A Close-Up Look At People Who Matter : Students Get Together for TreePeople

When a group of junior high students from Malibu and South-Central Los Angeles met at a charred canyon that looked more like the surface of the moon than the Santa Monica Mountains, magic happened, said Christyne Imhoff.

“Their jaws all dropped,” said Imhoff, the major organizer of the volunteer firestorm restoration project begun by TreePeople in February, 1994.

The two different groups of students had plenty of experiences to share about the Northridge earthquake. But fire was something they both had in common.

Just as the Malibu students had lived through the wildfires of November, 1993, the students from Edison Junior High School in South-Central lived through fires from the riots of April, 1992.

“Both had different fire experiences and had to share the experiences,” said Imhoff, an independent contractor with TreePeople’s environmental education program.

Planting the seedlings on the blackened ground became a form of therapy, she said.

A month later, the Malibu group came to Edison to plant trees on campus and to continue friendships that began at Red Rock Canyon.

“We saw them unite,” said Andy Lipkis, president of TreePeople.

Bringing people together is a big part of the TreePeople philosophy.

Lipkis began TreePeople in 1973, at first using friends’ back yards to grow seedlings. Today, the group has 21 full-time and part-time employees and commands a corps of more than 1,000 volunteers from a former fire station at the top of Coldwater Canyon.

The fire station was founded in the 1920s as a base for the city’s mountain fire patrols and, coincidentally, was once the only station to have a tree nursery.

TreePeople is continuing a tradition of using tree plantings to create natural fire barriers that began decades ago. But the group’s aim is to educate the public about the use of trees in restoring the environment and preventing fire disasters.

When the wildfires swept through the Santa Monica Mountains and Altadena in the fall of 1993, TreePeople could only sit back and wait as donations streamed into the agency and volunteers clamored to help.

“We knew when the fire was over, the real work was going to be needed,” Lipkis said.

Starting in the spring of 1994, about 700 TreePeople volunteers--including the Malibu and South-Central students--planted 2,500 trees and seedlings in six fire ravaged spots in Santa Monica and Altadena.

The plantings were focused primarily on recreational areas. Wild land was left untouched so the natural cycle of rebirth from fires was undisturbed. When fire burns the ground, the dormant seedbeds are released and new plants will sprout.

The volunteer effort harks back to a pioneer tradition, in which a community comes together to help each other in the event of a disaster and with TreePeople, the volunteers often cross social and political lines unexpectedly.

“There’s no partisan politics here,” said Lipkis, adding that even the word “environmentalist” had been resisted for years. On a rare occasion, some volunteers started comparing their political views.

“There were several people who found they were completely opposite politically and were shocked and horrified,” said Lipkis, who has seen his group draw environmentalist students together with outdoor “four-wheel-drive club” enthusiasts.

“Maybe we should just have a hard and fast rule not to talk politics,” he said.

After all, Lipkis noted, politics is what drives people apart. Nature--even out of a disaster--can have an entirely different effect, as Imhoff saw after the 1993 wildfires.

“It jump-started a whole new reason to pull people together,” she said.