TreePeople Imagines Planting Another Million Trees In L.A.

TreePeople is 37 years old. It started by planting trees in L.A.'s urban forest, and now Mayor Villaraigosa would like to plant a million trees and green Los Angeles. What have you learned in the last 37 years that will benefit Los Angeles?

We've learned that tree-planting can, when done right, produce profound environmental, social, and economic healing for a community. But it can't be a random act; you have to plant the right trees in the right place, and do so with objectives- i.e. solving our community's overall livability and environmental goals. If you design the tree-planting campaign to address such problems, amazing things can happen.

The city needs to reduce its water importation. We also need parks and to clean the air. We need to use trees to cool the city down, because one of our largest uses of electricity is for air conditioning. Los Angeles is a heat island where blacktop adds as much as ten extra degrees to basin's temperature. That contributes to more smog and a spike in electrical use during summer. Strategic tree-planting to shade parking lots, school yards, and streets can help reverse that. We have respiratory health issues, and trees can help filter pollutants and produce oxygen.

On the social side we have alienation and fragmented communities.

There's a lot of talent and interest that we can galvanize. People need to understand that they have a huge impact, and nothing will help them to understand that better than coming together to create a community vision around putting trees in their neighborhoods, which will change their streets overnight.

Address Mayor Villaraigosa's Million Trees initiative. Can the promise be realized?

The opportunity is to challenge the whole community to come together-for people to plant at home, to plant their streets, parks, and schools. TreePeople is working with the mayor's office, Rec and Parks, the Street Tree Division, and a number of other outstanding organizations like Northeast Trees, Los Angeles Conservation Corps, Hollywood Beautification-everyone did a lot of planning over the last 18 months and created a strategic plan. Now that plan has to be funded. The Million Trees L.A. staff is now turning it into an operating plan and the work has begun.

Is there money in the mayor's proposed budget for this effort?

I don't know its status right now. I've heard some good news. They're working very hard to raise private money for it, but with the city budget shortfalls, I heard that it's hard. The Rec and Parks Department didn't receive any money for Million Trees. I don't know the status of other departments' requests.

How can urban planning and intelligent investment in Los Angeles' built environment make Los Angeles more sustainable?

There is a huge opportunity to turn this city around by properly using the billions of dollars that we are continuously investing in redevelopment and infrastructure. "Properly" is the key word, and that means recognizing the multiple opportunities that exist with each project. One problem is that most city agencies are still in a single-purpose mode and aren't set up or required to identify these opportunities. Multi-purpose means taking a system-or ecosystem-approach.

We built so much of the city from a single-purpose perspective without realizing that it resulted in an unending war against nature, instead of working with nature's energy and systems. In the frontier environment in which the city was built, we wasted vital resources like water, energy, nutrients, and biomass because there didn't appear to be any cost. But now coping with the results of that wasteful system design including: polluted stormwater, urban flooding, water shortages, air pollution, respiratory disease including several thousand premature deaths each year, are costing us literally billions of dollars each year.

But, the good news is that through smart design-and, I would say, nature-inspired design-we can save energy and water and make the built environment much more healthy and safe. We've seen in our own headquarters that it can be extremely efficient-to cut back the energy we use 90 percent, and we're capturing all the water we need in our model parking lot, water garden, and cistern. If we design with the intent of sustainability, our citywide system would have so much capacity.

Earlier in the decade you tried to work with LAUSD to green their building program and encourage them to evolve from a single-purpose, single-objective strategy to a more holistic approach to building schools and neighborhoods. What have you learned from that experience? What remains to be done?

It's hard to get LAUSD to coordinate and integrate their work. Some folks want to, but others don't seem to. We've actually built some world-class projects, but keeping them alive is a challenge. But it must happen, and I've learned that as the shareholders and funders of our schools and government, we have to insist that the district be responsible, just like the marketplace insists that corporations be responsible. We, as taxpayers, have to hold them accountable to work together.

The district's agenda has to change. One of the district's explicit missions is protecting students' health and safety. The problem is that it doesn't acknowledge health and safety issues. It doesn't fully recognize environmental health and emotional health.

For example, the district has brutalized trees that we planted on many campuses because they think kids might bump into the branches, so they've wiped out the canopy of the trees under the notion of health and safety. But they ignore the U.S. Center for Disease Control, which states that the fastest-growing cancer in this country is skin cancer, and the most at risk population are 14-year-olds, who need to be protected from over exposure to the sun-most elegantly achieved by creating a verdant tree canopy on every campus.

Clearly L.A.'s civic community- School Board, City Council, and business/labor leaders-have not fully weighed in to redefine the public facilities opportunities. What stands in the way of rethinking what a new community school might be?

Once again, city government is built on a single-purpose system, which lacks facilities for coordination and integration. No one in city government has been trained or authorized to do this integrated thinking. Charter rules can occasionally discourage or hamper coordination amongst leaders and commissioners. No one has had the proper tools to evaluate the benefits of coordinated multi-purpose projects. So instead it only appears that there is a large collection of conflicting priorities.

In contrast, TreePeople's charette process puts everyone into a consensus-building environment with excellent facilitation. There's an emerging profession of process facilitators. That doesn't mean "how you run a meeting;" that means how you work with people and their concerns to bring about consensus and agreement that matches each discipline's professional standards-health, education, engineering, etc. Every one of those is legitimate, and we work through a plan that actually meets each discipline's integrity.

What are some examples of how TreePeople's charette process can contribute to planning?

One example is the charette we did ten years ago-and we're getting ready to do a new one-for the first T.R.E.E.S. project, in which we determined how to retrofit Los Angeles' single-family homes, commercial space, apartments, and public land. For the first time ever we brought architects, landscape architects, engineers, and biologists all to the table, and they all had veto power over each other's plans. Each group had a facilitator and worked for four days until they came to consensus on designs that had integrity from each discipline's perspective. Those designs worked so well that the city and county adopted many of them into their official best management practices for stormwater.

More recently, in a process headed by L.A. County Public Works for an ongoing charette in Sun Valley, we've worked with schools, churches, families, and various agencies, including the county and city, to manage the stormwater project team, bringing all their issues to the table and incorporating them into the design. So instead of a single-purpose stormdrain, the community is getting a beautiful, safe, and healthy watershed that includes more parks, trees, green-water and energy conserved, and air and water pollution prevented.

We have also done three charettes for the Inland Empire Utilities Agency, bringing multiple agencies in their service area together. One was the energy design for their headquarters building. They identified their experts, and we wound up producing a sound design in a very short amount of time. One of the resulting buildings turned out to be one of the first buildings in the nation to get certified LEED Platinum.

The charette is a very fast process: instead of taking months passing plans back and forth and vetoing each other, in a matter of hours or days you can go back and forth with everyone in the room together. All TreePeople did was facilitate.

Your charette process, not unlike charettes run by New Schools Better Neighborhoods, has been around for over a decade but has not been taken to scale. What would it take to get these proven planning processes used more often?

I think it will take bold leadership to institute integrated management on a larger scale. I think we have to do it. We are paying a horrible price that we're not confronting every day we move forward without going to a larger scale. Kids are getting hurt; kids are not getting educated. Look how frustrated every parent in LAUSD is.

Illiteracy, stubbornness, and control issues are preventing us from going to a larger scale.

The C40 cities-the largest 40 cities in the world, including L.A.-met in New York this month to compare and contrast their green strategies. What would be the ideal benchmarks by which to measure a city's progress?

I was just talking to the mayor's office about their approach to that meeting. It's important to distinguish the levels of influence of a mayor and city government from their level of control. The mayor and the city council can control only what the city owns. That's a fairly small footprint compared to that of the 4 million people in Los Angeles and the 10-plus million in L.A. County.

On the other end of the mayor's direct-control spectrum, the mayor is a fantastic leader with great influence, and people in Southern California are progressive, creative, and much greener than many others. His leadership, and the resulting work of this community, can have a monumental global impact in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

First, there is a lot we can do in the areas of personal energy use and conservation at home. We need to reduce the amount of waste we generate. We need to re-use and recycle, and we need to reconsider what we eat, given that cows are a major piece of the global warming picture.

We can work as a community to set some voluntary but aggressive goals-for instance, we could all agree to have one or two car-free days per week. During the energy crisis and water shortages of the past we set targets and the community hit them. Los Angeles reduced its water usage by 30 percent and hasn't returned since. As a community, we can feather out many actions that will have a radical impact without too much sacrifice and lifestyle upheaval. We can immediately choose-without having to wait for infrastructure change and without having to wait for Washington, D.C.-to decide to do something that's going to take 30 years to take effect. I'm sure that the L.A. community can take action that will result in a 20 percent or greater reduction in greenhouse gases in a very short amount of time.

Our influence extends further when you consider that our community includes celebrities, entertainment industry executives, and expatriate communities from nearly every country in the world. Imagine the power of all of us acting, leading, and setting trends that are followed around the world. No one may be able to directly control China's greenhouse policies, but our community's bold action can surely inspire its billions of people.