Andy Lipkis

TreePeople – Los Angeles, CA, USA

Andy Lipkis is a practical visionary who has dedicated his life to healing the environment while improving the lives of individuals and communities. He founded TreePeople in Los Angeles in 1973 at age 18 and continues to serve as its President. The TreePeople organization advocates and works to support sustainable urban ecosystems in the Greater Los Angeles area through education, volunteer community-based action, and advocacy. Andy has produced or been featured in numerous TV programs, including the Emmy-award-winning series, How Does Your Garden Grow, the PBS series Edens Lost and Found and The Visionaries, as well as films including Leonardo di Caprio’s The 11th Hour, Dirt! The Movie, Rock the Boat, and Love Thy Nature.

Founded in 1973 by Andy Lipkis, TreePeople is now an outstanding model of “urban community outreach.” Their mission is to bring People and Trees together, by inspiring and supporting communities to plant and care for trees in forests, mountains, parks, and our very own neighborhoods. With on-site educational programs, TreePeople engages policymakers, educators, and communities around the world, to provide a better future for all. Their mission is to encourage that we all take active responsibility for “Re-Greening” the Earth. So far they have successfully brought over 3 Million people together; its environmental education program reaches more than 200,000 students per year.

In the 1980s Lipkis coined the trademarked term “Citizen Forestry” to refer to the thousands of residents TreePeople has trained and supported in organizing their neighborhoods to plant and maintain trees. This term has been adopted by tree-planting organizations throughout the United States. From 1981 to 1984, TreePeople led a successful campaign to inspire the planting of one million trees in Los Angeles in time for the 1984 Summer Olympics. In the 1990s Andy helped guide the creation and successful implementation of L.A.’s curbside recycling program, which has among the nation’s highest participation rates. Furthermore, Andy initiated the T.R.E.E.S. Project in 1993 to promote agency cooperation and citizen involvement to begin managing L.A. as a living watershed. This kicked off with a major design charter, and led to the Sun Valley Watershed Project that successfully deployed green infrastructure to solve a chronic flooding and pollution problems in an urban area of 80,000 people.

In 2004 TreePeople completed construction on one of the nation’s most sustainable buildings, the Center for Community Forestry. This LEED Platinum facility includes a 220,000-gallon cistern that captures, cleans and re-uses rainwater as part of a state-of- the-art campus that serves as a living example of the pathway to urban climate resilience.

With climate change impacts already creating a chronic emergency for American cities, Andy’s work has demonstrated promising new ways for government agencies to collaboratively reshape urban tree canopy and water infrastructure to save lives and grow a more livable future. For example, through Andy’s leadership, water-related agencies have confirmed that LA’s average annual capturable rainfall is sufficient to provide up to half of the city’s current needs. Leading agencies are now collaborating to capture that water, adding it to local supplies while also preventing pollution and flooding.

“Trees need People. People need Trees.”

Website: https://www.treepeople.org/

Video 1: Urban Soil Symposium
Video 2: LA News Piece