Citizen Forester

Photos by Tom JohnsonIamtheLorax.Ispeakforthetrees. Ispeakforthetrees,forthetreeshavenotongues. AndI’maskingyou,sir,atthetopofmylungs— hewasveryupsetasheshoutedandpuffed— What’sthatTHINGyou’vemadeoutofmyTruffulatuft? —Dr. Seuss, The Lorax High up at the top of Coldwater Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains, the TreePeople work in yurts, large, round tent-cabins based on a 2,500-year-old Mongolian design. Wood-plank paths link the yurts, and much like hikers on a remote trail, everyone who passes on the thoroughfares smiles and says hello. There is always food somewhere; once a month, there’s a potluck brunch. “Andy was up here on staff appreciation day last year in his chef’s hat making pad Thai on a one-burner stove,” says Laurie Kaufman, TreePeople’s director of public education, about the group’s founder and president, Andy Lipkis. When there’s coffee on, it’s strong (Lipkis roasts his own beans). When I visit the headquarters near the end of January, Lipkis has just lost 35 pounds off his short, compact frame.“I tried all the New Age ways of eating,” he tells me, “but nothing ever worked.” He finally gave into convention and now uses the Weight Watchers system of counting points for everything he eats. The science of it thrills him. “Someone like me, of my height and bone structure, I get 22 points for the day,” says Lipkis, 50, who has a full head of hair and beard flecked with gray. “A bagel, an ordinary, plain bagel — do you know how many points that is? Seven! But if you get the whole-grain Western bagels from Trader Joe’s, those are only one point.”

To read Judith Lewis' articles about rain collectors click here. To read her guide to L.A. area Earth Day celebrations click here. A young woman comes into the office Lipkis shares with six other staffers and offers a piece of vegan coffee cake. “How many points do you think it is?” I ask Lipkis. “Oh, it’s pretty high fat,” says the woman. “You put vegetable oil in it?” Lipkis asks. “Yes.” “Oh, too bad! Next time use fruit-juice concentrate. It cuts the point count in half.” Lipkis does diets the way he does everything else: obsessively, to perfection and without prejudicial notions about what might be cool or fashionable. He plants trees with the U.S. Forest Service, plans projects with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works and even accepts awards from presidents named Bush — the first one honored him as the 440th point of light. But through it all he remains the original unrelenting tree hugger, and every story he tells, be it about weight loss or individual power, eventually comes back to trees. “Redwood trees, you know they’re huge — thousands of years old, not vulnerable to fire,” he says with the same soft-spoken delight he uses behind a podium. None of his office mates look up as he continues this speech. I wonder how many times they’ve heard these lines. “But the redwood seed, when it first germinates,” he goes on, “is tiny. It’s nearly microscopic; an ant would crush it. And look at what it becomes. The largest tree in the world.” Andy Lipkis has been a tree person since childhood. In 1965, when he was 10 years old, an apple tree in his Baldwin Hills backyard blossomed in the spring and kept flowering throughout the summer, fall and winter. Young Andy could not contain the secret. He knew that even in Southern California, where people sometimes fail to notice distinct seasons, this was an odd phenomenon and he had to spread the news. So Andy Lipkis called the newspaper. “[I was] trying to get someone out to come and see it,” he says. “And I have in my mind the picture of our tree on the front page.” It’s a charming story, but here’s the twist. Lipkis is quick to tell you that his vision of his apple tree on the front page of the newspaper is just that — a vision. “I don’t really think it ever happened,” he admits. It’s one of the few times Lipkis has failed to get his story told. He wrote his first press release at the age of 12, while working for Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign, and that same year, as a budding environmentalist, set up a neighborhood recycling center on the sidewalk outside his house with a friend. In the summer of 1970, three months after the very first Earth Day, Lipkis joined a leadership program at summer camp in the San Bernardino Mountains, in part to hone his skills as a young organizer. Up in the mountains, a naturalist told the campers that dirty air was killing the trees. “If something wasn’t done,” he remembers the naturalist saying, “they’d all be gone in 30 years.” Lipkis, who had already suffered from the effects of L.A. smog in the days before air-pollution laws (“If you took a deep breath, your lungs burned,” he remembers, “and you couldn’t see the mountains for months”), was determined not to let that happen. He’d found his “personal life mission.” “There were 12 guys and 12 girls in that program, and together we decided to take a piece of dead forest and bring it back. We spent three weeks cultivating a meadow. We took a piece of land in camp that had oil spread on it to keep the dust down. We tore up four inches of turf and planted smog-resistant trees” — incense cedars and Jeffrey pine — “and we made life come back.” Three years after that first tree planting, Lipkis orchestrated an even more ambitious effort he called the California Conservation Project. He ordered 20,000 sugar-pine seedlings from the California Department of Forestry and got several summer camps to agree to plant them. But the plan hit a snag: 18-year-old Lipkis didn’t have the $600 to pay for them, and state law prohibited the forestry department from giving trees away. Quixotically optimistic, Lipkis did what he had been doing off and on since he was a child: He alerted the media. An article in the LosAngelesTimesreported on Lipkis soliciting 50-cent contributions for each tree; within three weeks, he’d raised $10,000, and the forestry department managed after all to donate another 8,000 saplings. The California Conservation Project had scored its first fully funded mission. The experience taught Lipkis that if he could inspire the right allies — and get the media on his side — he could mobilize a force for the benefit of nature. When you put a living thing in the ground and watch it grow and change the landscape, you have material proof of the consequences of your actions; when you do it with 10 other people, you suddenly grasp the meaning of “What if everyone did that?”

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.”