TreePeople
A Letter from Our Director of Development Dear TreePeople Family, With August in full swing, we celebrate National Make-A-Will Month—a time to reflect on the lasting legacy each of us can leave for the future of our environment. Legacy giving, or planned giving, is an extraordinary way to ensure your values live on, nurturing the…
The benefits of growing California native plants are vast: they increase biodiversity by providing habitat and food for native creatures. They’re highly sustainable and low maintenance because they’re adapted to California’s ecosystem. And of course, they’re just plain beautiful! If you have a yard you can rip out and replace with natives—you absolutely should! Our…
If you live in Southern California, you’re probably familiar with the ubiquitous black mustard plant. Every spring, its bright yellow flowers blanket our hillsides, freeway medians, parks—basically, anywhere there’s a patch of dirt, mustard will grow. It’s a plant that thrives in disturbed areas—and unfortunately, it often disturbs the habitat around it, too. Considered invasive…
No child dreams of playing on scorching hot asphalt. And yet, more than 2.5 million K-12 students in California attend schools with less than 5% tree canopy in their play areas. Not only do green schoolyards enrich learning outcomes and improve mental health, they also provide life saving shade for our students and teachers. We…
Fire has always been a natural part of California’s ecology. But in recent years, climate change and decreasing biodiversity have resulted in more frequent and larger wildfires in the Angeles National Forest and the adjacent wildland-urban interface. That’s why on May 16, 2024, TreePeople and California Botanic Garden (CalBG) kicked off a $7 million initiative…
Over 50 years ago, TreePeople began as a testament to the power of youth and we’re continuing to harness that spirit with our environmental education programming.
The year is 1970. At a summer camp in the San Bernardino Mountains, a 15-year-old “leadership camper” named Andy Lipkis learns that air pollution from the city is killing Southern California’s forests. It was a striking realization for the budding environmentalist—one that stuck with him until college, and inspired the school project that would change…
It’s been a wet, rainy winter here in Southern California, and as we look towards the warmer days ahead, nature-lovers are wondering — does that mean there’s another superbloom in store? The short answer is: it’s too soon to tell. While rain can help usher in the dramatic floral displays that blanket our hillsides in…
In the preface to Claire Latané’s Schools That Heal, she reminds us that “It is hard to make healthy schools. Even in neighborhoods that have plenty of resources, most school environments fall short of supporting students’ mental and physical health and well-being.” TreePeople’s School Greening initiative aims to collaborate with school communities to reimagine how…
The urban forestry community lost a giant with the sudden passing of Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne on January 6. Jarlath led a globally respected lab that used high-resolution imagery of the earth to map land cover in our complex urban landscapes at fine level of detail with astounding accuracy. The work of Jarlath’s Spatial Analysis Lab at…
It’s beginning to (finally) feel and look like the holiday season here in SoCal! With all of the gifts you’ve been giving and receiving recently, you might be looking around at all your wrapping paper, decorations, and food and wondering, “isn’t this wasteful?” Fortunately, we have discovered some creative ways to go green (without turning…
Here in Southern California, we see green year-round thanks to our many evergreen trees; however, you’ll still notice plenty of trees that appear dead in the winter. SoCal is home to many deciduous trees, including Sycamores, Redbuds, and California Buckeyes. Once the weather shifts, these trees lose their leaves and start to enter dormancy, which…