Feature Archives

The Renaissance Garden Project started when UC Santa Cruz students responded to a call for help that Renaissance High School students sent out about the lack of nutrition they were receiving at school; students felt unhealthy. Students from the Education for Sustainable Living Program at UCSC came to the rescue. A garden was constructed to provide nutritional food and health education.

For those of us living in our modern cities land is a foreign concept. Stories of land conjure romantic images of countrysides far from our crowded neighborhoods, images that seem irrelevant to our lives. Even though we inhabit a landscape smothered with buildings and concrete, the struggles for land fought by rural people hold many important lessons for us as we strive for control over our lives and communities. When we consider the landless state of most poor people the world round and how most of us own no land, we realize we are all perpetually inhabiting someone else’s space. Our lives and communities as well as our food supply are controlled by people in far away places whose main motivation is profit. When we start to reclaim some of this space we begin to take back our lives.

UC Santa Cruz is preparing to cut down approximately 150 acres of trees on upper-campus to make room for all the new buildings that are part of the much-criticized expansion plan. This would be one of the most serious logging operations on UCSC's campus in decades, meaning the loss of well over 1,000 trees — mostly 2nd generation redwoods and mixed evergreens.

George Cadman of Free Radio Santa Cruz 101.1 fm interviews Stephanie Seay of the Buffalo Field Campaign about the Montana state and the federal government practice of capturing wild buffalo on public lands and slaughtering them or transporting them hundreds of miles. In the last two weeks in Montana state and federal authorities planned to slaughter 300 wild buffalo, including calves and their mothers. In the last 7 years the government has trucked 2,000 wild buffalo to slaughter, 1,000 last year alone.

On May 30th members of Youth United for Community Action (YUCA), celebrated a California state order that will shut down large portions of a major hazardous waste handler located in East Palo Alto, ironically named Romic Environmental Technologies. For 43 years, Romic Environmental Technologies has operated a hazardous waste recycling facility in East Palo Alto.

On June 4th, convicted Green Scare/Operation Backfire defendant Daniel McGowan was sentenced to 7 years of prison with 3 years of supervised probation. He was the ninth of ten defendants to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in the past two weeks. McGowan was one of only four defendants to refuse to name names and implicate others who took part in similar actions. Another non-cooperating co-defendant, Jonathan Paul, faces sentencing in the next few weeks.

On Wednesday, May 23, while the San Francisco Board of Supervisors reviewed the implementation plan of Community Choice Energy (CCE), the Green Guerrillas Against Greenwash staged a street theater performance outside City Hall. The performance included caricatures of Mayor Newsom and PiG&E being caught "in bed" by woman dressed as a giant windmill. Material distributed by the protesters highlighted Newsom's relationship with PG&E, including indirect campaign contributions totaling over $30,000 and his recent history of blowing off CCE events while publicly praising PG&E for their token "green" publicity events. CCE is the plan to run San Francisco on 51 percent renewable energies by 2017. It achieves this goal by dismantling PG&E's monopoly and allowing the city of San Francisco to bulk buy energy from independent producers.