trade organizations under one roof.”

Teresa Baxter founded retail collective Fair Trade Long Beach.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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It’s not always possible to buy locally-sourced products. That’s where fair trade can come in. Fair trade certified products are made ethically, meaning fair wages, no child labor, or other human rights violations, and they’re often also more sustainably produced. Baxter’s store, for example, showcases upcycled and sustainably-made products from our own southern California backyard and around the world.

“We do have local artisans and we do have global artisans, so we call it 'glocal,'” Baxter said with a smile. “So caring about your community and the community as a whole.”

There is cut metal wall art made out of old oil drums by a Haitian artist. There are Ecuadorian art pieces made out of tagua nut, an alternative to ivory. A Cambodian artist makes totes and wallets out of recycled cement bags. There’s also Eli’s Garden Corner, where a 13-year-old entrepreneur sells adorable succulent arrangements to save money for college. Each product has a person and a story connected to it…and there are all different price points.

Cut metal art made out of old oil drums by Haitian artist Jean Mikerson, sold at Fair Trade Long Beach.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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“If we know where it's sourced from and if we know that the person is being paid a fair wage for what they're creating, then it just creates the ultimate vibe in our home and our surroundings,” Baxter said.

Just next door to Baxter’s shop, there’s Amarte, another retail collective founded by Claribel Valdovinos. While she’s not fair trade certified, she embraces fair trade principles through the direct trade she does to source her products.

“So I know the families and I go in person and I've seen how the conditions are,” Valdovinos said. “But mostly it's like a mutual collaboration, so I go and ask, like, ‘what would you like to highlight,’ and at the same time give feedback as to what folks are asking for.”

The store features many Indigenous artisans from Mexico, as well as Senegal, who use traditional, more environmentally-friendly methods to create their products. For example, woven palm work by Oaxacan families who raise and care for the palm trees on a collective, and naturally dyed traditional Senegalese clothing.

Claribel Valdovinos founded Amarte, a retail collective in Long Beach that sells goods with the ethos of preserving culture and celebrating Indigenous artisans from Mexico and Senegal.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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“When you shop small and you shop local, the items that you're getting here are made with integrity and no one is being exploited,” said Valdovinos. “It's definitely a climate action, from the artisans we collaborate with, knowing that they're using traditional methods, and also at the same time, what we have here is in small batches, so we’re mindful of our carbon footprint.”

While shopping local or fair trade isn’t always guaranteed to be more climate-friendly, understanding where our stuff comes from and who made it helps us all learn how to live better with each other and the planet.

Tips for shopping sustainably

Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter and multiple insurance companies he owns have been sued, alleging they failed to disclose an ongoing federal probe to customers while directing policyholders’ money into Walter’s other companies.

The lawsuit lists Walter, Delaware Life Insurance Co., Clear Spring Life and Annuity, TWG Global Holdings and Walter’s Guggenheim Partners investment firm as defendants.

Ira Rosner, a 67-year-old Florida man, brought the class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Miami on Wednesday. He purchased a policy from Delaware Life in April and he had until late May to withdraw his money without penalty. However, the company did not disclose the investigation to him until June,

Rosner is seeking a jury trial in the lawsuit that seeks damages for negligent misrepresentation, breach of contract and aiding and abetting fraud.

TWG Global didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

Walter has been under investigation since last year by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and the Securities and Exchange Commission following a whistleblower complaint regarding alleged misrepresented loans made between companies within his business portfolio.

TWG Global Holdings is the holding company through which Walter controls Delaware Life, Clear Spring Life and Annuity Co. and his stake in Guggenheim Partners. TWG Global denied any wrongdoing involving the probe in a statement last month.

Walter and co-owner Todd Boehly sold their stakes in English Premier League club Chelsea this week. Last month, Walter agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers in a surprise move less than a year after buying the NBA franchise from the Buss family. The deal is under review by the league.

The Dodgers have been adamant that Walter has no plans to sell the baseball team.

Compton Unified Superintendent Darin Brawley has won a national education prize recognizing his leadership in improving student achievement in the district.

Brawley will receive the 2026 Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education, which includes a $50,000 award, at a ceremony in New York City in November.

The McGraw Center for Education Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, which administers the prize, cited the “extraordinary impact” of Brawley and the two other recipients. Brawley won for his work in K-12; prizes are also awarded for higher education and lifelong learning.

“At a time when schools and communities are confronting profound educational challenges, three visionary leaders are demonstrating what meaningful change can look like,” the McGraw Center said.

With about 20,000 predominantly low-income Black and Hispanic students, Compton was singled out nationally for test scores in math and reading that did not fall back during the COVID-19 epidemic and continued to exceed the national and state averages since.

The center noted that Compton’s graduation rates increased from 58% to 94%, and college acceptance rates exceeded 95% during Brawley’s 14 years as superintendent. It also highlighted the district’s expanded college and career pathways and innovative industry and community partnerships.

Last year, EdSource detailed an unusual drama program at Compton’s Dominguez High. Another EdSource article this year highlighted the inclusion of student-centered “calming corners” and learning stations in school renovations.

The McGraw prize, named after the CEO of the McGraw-Hill education publisher, has been awarded since 1988. Other recent California recipients have included Debra Duardo, Los Angeles County schools superintendent; Jody Lewen, president of Tamalpais College, who introduced academic programs at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center; Stanford University professor and researcher Roy Pea; and Sol Khan, creator of a worldwide free online education and tutoring platform.

The higher education prize went to Shai Reshef, who founded the University of the People, the first nonprofit, tuition-free, accredited online university, and the lifelong learning prize was awarded to Michael Webber, a nationally recognized professor of mechanical engineering and public policy at the University of Texas at Austin.

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Inside three water tanks in a tucked-away room at the Aquarium of the Pacific, biologists are tasked with bringing back a population of frogs that once thrived across the state’s mountainous streams but has since reached the brink of extinction.

It’s a program that’s nearly closed out its fifth year with a major milestone: more than 1,000 frogs raised and released into the wild.

That’s more than five times as many mountain yellow-legged frogs — named for the lemon-hued streak along their hind legs — believed to be in the wild when last recorded in 2019, reduced to small pockets of wild streams in the San Gabriel, San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains. By the time the frog was listed under the federal Endangered Species Act in 2002, fewer than 100 adults remained in Southern California. A count in 2020 put the number at about 188 in the wild, though biologists say that figure has almost certainly shifted since.

The species’ collapse is tied to a compounding list of threats: wildfire, mudslides, pesticides, fungal disease, habitat loss and the appetites of non-native trout, bullfrogs and crayfish. It’s a decline so severe that biologists consider the species among the rarest vertebrates on Earth.

Staff at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach are working to change that math, one tadpole at a time.

In the latest release, about 653 of the endangered frogs were returned to their native mountain habitat by staff from the Aquarium of the Pacific, the Los Angeles Zoo and the U.S. Geological Survey. Of those, 394 had been head-started at the aquarium — its largest release of the species yet, bringing its total to 1,032.

The frogs were bred at the Los Angeles Zoo’s breeding program, then transferred to Long Beach as tadpoles, where aquarium staff reared them through metamorphosis into froglets and frogs. The process typically takes one to two years, though the species can remain in its tadpole stage for up to five years, making a given frog’s age something of a mystery even to the people who raised it.

A tadpole chills by the rocks in a tank at the Aquarium of the Pacific, where it is being raised before being released into the local mountains, Tuesday, Sept., 15, 2026

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Thomas R. Cordova.

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Long Beach Post

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Inside the aquarium, the water is engineered to mimic the mountains it’s standing in — kept near 60 degrees in summer, the temperature currently found in the streams the frogs call home, and cooled to around 52 degrees in winter, with reduced UV exposure to simulate the season’s shorter, dimmer days.

The aquarium’s involvement began in 2021, in the aftermath of the 2020 Bobcat Fire, which tore through the central San Gabriel Mountains and destroyed an estimated 95% of the frog’s remaining usable habitat.

“They had salvaged some tadpoles from the fire-impacted areas, and they ended up bringing a handful of them here,” said Erin Lundy, with the aquarium’s conservation team. “And then we also had some captive-bred ones from the L.A. Zoo that year, and that was our first group.”

Since then, the team has expanded to include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which help monitor populations and oversee releases.

Erin Lundy from the Aquarium of the Pacific looks into a tank at frogs as she gets them ready to be released into the local mountains Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2026

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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As the aquarium’s tadpole numbers have grown, some are now sent to the Santa Ana Zoo each October to continue growing until they’re ready for reintroduction. Frogs are carefully separated by genetics and population of origin, so each can be released back into its native range and preserve healthy genetic lines.

“I think that we have some responsibility to give the animals the best chance that they could possibly have,” Lundy said, “but this is certainly a species that without a good amount of human intervention would not exist to this day.”

Much of the aquarium’s work is now focused on an even more elusive threat than fire: chytrid fungus, a microscopic pathogen that attacks the keratin in amphibian skin, blocking the salt absorption frogs rely on and eventually causing cardiac arrest. It has driven amphibian populations to collapse worldwide, and mountain yellow-legged frogs appear especially vulnerable to it.

“Some amphibian species over time have developed a resistance to chytrid, and so part of the intention of growing so many animals is hoping to find what gene that is that introduces some chytrid resistance,” Lundy said. Researchers are testing whether frogs can be inoculated before release, or whether introducing different microbes to their skin might help them fend off the fungus on their own.

Tadpoles swim in a tank at the Aquarium of the Pacific as they are raised before being released into the local mountains, Tuesday, Sept., 15, 2026

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Thomas R. Cordova

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Long Beach Post

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Lundy has now been on three of the aquarium’s release trips, watching frogs she has cared for — some for years — carried up into the mountains and set loose into the streams they were bred to repopulate. It is, she says, a strange kind of joy.

“It’s a little bittersweet because, oh no, I’ve been taking care of you for so long, but that is the point, so it feels a little bit like Christmas Day,” Lundy said.

Not every frog leaves the same way. Some, she said, shoot off into the current without so much as a pause. Others linger at the water’s edge beside her for a few minutes before finally disappearing beneath the surface.

“Almost feels like they’re saying goodbye,” she said.

Keno’s Restaurant in Anaheim Hills is a family-run business with a vintage feel — and a 15-pound burrito on the menu.

General Manager Shauna Reyes joined Austin Cross on AirTalk, LAist 89.3's daily news show, to talk about what customers can expect at the decades-old steakhouse that has a cafe twist.

About the owners

Vintage photos of Keno's, back when it first opened, and was a 24-hour restaurant.

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Courtesy Greg Rogers

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Keno's originally opened in 1972, gaining enough popularity to expand into a small chain of restaurants. Gus Cooper helped build and operate the Anaheim Hills location since its opening in 1980. The Anaheim Hills location eventually changed hands to Gus' nephew, Steve Cooper, in 1993. Steve Cooper and his family have been running Keno's ever since.

What it's like being a Keno's customer

Photo of Keno's lounge and steakhouse section.

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Courtesy Greg Rogers

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According to Reyes, the ambiance and customer connections are what set Keno's apart.

You can experience the cafe, with a bustling diner feel, or step into their steakhouse, which has a fireplace Reyes says was inspired by the Peppermill in Las Vegas.

Restaurant details

• Keno’s has a live event schedule that includes solo acoustic sets and a Frank Sinatra cover artist.
• In addition to the 15-pound burrito, you can also find a 32-ounce Tomahawk steak on the menu.

Menu items we tried

• The Lumberjack Breakfast
• Monte Cristo
• California Chicken Sandwich
• Tomahawk Steak
  

What should we try next?

What should we try next?