Citizen Forester

Trees and industry do mix.

After that initial success, however, Lipkis fought his destiny. “I spent three years in conflict with myself,” he says, “because I had this passion, but I thought I was a freak. I thought I was meant to grow up and be something professional.” He did a few semesters of college at Sonoma State, but the drive to plant trees — and the opportunities to secure funding for his California Conservation Project — exerted too strong a pull. Early on, Lipkis and his band of citizen foresters had been dubbed the “tree people” by the camper volunteers and others who worked with the group; the name stuck and Lipkis officially changed the group’s name. TreePeople quickly became the nation’s pre-eminent motivating force in the urban forestry movement, and now when Lipkis calls the papers, he gets a quick response. Today he has gotten me to come out and see one of his latest obsessions. But we are not in a forest or wooded urban park. There is barely a tree to be seen here in Sun Valley, on the far northeastern edge of the San Fernando Valley, at first glance a barren landscape of concrete, telephone poles and abandoned gas stations, pockmarked with spent gravel pits and landfills that receive 80 percent of Los Angeles’ trash. If Westsiders come to this predominantly Latino neighborhood for anything, it is to visit Sun Valley’s Theodore Payne Native Plant Nursery on Tuxford Avenue. But they’d be wise to shop on sunny days: Unlike most of the rest of Los Angeles, where devastating floods were largely eliminated by a single-minded U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the late ’30s and early ’40s, Sun Valley can still be cut off from the world by too much water. Its miles of rain-damaged surface streets occasionally collapse into sinkholes, like the one that swallowed Rory Shaw, the director of L.A.’s emergency sewer repair division, in February. “This is a community built without storm drains,” Lipkis tells me as we ride in his cornflower-blue Prius. “There are homes here built in creeks.” At Tuxford and San Fernando Road, a bleakly sunken intersection that makes the papers nearly every time it rains — usually with a car submerged to its windshield — Lipkis maneuvers his Prius into a U-turn and says, almost apologetically, “I used to have a joke. I used to say that if 100 dogs urinated here at the same time, there’d be a flood.” He’s not joking anymore. Like the proverbial Dutch boy up all night with his finger in the dike, Lipkis has spent the better part of the last seven years trying to help fix Sun Valley’s flooding problem with an ambitious flood-management project. The idea centers on the notion that water in Southern California is an expensive and precious resource, and if some of the 30 or so inches that fall here in a wet winter could be filtered and stored for drier months, the watershed system would eventually save the city money. If it turns out the way he imagines, the watershed plan will not only drain, filter and store the water that collects in the streets between the Tujunga Wash and the Burbank Airport but also improve the living conditions of this chronically neglected community with acres of recreational green space at the Sun Valley Park and Recreation Center. Certainly, Lipkis’ project is a far cry from the $42 million storm drain the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works had in mind just a year before he turned up. Back then, Sun Valley’s water was scheduled to be disposed of in the tradition established by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1938: into the ocean as quickly as possible, ferrying whatever bacteria and trash it picked up along the way in concrete channels. The new plan involves years of engineering, large- and small-scale urban forestry projects and replacing miles of asphalt with “permeable” concrete. The water will percolate back into the Valley’s cavernous basin, the source of 15 percent of the city’s water. When all its phases are completed, its budget may top $300 million — six times the original county plan, but with six times the sources of funding. Says Lipkis, “It’s attracting a lot of resources.” But what does all this talk of flood management have to do with trees? The roots of the initiative go back to 1978. It was a particularly heavy rain season, and TreePeople volunteers went out into the storm-ravaged streets to support overwhelmed rescue crews. “We organized an army of 900 volunteers,” Lipkis says, “everybody from ham-radio operators to environmentalists to students and carpenters. They practically hated each other, but they all managed to work together because they were saving people’s lives.” They worked for three days in 1978 and returned for another 10 days in 1980, sandbagging homes, diverting mudslides and coordinating evacuation efforts. They saved 1,200 homes and acquired a new nickname: the MudPeople. “[Those days] gave us firsthand experience with flood management,” Lipkis remembers. “We saw the pain, we saw the loss, we saw the cost management.” Lipkis began seeing trees as more than smog-clearing, aesthetically pleasing shelter. “Trees are our superhero multitasking partners in fighting pollution, global warming, flooding and drought. We have not made pumps powerful enough to move water as far as they can. And they move it every day. They are water-caching, self-mulching ecosystems unto themselves. “If you were to go under a native oak tree like Old Glory and dig,” he says of the Santa Clarita oak that treesitter John Quigley tried to save a couple years back, “you would find five feet of highly conditioned soil. That whole area functions like a tank, like a sponge, like a water-purification system, like a groundwater-recharge system.” An oak 100 feet in diameter can store 57,000 gallons of water in one 12-inch flash flood, or one rainy season. “But you take that tree away,” Lipkis says, “and many things happen — you lose the mulch, the water all runs off, you have a flood. You have to build major flood-control systems — major concrete channels. You’re also robbing that water from our water supply. Instead of recharging, it carries valuable soil and pollution to the river and to the bay where it can harm human health, from swimmers to people who eat the fish. “That one tree,” Lipkis concludes, “is very, very powerful.”