Founded in 1973 to plant trees and restore the pollution-damaged mountains of Southern California, TreePeople has planted and maintained over 1.5 million trees in the Los Angeles area and pioneered more than 200 tree-planting groups worldwide.

Early on, founder Andy Lipkis and his band of citizen foresters were dubbed the “tree people” by the camper volunteers and others who worked with the group; the name stuck and Lipkis made it official. TreePeople quickly became the nation’s pre-eminent motivating force in the urban forestry movement.

As one of the largest environmental educators in the United States, TreePeople has initiated numerous large-scale public and youth education programs, resulting in millions of people caring for their environment by planting trees, recycling, and preventing the pollution of stormwater. With over 15,000 members, TreePeople is one of the largest independent environmental organizations in California. Both locally and nationally, the organization is helping to promote integrated watershed management practices through education, planting projects, policy development and research.

a href="http://www.treepeople.org">More about TreePeople

Following is an excerpt from an interview with Andy Lipkis written By Judith Lewis. It appeared in the LA Weekly, Volume 27, Number 221.

"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, 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 the trees, 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 Los Angeles Times reported 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," he says, "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?”

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