Planbook Preface

Los Angeles is a great city in a beautiful environment. But it was built with little understanding or appreciation for the power and function of nature and its cycles. Environmental problems take a heavy toll on its economy and ecosystem, and on the health and safety of its people.

There is an answer. Welcome to our dream of an ecologically, socially and economically sustainable Los Angeles.

In natural systems, rainfall is caught by trees or shrubs and released slowly into the ground. This natural cycle produces nutrients, fresh water and clean air. Even in a semi-arid landscape like early Los Angeles, the ecosystem was in balance, providing everything that native people, plants and animals needed for sustainable life.

Los Angeles was built with little understanding and appreciation for the power and function of nature and its cycles. A great city was created in a beautiful environment-at tremendous cost to the environment and frequently to the people who lived here. More importantly, the cost of fighting nature to keep Los Angeles functioning continues to take a heavy toll on the economy, ecosystem and people-in terms of health, safety and opportunity. We have interfered with the natural cycles of energy and water with thousands of square miles of concrete and asphalt. In this system, rainfall is channelled to our roadways, where it picks up oil, asbestos, pesticides, animal wastes and a toxic soup of other pollutants, and washes into the over-taxed storm drain system and out to our beaches and bays. In this system where well over 60% of the city's surface is covered with pavement, very little of the sun's energy is absorbed by vegetation, but instead heats up the pavement, and then the air, needlessly overtaxing air conditioners that must struggle against this excess heat at huge costs-costs in terms of dollars, extra fuel burned at power plants, and extra air pollution from those power plants. In this system yard waste never gets the chance to return to the soil but is, instead, shipped to landfills where it constitutes 30% of the waste stream. And in this system vast quantities of water are imported from distant states to irrigate our lawns, while the 15 inches of rain that falls on our city every year, an amount that if it were captured could meet more than half of our city's annual need, disappears down our street drains; handled in this way, as a nuisance rather than a resource, almost none of the rain water that falls on our city is available to replenish our groundwater.

Yet we spend hundreds of millions of dollars on massive flood control projects that are, in part, caused by our wasteful attitude towards the rain that can and should refresh our soil. To deal with these problems and the other ills of modern urban life-like closing landfills, air pollution, energy waste, and unemployment-we have created massive bureaucracies, all working hard, but independent of one another.

This project-Transagency Resources for Economic and Environmental Sustainability (T.R.E.E.S.)-was conceived as a means of overcoming this lack of coordination. It proves that there are enormous economic, environmental and social benefits to be gained through a cooperative approach to designing our urban landscapes as functioning mini-watersheds.

If fully implemented, T.R.E.E.S. can:

• Reduce fresh water imports to our region by up to 50%
• Create up to 50,000 jobs
• Dramatically reduce pollution into Santa Monica and San Pedro Bays
• Remove the 100 year flood threat on the L.A. River
• Eliminate "greenwaste" from the waste stream, thereby reducing landfill content by 30 percent
• Significantly improve air quality

To demonstrate these potentials T.R.E.E.S. brought together dozens of urban planners, landscape architects, engineers, urban foresters and public agency staff to produce more sustainable designs for prototypical industrial sites, commercial buildings, schools, apartments and single family homes. These plans and a host of cost-effective ideas, all of which were primarily produced during the four day charrette are included in this PLANbook. Our aim was to create a set of designs that are so attractive, compelling and sensible that they spark a widespread desire to implement them throughout the city. We believe that a system-wide retrofit, implemented over time, would yield benefits to justify the cost. Among the goals is a 50% reduction in imported water and the creation of up to 50,000 rewarding jobs for people to work in the new "green industry"-re-landscaping property, building and installing cisterns, and monitoring and maintaining these systems. We believe that these goals are not beyond our reach, and the purpose of T.R.E.E.S is to prove it and to start us on the path to implementation.

This is our vision of what T.R.E.E.S. can do to help Los Angeles. What can you do?

Andy Lipkis
President, TreePeople