Viable Solutions

Los Angeles' economy and ecosystem are in pieces: we need to start connecting the dots, and quickly. Today's combined crises in climate, drought, and economy call for us to urgently recognize the true emergency we are in.

One solution is to look to a rarely used government structure that could be updated and expanded to address our current state of threat.

In the case of a "significant crisis" the heads of agencies - police, fire, sanitation, building and safety, water and power, etc. - are called into an Emergency Operations Center. There they literally look at the big picture, supported by information and intelligence from multiple sources. Together they craft solutions and pool and direct public resources - people, equipment, and funds - in real time, until the crisis is solved.

The city of Los Angeles happens to have a brand-new such center, completed last year. Most of the time it sits unused, perhaps because we don't recognize that we're in the midst of a "chronic emergency."

The city of Los Angeles's financial crisis, with its painful staffing cuts, is deeply rooted in its environmental crisis.

This may sound surprising. It's a perspective that's certainly invisible to most policy makers.

We hemorrhage cash and jobs, in part, because we are hemorrhaging water and energy. The waste of natural and economic resources is intertwined, and it's time to realize that the solutions must be intertwined as well.

Kudos to Mayor Villaraigosa who took the vital step this week of consolidating the functions of Environment, Energy and Sustainability into his office. This shows that he and his staff recognize the urgent need for coordinating resource management. It's partly because of the uncoordinated way we've managed the environment that we are in today's mess. And it's critical to understand how we got here in order to create a path out.

When cities like Los Angeles were developed, people didn't understand they were building on an ecosystem. Thus government was organized into manageable departments that didn't reflect a living, interconnected system of air, water, soil, plants and animals. As the city grew, departments became bureaucracies, and these organized into what is known in management parlance as "silos," each with its own responsibilities, infrastructure systems, and budgets to grow and protect.

And so, cities' water supply people didn't talk to the flood control people. The flood control people didn't talk to the water quality people. As new problems arose, cities created new bureaucracies and infrastructure systems to manage and solve them, like band-aids, without addressing the problems in the underlying systems that caused them in the first place.

The result: today's massive, systemic, overwhelming waste: of vital natural resources, of taxpayers' money, of water, and of human lives.

Here's a picture of an illegally cut tree in the Glassell Park area of Los Angeles, according to the photographer. Though the lack of foliage makes identification a bit tricky, this multilated tree might be a mature ficus tree, much like the verdant and healthy tree further down the block.

That tree -- the healthy one -- is providing the services that green infrastructure offers us in the city; giving shade and protection from urban heat; filtering particulate pollutants from the air; capturing, holding, and filtering a limited amount of rainwater in the soil if it's planted in the sidewalk, and providing a haven and sanctuary for birds, which, if we were near the tree, probably would be going delightedly and noisily about their business.

I bring this up because the city of Los Angeles, with a ballooning budget deficit, may be facing cuts of as many as three thousand jobs and may eliminate city services such as tree trimming. 

This is bad news, not just for city employees, but for all the city's residents. These are difficult times for the people of our city, and now, potentially, for the trees of our city as well, because of the threat of damage to our urban forest. In the nearly four decades that TreePeople has been at work in Los Angeles, we have been through several recessions. In bad times, the budget for tree-trimming is reduced, and as a result, tree-trimming is either deferred or the pruning that is done is often much too severe in an attempt to make the pruning last years longer. Trees can be butchered. Many die. Those that do survive lose much of their ability to provide vital and natural urban infrastructure services.

Congratulations to the city of Los Angeles' Board of Public Works for taking the first step towards conserving our city's rainwater by passing a Low Impact Development [LID] plan.

This puts us on the path towards water sustainability. It still needs to be approved by the City Council, but this alone is a big step forward.

LID's primary aim is to protect water quality, but its tools can calibrated to substantially augment the supply of water for landscape irrigation, which comprises 40% to 70% of Southern California's overall use, and thus free up a substantial amount of water for the city and its residents.

While enacting a LID ordinance into law will be a critical step, the desired results and changes will occur over decades, not months or years. If Los Angeles is to respond to the threats to its health and viability posed by climate change and the long term water supply emergency, we will need to accelerate this retrofitting process.

Accelerating LID implementation represents the fastest, best way to establish a sustainable clean water supply for Los Angeles.