Starting January 9, students from 17 Los Angeles area middle and high schools will compete in TreeByTree, a social media campaign to win a field trip to help restore fire-damaged wilderness. You can support them by logging on to Facebook over the next five weeks and voting as often as once a day for your favorite environmental initiatives these students are spearheading.

TreePeople and Southern California Edison (SCE) have partnered in creating TreeByTree to support environmental stewardship among local youth. Fifty students from each of the 10 schools with the highest number of votes on their weekly photo postings win the opportunity—sponsored by SCE—to join with TreePeople in reforesting burned areas of the Angeles National Forest. This forest provides Los Angeles County with 35% of its drinking water and 72% of its open space. More than 160,000 acres were burned in the historic Station Fire of 2009, and winners of the TreeByTree campaign will plant baby trees in parts of the forest burned too deeply to regenerate without human intervention.

In the spring of 2011 TreePeople and the U.S. Forest Service began enlisting thousands of volunteers to plant thousands of trees a year in 75 acres along major roads in the Angeles. New trees are small native seedlings, 6-8” tall and TreePeople volunteers have planted 22,600 of them in the past two years.

In tandem with TreeByTree, SCE is encouraging its customers to adopt paperless billing, which, if universally adopted, could save as many as 750,000 sheets of paper daily and 47,000 trees per year.

 CLICK HERE TO VOTE DAILY BETWEEN JANUARY 9 AND FEBRUARY 13 FOR YOUR FAVORITE PHOTOS