The Green Team
Andy Lipkis, the founder of TreePeople, is standing in the middle of a neat lawn on a shady stretch of West 50th Street. “I’d like for every home in Los Angeles to do this,” he says admiringly.
With its rich carpet of drought-tolerant St. Augustine grass bordered by a shiny box hedge and graceful yellow lilies, the yard qualifies for a magazine cover--but that isn’t what Lipkis means.
The roof drain on the 1920s bungalow has been elongated to divert water to the lawn, which has been lowered by six inches to become a retaining basin. Rainfall now soaks into the earth, instead of gushing to the street and finally the ocean.
“You’ve got a couple thousand gallons of water storage here,” he says happily. In the backyard, gutters and downspouts carry rainwater through a filter and into two large underground cisterns controlled by a pump to provide slow irrigation. Finally, grass clippings are gathered to become mulch and compost.
This is the Lipkis dream house--a residence redesigned to capture, save and reuse rainwater.
That’s what has been achieved at the demonstration house in South-Central. And Lipkis, never a man to think small, wants to extend this rain recycling concept to every residence in Los Angeles.
For a warmup, he has engineered the greening of 400 school playgrounds, where trees and grass will replace asphalt. And he is working on plans, like the South-Central demonstration house, for schools, businesses and residences. Two school projects are under construction. At Broadous Avenue School in Pacoima, rainwater will be captured in a sunken lawn and returned to the ground-water table. And at the Open Charter School on Osage Avenue in Los Angeles, all the campus runoff, which goes into one drain after passing over a polluted parking lot, will be captured, filtered, stored in underground cisterns and used for irrigation.
“Andy would like to retrofit the entire city of Los Angeles,” chuckles his wife, Kate, 45.
“We have a vision that could really change L.A. for the better, and it involves everyone,” he declares, unfazed. He’d like to see every house retrofitted with the lowered lawns, extended drains and cisterns of the demonstration house.
For Andy and Kate Lipkis, whose nonprofit TreePeople--founded by Andy in L.A. 26 years ago--has become a global model for environmental citizen action, the simple act of planting a tree is not enough. Now they want the trees they plant and the houses they retrofit to be part of a total system--what they call a “sustainable watershed.” The bottom line: a city that functions as its own ecosystem, dramatically reducing flooding, drought and pollution.
The two have been partners in crusading for a green revolution since 1982 when they met in Australia, where Kate was an advertising copywriter and Andy was speaking at a conference. They were married a year later in the TreePeople park here, a black walnut tree serving as the chupa.
As president and vice president of TreePeople, respectively, Andy and Kate toured the country for Earth Day in 1990 with their handbook, “The Simple Act of Planting a Tree.”
Still a team, they have altered their roles in recent years. “Andy’s working on this immense scale, and I am working on the micro level,” says Kate, who has scaled back for more time at home--a Mar Vista frame house shaded by fruit trees and berry bushes--and involvement with their children, Phoebe, 13, and Henry, 7.
The two insist on carving out time for family, making individual “dates” with each child. Andy, 44, does a 5 a.m. workout so he can drive Henry to school, and the family dinner hour is almost sacred. Cooking is shared: Andy has been a chef since 15 when he took a French cooking course, and he prides himself on curries, marinades and “creating something excellent out of leftovers.”
“We have powerful conversations over cooking the carrots,” Kate says.
“She is living what we preach--she is walking our talk,” says her husband.
It’s a perfect match, says longtime friend and TreePeople staffer Christyne Imhoff. “He’s a passionate visionary who has founded an organization to channel all that amazing energy into. She’s the balance who can stop him and say, ‘Look, that’s not important. You get home and spend time with your family.’
“I can tell you, though, that when things get a little tough, Katie steps in and writes the grants. She is there to help.”
Kate, who sends her husband off at least once a year for a week of retreat (“He just comes back with bigger ideas than ever”), says they regularly experience burnout. “From a family perspective, we need a little balance here, so I started doing the volunteer aspect.
“I went through the whole [citizen training] and learned a lot,” says Kate, referring to TreePeople’s Citizen Forester program. She is showing off her handiwork at the Palms Middle School, where their daughter is a student. Last year, Kate organized sixth-graders for a one-day massive tree planting there.
(While funding for that project came from the Sony Green Fund, which has supported school plantings, Kate’s other residential plantings have been financed by private contributions. “Part of being a Citizen Forester is getting creative about raising money: Plantings cost a minimum of $100 a tree.”)
Group Must Ensure Trees Survive
TreePeople, whose Citizen Foresters have planted more than 1.5 million trees in Los Angeles during the last 26 years, is still dedicated to trees, Andy says. “But we have to make sure the trees we plant actually survive and produce the benefits needed.”
Thus, the sustainable watershed: Because trees function best in an ecosystem--”like acupuncture needles to help the healing”--Lipkis is leading a visionary crusade to adapt the city’s entire landscape. It’s the biggest stretch to date for this resourceful environmental group, located on 44 wooded acres at Coldwater Canyon and Mulholland Drive. Here, a staff of 45 juggles dozens of programs from an office complex that once housed a fire station.
At the center of the activity is the nonstop Andy Lipkis, whose activities range from a White House meeting to a milk carton-mulching workshop at a local school.
“Andy’s constantly percolating with new ideas--some don’t work but many do,” says Jim Hardie, serving his second term on the TreePeople board of directors. “Now he comes in and says we are going to retrofit Los Angeles to make it sustainable. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it is huge.”
“It’s huge all right,” agrees Kate, “But one of Andy’s big talents is his ability to synthesize a heady idea into something that is grounded.”
These days, the prevailing “heady idea” is TREES--or Trans-Agency Resources for Environmental and Economic Sustainability. The goals:
* Reduce Los Angeles’ dependency on imported water by up to 50% while keeping the city green.
* Reduce the threat of flooding and the amount of toxic runoff into the ocean.
* Eliminate the flow of green waste to landfills, cutting their load by 30%.
* Beautify neighborhoods in ways that create up to 50,000 jobs in new “green industries” such as relandscaping property and installing cisterns.
It may sound like tilting at windmills, but with a typical blend of vision and practicality, Lipkis has tracked down $1 million in grants and donations, and lobbied private and public agencies to accomplish the following:
In May 1997, he convened a two-day workshop at the unfinished Getty for 75 top environmentalists, urban foresters, architects and other specialists. They developed, and have published, a set of “Best Management Practices” for landscape redesign and architectural retrofits.
Step two, in 1998, was to build the demonstration house.
And third was a cost-benefit analysis: Two hundred scientists took two years to compile a database of 16,000 pages. Now Lipkis can flip open his laptop, input any street in Los Angeles, and come up with the economic benefits of planting more trees and retrofitting there.
“His program is sensible,” says Mary Nichols, California’s secretary of resources. Although her first thought was, “Too big!” she has taken a closer look and concedes, “Andy takes the fact that we have misaligned our priorities--we lose water we should be saving and we air-condition buildings that should be cooler to begin with--and he shows us a different way to allocate money.”
And, almost as a sideline, he helped engineer the greening of those 400 schools in Los Angeles. “We think we’re doing God’s work--it’s one of the most important environmental things that has happened in Los Angeles in 50 years,” says businessman Steve Soboroff, senior advisor to Mayor Richard Riordan and chairman of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s school bond oversight committee.
It was probably the coincidence of a lifetime, Soboroff says, that just as the district was preparing to spend $187 million installing 60-million square feet of new asphalt at the schools, Lipkis presented a greening program to plant trees that would shade the buildings and reduce air-conditioning costs enough to pay for maintenance of lawns and trees.
“We are replacing a third of the area with trees and lawns--we literally stopped the bulldozers,” Soboroff says. “Andy volunteered to oversee it. We are talking about the largest landscaping and greening project in the history of Los Angeles for no additional money. Now you will have less heat and pollution and a soft environment instead of a hard asphalt surface. It probably affects 350,000 children a day.”
Along with some help, Lipkis says. TreePeople is working with the Hollywood Beautification Team, L.A. Conservation Corps and Northeast Trees in an additional greening program called Cool Schools. The trees are being paid for by the Department of Water and Power. “We couldn’t work without partners,” he says.
Family Inclined to Activism
Lipkis, raised in Baldwin Hills, comes by social activism naturally. His father, Leon Lipkis, an optometrist, helped create Crenshaw Neighbors, and his mother, Joyce, was active in Democratic politics. At 13, Andy was working for Eugene McCarthy for president. “I wasn’t a kid without power. I could sit and craft a press release and have an impact.”
At 15, he organized fellow summer campers to plant smog-tolerant trees in the San Bernardino Mountains, where trees were dying from polluted air.
That was the start of TreePeople.
The retrofit project grew out of the 1992 riots following the verdict in the police beating trial, he said. He was stunned by the culture of violence revealed by the riots. “We had promised that trees can do a lot--clean the air, feed people and make neighborhoods safe. Even though we had been planting trees and developing community interest in neighborhoods all over South-Central, those dozens and dozens of little success stories were not enough. TreePeople was not entirely meeting the promise.”
It was a year after the riots that he learned the Army Corps of Engineers planned to spend half a billion dollars to raise the walls of the L.A. River. “A half-billion dollars to raise the walls to dump the water we so badly need--that seemed the height of insanity to me.”
It all came together in an “epiphanic moment” when he was driving from a board meeting of the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, discussing jobs for inner-city youth. “. . . I saw the waste here with the river walls . . . no jobs . . . and whomp! Suddenly there was a flash of recognition. I thought, ‘I can’t sit here and see these connections and not do something.’ ”
TreePeople works with the city Stormwater Division, Department of Water and Power, U.S. Forest Service, L.A. County Public Works, Los Angeles Unified School District, Environmental Protection Agency, city of Santa Monica and local community organizations. Comments longtime lawyer friend David Abel: “If he can link all these agencies--all kinds of institutions that don’t ordinarily talk to one another--he can have a profound impact on this community.”
“I see myself as a pathfinder,” Lipkis says, recalling a visit to see the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’ awkward, gargantuan wooden plane. “It only flew a little bit, but eventually allowed very elegant engineers to come in and build 747s.”
And he’s fed by the inspiration of a 21st century Los Angeles that “won’t just be a place where people come to take. I want my kids to live in a society that is safer and healthier because people are giving their energy back--to the city, the culture and the Earth that is sustaining and feeding them.”
* Details of the TREES project are online at https://www.treepeople.org/trees.
* Connie Koenenn can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com
