Article Pitch

I’d like to write an article about integration of native plant species into spaces to promote biodiversity particularly in the LA area. This idea is in line with the Cara Buckley article, but I wanted to look into the ways rewilding can be used in more public spaces. For sources I was planning to attend one of the Friends of the Ballona Wetlands “Grow Native!” Events in the discovery park (the next one is April 12) to report on their educational outreach through that program and the park itself. Additionally one of my coworkers is a bio major who has told me about her professor’s involvement in using native plants in a park setting, and she has offered to connect me with said professor who could serve as a second source. I think I would like to do this article as half photo essay, half written, just because the topic is fairly complex and I am not confident I will be able to capture the right photos to explain it properly on their own. What makes me uniquely qualified to tell this story is my personal involvement in habitat restoration as well as the fact that my senior thesis project in design was focused on a similar subject. My previous experience sets me up for a solid basis in the concepts of ecosystem interactions and the importance of biodiversity, and this story would be a way to delve deeper into a tangible, local extension of that. This would probably best fit in an LA-based publication given the locality of the story, so potentially the LA Times ( I am admittedly not the most familiar with the available options).