Apr-May 97

The TreePeople

Since 1973, TreePeople, founded by Andy Lipkis, has been working with Los Angeles residents to regreen their streets, promote individual commitment, and help develop a sense of community among diverse groups of people. TreePeople has been emulated in cities all over the country.

Urban forestry has exploded into a movement of citizen forestry, an incredible vehicle for people to take some power back and make their community responsible for managing the environment. TreePeople puts people back in charge, letting each person, each family unit, each household unit become manager of their whole ecosystem, planting trees on their streets, parking lots, schoolyards, often cutting and removing concrete first. We train people to be citizen foresters, to get the permits required by the city, to pull neighbors together to create a community vision, and then change the way their neighborhood looks and functions.

One of the first steps is to break that concrete. There is nothing more satisfying than to work with kids who are angry-sometimes gang kids, sometimes urban youth-give them the sledge hammers, give them the power to make change happen. It's visible, physical, and immediate! Once they learn how to plan a project, let them go after the concrete and smash it and remove it and see something growing in its place. Our program, aside from planting in neighborhoods and schools, also gives away thousands of fruit trees-apples, peaches, plums, nectarines, citrus and now even some mangoes-to low income families who are getting their food usually through food banks. Some are creating community orchards in their churches or their food bank areas. Others are just taking the trees home, sometimes to grow in pots.

There is incredible productivity within the soil underneath all that cement, just waiting to be tapped. It's a partnership with nature that we're missing. We have humans with all this human energy in cities, and what do we do? We warehouse it! We tell people, "There's no place for you and we can't contain your energy, so we'll try to contain it in prisons." That energy can be used for healing, not just the physical environment, but healing people. The same thing is true of the soil. There's tremendous energy there, and I like to think of TreePeople as that bridge-bringing trees and people together.

Los Angeles didn't use to be a desert, but it was a fairly dry Mediterranean climate. We still had a lot of trees. In fact, notes from the explorers indicate that they could walk from one end of the San Fernando Valley to the other and never be without the shade of an oak tree. That is clearly not the case today. We've taken what was a beautiful native land and overpaved it with concrete and homes. When it rains, the toxins that we spread around the street, over our lawns and throughout the city, are flushed out into the storm drains and into the river and out into the bay, a phenomenon that is repeated in cities all across the country. Even when we have trees, we have stripped away their forest function that managed the watershed, prevented floods, prevented pollution.

Remember, the tree is also below the ground, including the roots, the soil, and the mulch. When you get into pollution cleanup and water filtration, you understand how first the canopy-the leaves of the tree-catches and slows the rainfall. Imagine that whole canopy to be a spacious container holding, perhaps, twenty or thirty thousand gallons. The rain comes through, is slowed down and gradually released into the soil. If there is mulch and a layer of dust under an urban tree, as there would be in a natural forest, pollutants start to filter out of it. Microorganisms in the soil can slow down the whole flood hydrograph and filter pollutants out.

If you simply put trees in the ground and don't think about mulching and recreating a human-made, forest type environment, then you miss that benefit. Cities are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to try to prevent or clean up storm-water pollution without understanding how their natural ecosystem works and how trees can help. Unfortunately, such insane policies lead to fewer jobs and less sustainability.

There is a way to bring back a much healthier environment and a healthier economy with appropriate tree planting. Los Angeles alone spends thirty to forty million dollars a year to try to clean up its storm water pollution. Storm water is rain water, so any pollutants that we put on our property and anything that we drop in our streets, sidewalks, lawns, parking lots-from auto exhaust to lawn sprays to dog droppings-all gets washed into the storm drains and into the rivers and on to some body of water. Here in Southern California it's the Santa Monica Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Trees can catch the water so the storm drains don't fill up; trees can trap a lot of those pollutants so some of the microbes can actually treat them. We can begin to recreate a forest environment and even inoculate the soil to try to trap and biomediate some pollutants.

When we built the cities we didn't understand natural cycles, so we paved them. Most of the Los Angeles basin, perhaps two-thirds of the land surface, has been paved. The results are stunning. The Army Corps of Engineers lined our natural river with concrete in order to prevent flooding. Then about fifteen years ago we discovered that we had overpaved, that so much water falls from the rain and flushes to the river so quickly that the river may overflow next time there's a fifty-year flood and that will inundate the southern half of L.A. County. The Army Corps of Engineers' response to this was to recommend spending a half a billion dollars to raise the concrete walls of the L.A. River still more in order to prevent flooding! But forestry is watershed management; therefore urban forestry is urban watershed management. If we simply began to unpave the city, strategically planting trees and working on other ways of diverting the water, the money could lead to sustainable jobs and enhance the water supply, instead of just sending polluted water more efficiently to the ocean.

Imagine how planting trees could protect our kids from overexposure to ultraviolet rays. There is room to plant trees in schoolyards and to plant trees in parking lots. There is a way for the water from the schoolyard or the parking lot to flow to the vegetation so it waters the trees and so the trees can help capture that water. But there are a lot of spaces for trees that we're not allowed to plant. There's one huge parking lot in Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium, a massive area of blacktop. Imagine if trees could be shading it, preventing it from being a source of pollution and a heat island. But the insurance company won't let them allow us to plant it because someone might trip on a root, on a crack. They tell us they spend $100,000 twice a year filling cracks every time the insurance company inspects them because of the threat of liability. So that is a huge, very real barrier. The City of Los Angeles says it gets sued an average of one trip-and-fall lawsuit per day.

About 15 years ago along the Ventura Freeway in San Fernando Valley, miles and miles were lined on both sides with tall, beautiful silk oak trees. Because one of them dropped a branch on a parked car, 1500 of these trees nearly 100 feet tall were clearcut in a matter of months-a big loss. The fear and greed of our litigious society is a symptom of our removal from nature. If people were more plugged into participating in the natural cycles, they would find a greater sense of peace, a greater sense of safety. Nature is one of the best ways to build a spiritual awareness.

The human dimensions of this project are extremely important. There is a direct correlation to jobs and to all the water that Southern California is sending off to the ocean in storm-drain channels. Even though Los Angeles only receives about 10 or 12 inches of rainfall a year, that's half the water it needs-enough to water all the landscape areas. The City of Los Angeles spends close to a billion dollars a year for water. If it spent half that money on jobs, employing people to be urban watershed managers, planting trees, mulching them, taking care of them, and harvesting the water locally and producing the water locally, our initial figures say that we could create jobs for thirty to fifty thousand people!

We're proposing to retrofit, with mulch, properties with trees, and also with some kind of cistern, a water catchment and reuse device. In a forest, mulch is the branches, the leaves-everything that falls off the trees on the forest floor. That nice soft sponge is a storage device for rainwater that releases it slowly into the soil. In a lot of areas around this country, mulch is how the water gets back into the aquifer to be brought back up by wells. But mulch is now what everyone is throwing away. It's in the landfills. Thirty percent of what's in the trash trucks going to the landfills is called "green waste." It's what would be mulch-yard trimmings, lawn trimmings, tree trimmings. It should be ground up and put back in the soil instead of going into landfills. We spend a lot of money and make a lot of smog transporting green waste to fill up urban canyons when it should never leave the property.

In Southern California and elsewhere, anyone who has grown up on a farm or in rural areas knows about cisterns, capturing water from the roofs, storing it in tanks, and using it for a water supply or for irrigation. There are actually ways to build a new high-tech cistern to store thousands of gallons of water on each property.

What we're talking about here is sustainability. It's not too complex. The real challenge is that we have bred the sense out of everybody. People have an innate awareness about how the world works, but as we've urbanized, we've bred that out of people, taken away their sense of responsibility and their capability. It's waiting to be used, but if it's not harnessed, it turns violent and becomes a problem with our population. You can't package and sell the experience of the wilderness, so there aren't very powerful voices screaming for it. But it is right there and it's loaded with answers.

A lot of people, even people who are working very passionately on big environmental issues, will often dismiss that simple act of planting, thinking it's not enough. But it is the basic seed to get people active, and it's the seed of environmental justice. When we see people and neighborhoods that are not connected and that have never met each other begin to look at how to make the neighborhood better, they get out of their homes, out of inaction, out of just sitting commenting and complaining, and come together to begin dreaming, to take action together, then realize that they can rely on each other, realize they have the power to make a change. It builds a whole mechanism for the neighborhood to be organized and to begin to respond to other threats. There are sometimes government funds to help and sometimes there aren't. The good thing is that it doesn't require government money. It takes people saying, "Hey, we want to support this and we have a program."

The wonderful thing is the flip side. Breaking up concrete to plant trees is also very gentle. A lot of people say to us: Why don't you do more radical work? Actually, radical is a forestry term-the root that comes right out of the seed. Why is it radical? Why is it powerful? Because that little root from the tiniest, tiniest seed has the power to actually break rocks and to get through concrete and take hold. The largest trees we have in this country and the largest in the world are redwoods and they come from some of the smallest seeds that exist on the planet. No matter how small or weak people think they might be, it is action that begins to take root, that begins to build strength. Commentary doesn't do it. It's important for people to take political action, to vote with their feet, to be out there, because you can never take that away. It builds strength for the long term.

There's no sense in planting any tree if you're not going to be there to care for it. Most of our cities have created environments that are too harsh for trees to grow on their own. They need people to care for them and to protect them. The climate is too harsh, or the physical environment-heat, drought, wind-is too harsh or the social environment-angry people- is too harsh. When you turn that around and give people a chance to use their dreams to reclaim the city, then you succeed. Many trees are killed by smog. In fact, that's why I got started. The smog from Los Angeles was killing the San Bernardino Forest, the forest that surrounds L.A. There are trees that can actually live in the smog, that can filter the smog particles and some of the gases out of the air without dying, so you have to use the right tree in the right place. There is no one tree that works all over this country. There's not even one tree that works throughout the state of California. You need to link up with people who have horticultural skills, hopefully a local nursery person; certainly your state forester-there's one in every state-can help you choose trees that are more tolerant of pollution.

There are tree organizations all over the country. We don't have any official chapters because like native trees, we share our pollen and share how we go about doing our work. That's how people get started all over the country. There are several tree groups in the San Francisco Bay Area. Probably the largest in San Francisco is Friends of the Urban Forest. They can refer you to other groups locally. There are fifty nonprofits now all over the country. There's a group called Trees New York who are very active in planting. The City of L.A. has been doing some great stuff. More and more we're seeing abandoned alleys that were running between homes being converted to parks by citizens in cooperation with the city.

You can actually plant trees in honor and memory of people by dedicating trees to them. For a $15 contribution, you can call us and get a certificate honoring a person and give trees for Christmas or for holidays. Or you can actually plant a grove of trees for a $50 contribution. You can reach us at 818-753-TREE to order trees or get more information. TreePeople has also produced an 8-minute video that has an impact on urban kids, lets them see their power to turn the city around. That's available from TreePeople at $10 a copy. You can reach TreePeople at 12601 Mulholland Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210, (818) 753-4600.

Material for this article was excerpted and edited, with permission, from Jerry Brown's interview of Andy Lipkis on the We The People radio program.

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