Green Pioneer: L.A.’s Chief Sustainability Officer Matt Petersen
Published in Town & Country Magazine by Mary Kaye Schilling
Matt Petersen has been hired to make L.A. sustainable. Can he also get local philanthropists to dig a little deeper?
Possibly the most challenging task Matt Petersen will have as Los Angeles’s first chief sustainability officer is to persuade the city’s residents to tear up their lawns and replace the grass with drought-resistant plants. It’s called xeriscaping, and it’s one in a long list of tasks on the wall of his office. He and his boss, Mayor Eric Garcetti, are hoping to execute the inaugural sustainable city plan for L.A. over the next six months, with goals that include increasing the use of solar power and recycled water, creating 20,000 green jobs, and improving public transportation. But none of those initiatives will be as difficult as encouraging a citizenry addicted to luxurious gardens and emerald golf courses to wake up and realize they live in a desert. “That’s easy to forget when you drive around the city,” says Petersen, who is amazed to see homeowners who are living through one of the city’s worst droughts liberally watering their lawns.
As Jerry Seinfeld might say, good luck with all that. But if anyone can make it happen it’s Petersen, who, when he was president and CEO of the nonprofit Global Green USA, “greened” $15 billion in new construction for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Critical to his success will be seducing private benefactors into shoring up limited public funds—not only in L.A. but nationwide. “This is a generalization,” Petersen says, “but when it comes to environmental stuff, New York funders think San Francisco funds L.A., and San Francisco funders assume Hollywood takes care of it.” In fact, even with committed and ongoing celebrity donors—such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Norman Lear, and James Cameron—Hollywood money can’t compete with New York, where hedge fund managers casually write six-figure checks. “Our biggest night of fundraising pales in comparison to New York,” where “philanthropy is institutionalized. The culture is younger here.”
Petersen believes that the charismatic Garcetti (“the only person who could have lured me to city hall”) is L.A.’s best hope for making sustain- ability a priority. “The power of mayors is incredible. Look at the amazing environmental strides Bloomberg made in New York,” he says. Further- more, success in L.A. would provide a blueprint for America. “Our suburban sprawl and traffic problems are representative of the nation. If it’s possible here, it’s possible anywhere.”
