Feature Archives

Each year on April 20th, at 4:20pm, people celebrate and smoke cannabis together. One of the biggest gathering spots in California, perhaps the biggest, is Porter Meadow at UC Santa Cruz. It's a large event for the whole community - a place where thousands of people can have a picnic, play with musical instruments, frisbees, kites and just have fun. It's in a safe and relatively secluded location and problems are rare.

Will & Darwin write: Our intention... is to generate a greater level of critical reflection and discussion concerning the dominant role of the politics of “greening”... that characterize campus-based environmental organizations.... We can think of few more timely priorities for those who would use university campuses as organizing bases [than] to challenge the system of authoritarian power that is in the process of destroying the ecological basis for the existence of life on earth.

There will be a meeting on Tuesday, April 7th at UCSC to discuss the defense of the Community Studies department. A post on the SC-IMC calendar states, "Proposed budget cuts at UCSC to come into effect July 2009 'disband the administration' at Community Studies, 'laying off' lecturers and cutting the Field Study program. This program benefits not only students, but various community organizations in Santa Cruz, all over the state, nation and the world."

Peter Herlihy and Jerome Dobson, professors of Geography at Kansas University, received funding from the Foreign Military Studies Office, located at the Fort Leavenworth U.S. Army base in Leavenworth, Kansas, to map communally held indigenous land in the states of San Luis Potosi, and in Oaxaca, Mexico. The project, named the Bowman Expeditions or México Indígena, began mapping in 2005 in an indigenous region known as La Husteca, which is partially located in the state of San Luis Potosi, and then moved their operation to the state of Oaxaca amidst the statewide popular uprising of the Oaxacan Peoples’ Popular Assembly (APPO) in 2006.

On March 16th, UCSC administrators and Vice Chancellors held a meeting to discuss rent hikes at UCSC's Family Student Housing (FSH). A hundred tenants, from a community of 200 rental units, showed up to demand affordable rents. On Monday, March 30th various Associate Vice Chancellors and Directors of UCSC Housing are holding a second meeting to discuss their proposed rent increase of 7.5% with the FSH tenants. This will be an increase of 62% over the last nine years.

On March 16, 2009, students and educators from public colleges all over the state converged on Sacramento to demand that California fully fund higher education and not raise tuition. Over 6,000 students, teachers, administrators, and education workers converged in Sacramento. They came to demand, “Keep the doors open,” “No budget cuts,” “Bail out colleges, not banks,” “Fund education, not war,” and “Money for schools, not prisons.”

Between the forest and the ocean, among the students and the yuppies, Anarchists in Santa Cruz have fostered a close-knit community dedicated to the destruction of this world and the creation of another. Santa Cruz is a hub of anarchist culture and resistance, with a long history of radical struggle and active anarchist projects spanning decades. From May 7th to 10th, the Santa Cruz Anarchist Convergence was be a four-day event for building community and resistance and sharing radical ideas.