Environment

Starting this week, Whole Foods shoppers in Oakland can pick up nutrition and fitness tips to go with their groceries. The natural food retailer has just launched the Wellness Club—a program that offers classes, workshops, lectures and a 10 percent discount on food products that the program deems whole, unprocessed and healthy. Oakland’s Lake Merritt store is the only Whole Foods location on the West Coast to host the pilot program, which will operate in five sites throughout the country. The Dedham, Massachusetts and Chicago, Illinois programs began earlier this summer while the New York City and Princeton, New Jersey pilots are set to launch this fall.

Giant dove puppets made from bed sheets were lofted high by youth brandishing them as signs of peace at this Sunday’s Roots & Shoots International Day of Peace event at the Oakland Zoo. The doves, held together by wooden poles and duct tape, their large eyes outlined with acrylic paint, looked down over the meadow as hundreds of attendees turned the ninth annual celebration into a day-long festival engaging youth in educational arts and crafts activities, like making piñatas for the primates at the zoo.

The sounds and smells of the bustling Coliseum swap meet—frustrated honking from the overcrowded parking lot and the hot fried dough aroma of fresh churros—drifted over Seminary Creek Saturday morning, as volunteers clad in neon-yellow work vests trolled its steep banks looking not for a bargain, but for trash.

Oaklanders dragged furniture and plants into the street on Friday, transforming parking spots into miniature parks—or “parklets”—for International PARK(ing) Day.

More than a dozen business and community groups will haul furniture and plants into parking spaces this weekend, establishing miniature curbside parks on the road in front of Oakland shops. In conjunction with Friday’s International PARK(ing) Day, participating groups are building “parklets” to add green public spaces to urban landscapes.

Every summer, from June into September, Lake Merritt is goose territory. The problem, some park visitors say, is what they leave behind – feathers and droppings, which cover the grass and smear the sidewalk, especially around Lakeside Park, during the summer months, when visits to the park peak.

Oakland resident Kendra Poma said she noticed food swaps—local barering meetups for gardeners and cooks—sprouting up all over the country. “I couldn’t find one happening in Oakland,” she said. So she started one.

Touted by locals as the center of the medical marijuana industry, Oakland seems a fitting host for the nation’s first marijuana outdoor street festival: the two-day International Cannabis and Hemp Expo, which opened its doors Saturday.

To chants of “Si se puede!” eight young people stood smiling on stage at the New Parish club in downtown Oakland on Thursday night. They were there to tell the stories of the farmers and community members they had met while on a road trip across California to promote farm bill reform and to encourage young people to support new farm-related legislation.