Andy Lipkis and his teenage friends are the founders of the
nonprofit, community-based organization known as TreePeople. Based in Los Angeles, CA, the
environmental organization's primary purpose has been to educate communities on
the planting and care of trees and to work with government agencies on the
number-one issue west: water.
Exploding populations from Phoenix, AZ, and Las Vegas, NV, to
suburban Los Angeles have turned the issue of available water supply from
problem to crisis. “The way we use water is so wasteful and so inappropriate
today, according to the California
Water Plan, there is already so much demand for water, it already exceeds
supply,” says Lipkis.
And human consumption isn’t the only problem. As cities grow,
so does the amount of pavement and concrete that seals the natural watersheds.
That in turn prevents rainwater from refreshing underground aquifers, nature’s
water tanks. And rainwater is exactly what Lipkis is hoping people will start to
think about. Right now, building codes in Los Angeles County, as in most parts
of the country, require rainwater to be moved from rooftops to the street. As a
result, even in mostly sunny southern California, a massive amount of water gets
flushed into storm drains every year.
“When it rains an inch,” Lipkis says, “Los Angeles
hemorrhages 7.6 billion gallons of water.” Part of the solution to the water
crisis, he says, is collecting as much rainwater as possible because “it
represents half or more of all the water we need in this big city.”
Lipkis and the TreePeople imagine a time when as many as a
million homes and businesses have rainwater cisterns all electronically
networked and ready to provide treated drinking water to the public. Lipkis
points out that cisterns are not a new idea. In fact, civilizations throughout
history have used cisterns to collect rainwater. Cisterns exist now as part of
building codes in places like Bermuda, which lack such fresh water resources as
lakes or rivers. Lipkis believes it’s an idea whose time has come here in the
deserts of the West. TreePeople, in collaboration with the Los Angeles
Department of Water and Power, has built five demonstration sites in Los
Angeles, including a large hilltop cistern at the organization’s Coldwater
Canyon Park headquarters.
“When it rains an inch,” Lipkis says, “those five little
projects capture 1.25 million gallons.” And it is all that free water that has
government agencies thinking about rain.
In Los Angeles, storm runoff presents many problems. When it
rains heavily, the water goes from the streets into the canals of the Los
Angeles River and straight into the ocean. With that runoff, garbage and toxic
pollutants are picked up along the way. Another problem, Lipkis argues, is the
heavy reliance on the almost 100-year-old California Aqueduct, which routes
water from the Eastern Sierras. His main concern is the incredible amount of
energy that is spent moving water. “We’re bringing water in from hundreds of
miles away. Moving water and using water,” he says, “consumes, overall, 19% of
all the electricity in the state and one-third of the natural gas.” That is the
single largest use of electricity in the state, which happens to be the most
populous in the country and which, were it an independent nation, would be the
eighth-largest economy in the world. That’s quite a carbon footprint.
Lipkis
believes the best solution is that of a hybrid water management system, one that
would include cisterns, natural watershed management, and existing water
infrastructure, including a less power-hungry aqueduct. And perhaps most
importantly, it would include the cooperation of water supply agencies,
flood-control agencies, and sanitation agencies, which he believes have done too
much conflicting, single-purpose cost-benefit analyses in the past. Lipkis sees
only an upside to a large-scale cistern and rainwater infiltration project, and
not only because of the environmental benefits. A study in the late 1990s
conducted by TreePeople estimated up to 50,000 new jobs that would be created by
a sustainable infrastructure system.