UC Fells Memorial Oak Grove -- Treesit Spirit Lives On
word count: old - 1,354; current revision - 1,631 needs to be cut down
Have you ever sat underneath a beautiful canopy of trees with the solid, living wood of a Coast Live Oak pressed gently against your back, and meditated while beams of sunlight caressed your face? It’s a truly beautiful experience – and one that the Save the Oaks Campaign tried to preserve. UC destroyed Memorial Oak Grove, but the treesitters hope the spirit lives on.
Fiat Lux – “let there be light” - is UC’s motto. But its Latin etymology renders the meaning accessible to a small handful of Western-educated people. So in essence it stands for “let there be light for a few.” This unfortunately was the attitude of the University of California toward the beloved Memorial Oak Grove.
Back in May 2006 the university announced plans to construct a new athletic training facility to serve the needs of Cal’s student athletes. This was to take place upon a mature grove of 42 native trees including Oaks, Deodars, and Redwoods. Adjacent to the Memorial Stadium’s western wall on Piedmont Ave., the woodland was enjoyed by generations of Berkeleyans, who loved it for many different reasons. Some found this Urban Forest to be a special place to just relax and enjoy life. Native Americans have reason to believe that the grove is an Ohlone burial ground. Veterans viewed the grove as a sacred part of the Memorial to those who perished in the First World War. During his weekly Canyon Walks, Prof. Ignacio Chapela explained that the grove was a wildlife corridor – Red Foxes and other critters were spotted scampering through the grove.
Cal could have chosen to spread its light to serve the needs of the entire community by building the gym somewhere else while leaving the grove intact, but protests and petitions went unheeded.
Inspired by Julia Butterfly Hill’s famous two-year-long treesit to save a Redwood Tree, local indigenous leader Zachary RunningWolf Brown and his friends Jess Walsh, Ayr, and several other Berkeley activists got wind of Cal’s plans and decided to experiment with a treesit as a way of saving this urban forest. Equipped with carabineers, harnesses, and their inner light of hope, they scaled the trees before dawn on December 2nd, 2006 – the morning of the “Big Game.” Soon after it was revealed that the remains of 18 Native Americans were unearthed when UC blew up the hill to build the stadium, a fact which UC acknowledged in their Environmental Impact Report, meaning the Oak Grove sits atop a Native burial ground! The longest-running urban treesit ever lasted just over 21 months and attracted over 300 treesitters (including students) and garnered international media attention. The treesitters successfully raised public concern about the University’s contradictory practices of addressing the needs of athletes at the expense of the well being of the diverse life-systems that the public still expects it to serve.
Just like spotted owls are an indicator species of the health of an eco-system, the treesitters were an indicator species of the health of this public university. They saw the demolition of a local healthy ecosystem that was free and open to the public to be replaced by a concrete gymnasium as yet more poison in the well. But even as the poison manifests in different forms - corporatization of research, privatization of public knowledge, conflicts of interest, ecological devastation, war profiteering, nuclear weapons development, and now British Petroleum - it consistently performs the same function. The poison blows out the light of creativity, cooperation, wisdom, and compassion for the diverse yet interdependent forms of life that create our University community. This poison, embodied in the motto “let there be light (for a few)” requires the destruction, absorption and exclusive reallocation of light from the infinitely diverse life-system at large to a select few, as if this light were a scarce resource.
So a young woman and a Native American elder scaled a tree to mount a David and Goliath battle against this theft of light. Over the course of the treesit, thousands of supporters brought their own light to the grove to sit in the trees, support on the ground, prepare food, offer warm beds to weary treesitters, provide legal council, play music, make friends, and become inspired by the “treevolutionary” spirit.
The treesit acted as a magnet for community gatherings. Treesit supporters organized festivals and slumber parties, with lots of art, music, cooking, creating, and even philosophy salons. One of the many amazing facets of the sit was the “radical community” that arose – rich people in the hills, folks who were houseless, activists, people of all background gathered in the grove, a "Free and Forever Wild" space where money meant nothing and humanity meant everything.
Students played a big role from day one, organizing petitions, rallies, and nonviolent direct action trainings. On September 14th 2007, 34 students from the Free Speech Free Trees Coalition climbed over the first fence the University erected around the grove and 21 were arrested, in protest of the grove being closed to the public. Before they were hauled away, students held a dance party and drum circle in front of confused-looking police officers, and conducted a consensus-based meeting despite the fence separating the students from each other.
UC did everything it could to crush the treesit, eventually spending reportedely over $1 million on private security, fences, and police overtime. UC constructed two sets of barbed-wire fences, which made it much harder for the community to gather. UC arrested supporters just for sending up food and water. Despite over 150 arrests and citations at the hands of the UCPD, the community maintained a continuous positive presence, both in the trees and on the ground. Senior citizens calling themselves the Berkeley Grandmothers for the Oaks fed the treesitters every week despite UC threats to arrest old ladies armed with pumpkin pies.
On June 17th 2008, UC sent a team of hired arborists in cherry pickers to cut out most of the treesitters’ supplies and physically extract several treesitters. At times the arborists cut traverse lines while the treesitters were attached – seriously endangering the treesitters’ lives. In defense, some of the treesitters hurled piss and poo at the arborists. Some treesitters embraced a wide range of tactics while others remained committed to nonviolence as a way of protest and a way of live. Each treesitter followed their own calling. From 14 treesitters at the start of the June assault, within a few weeks four were left. Somehow, they lasted eight more weeks, despite UC’s attempts to starve and dehydrate them.
In addition to the treesit, three groups – the City of Berkeley, the California Oak Foundation, and the Panoramic Hill Association – filed a lawsuit against UC. The lawsuit focuses on alleged violations of the California Environment Quality Act and the Alquist-Priolo Zoning Act. Judge Barbara Miller issued a preliminary injunction in January 2007 barring UC from cutting the trees, but then in June 2008 issued a comprehensive ruling largely in favor of UC. The plaintiffs took their case to the Appeals Court. On Friday September 5th 2008 the Appeals Court agreed to hear the case but refused to continue the injunction against tree-cutting. That same day the plaintiffs appealed to the State Supreme Court, but UC made a preemptive strike and proceeded to cut down the grove within minutes of the Appeals Court’s ruling. Three days later, on Monday, the Supreme Court ruled and stated the issue was now “moot.”
September 5th 2008 is a day that shall live in infamy. UC was fond of stating to the press that when Judge Miller’s Trial Court ruled on the lawsuit “everyone will have had their day in court and it will be time for the treesitters to come down.” As UC well knows, many of the most important rulings for justice in the United States – against slavery, bigotry, discrimination, and Jim Crow segregation – were made not by the Trial Court level or the Appeals Court level, but by the the State and Federal Supreme Courts. UC’s decision to destroy the grove without waiting to hear the State Supreme Court’s ruling, and thus to imply that the Supreme Court is irrelevant to the legal process, is the height of despicable self-serving cynicism and exemplary of UC’s highly effective propaganda campaign.
While the grove is gone, the lawsuit continues. Despite the fact that the Appeals Court refused to reinstate the injunction against tree-cutting, the Appeals Court still plans to hear the lawsuit. If the plaintiffs lose at the Appeals Court level, they plan to take their case to the State Supreme Court. If UC loses, they could be forced to “un-build” their training center.
For nearly a year the police bombarded the treesitters with the artificial light of generator-powered floodlights. These loud and obnoxious concentrations of artificial light were and are the signature of our University. The treesitters' light shined from within, organically and abundantly - indeed, some treesitters talk about experiences of healing and spiritual transformation during their time at the grove. Theirs is the signature of an alternative movement to “shed light” on and within all members of the University and Berkeley community. As the treesitters were fond of saying, “We can have old trees and new gyms” – even with the grove gone, it’s still true. Let there be light for everyone!
L A Wood has created a film about the treesit entitled “The Big Game” – see www.berkeleycitizen.org. Also, UC Berkeley students are working on two books (one text, one photos) and a thesis to document the struggle to save Memorial Oak Grove – for more details, see www.saveoaksbooks.com.
more info: http://www.saveoaks.com http://www.freespeechfreetrees.org http://www.saveoaksbooks.com http://www.berkeleycitizen.org’’’