Taiji Terasaki

ANDY LIPKIS

Founder, TreePeople

"My personal mission is to inform, inspire, engage and support people and communities to participate in restoring the healthy function of our ecosystem, so it can abundantly provide the life support services we all depend on for our food, health, safety, economy, and joy. I believe that we the people—individuals, communities, organizations, and governments—have the collective intelligence, passion, creativity, and energy to solve these problems if we work together. Over the decades, I’ve discovered an inner artist that drives me to demonstrate how nontraditional approaches such as biomimicry, urban forestry, and green infrastructure can bring about urgently needed solutions. The time is ripe. Wide-scale implementation and healing are within reach."

Biography

Andy Lipkis is a practical visionary who began planting trees to rehabilitate smog and fire damaged Los Angeles–area forests when he was 15 years old. At 18, he founded TreePeople and has served as its president since 1973. A guiding light for urban climate resilience around the world, for nearly 50 years this organization has created a greener future for Los Angeles by inspiring people, along with their local governments, to plant and care for trees and harvest and conserve the rain. Since its founding, TreePeople volunteers have been responsible for the planting of more than 2 million trees and counting. Its environmental education program reaches more than 200,000 students per year, with millions of children touched over the decades.

In his role of leading TreePeople, Lipkis has served as a consultant to the city of Los Angeles as a program planner and public engagement and education facilitator. Beyond L.A., Lipkis has worked with cities such as Melbourne and Hong Kong to help them plan for climate resilience and adaptation. In the wake of the devastation from the 2018 fires in Southern California, Andy crafted a collaboration between TreePeople, the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program, and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. The Society of American Foresters and the American Society of Landscape Architects have, respectively, granted Lipkis the honorary titles of Forester and Landscape Architect in recognition of his life’s work.

www.treepeople.org/andy