UC Regents vote to cut oaks

My friend Tristan got it wrong in describing where the tree-sit is. It is on the East side of Campus, off of Gayley Road. People can take the AC transit F Bus and get off right across the street..

yep. I think the students like those trees, and this is a campus with far less lawn than some of the 'college town' universities, but finals week is arising now.

One thing that often happens is that with uncomfortable things that are getting outside press (which this definitely is, in the SF Chronicle and television), is they will wait until the last day of finals when students have dispersed and there are no more issues of the newspaper to come out to take action. Ignacio Chapela was quickly called and given tenure on the last day of spring semester. There are several other cases of this. So I would rally the wingnuts around December 15th.

Tristan, you wrote: "UC Regents voted tonight to move forward with a high tech gym in the location that isnow Memorial grove in Berkeley CA. This will entail cutting all of the trees there."

Actually, this is not true. There are 70 mature trees in the naroow strip between the stadium and Galey Rd. Of these trees, 42 will be removed, 27 will remain, and 1, a healthy redwood, will be relocated. Please take the time to correct your article.

Second, about the students not being there: the great majority of Cal student support the new gym facilities. Close to 9,000 students are football season ticket holders. The facilities, which are badly needed, will be used by students from 14 teams. Revenues from the football program go directly to the scholarships for thousands of student-athletes on campus who live and study near the area concerned, while almost none of the parties opposed to the project actually spend time in the area.

Hey Berkeleylite,

Fuck you and your pro-university bullshit and slant on everything. Fuck sports and sports revenue too.

We should eliminate the macho brutality of college football, tear down the stadium and replant it all with native trees. And daylight ALL of Strawberry Creek!

And you're a liar: I used to live on Panaramic Way on the hill. Everyone is not a "millionaire." I can say with assurance that there isn't a single house on the hill larger than the house of any U.C. Regent. If you didn't have your head up your ass and knew history, you'd know that for the early part of the 20th century it was a bohemian arts community. The street poet Julia Vinograd's family lived near the top when she was born and growing up. There was a whole crafts movement on the hill, with a strong emphasis on ceramics. Lot of those hill-clinging houses are modest and hardly worthy of the McMansions you see in the suburbs just over the hills in Contra Costa County. And I'd venture to say that almost half of Panoramic Hill dwellers are renters; mostly students and workers living in small, cubbyhole apartments like I did. And we hated sports events and concerts and pep rallies at the stadium. For me, Greek concerts were great; it was like hearing a concert for free. But the traffic afterwards for either venue sucks.

My rental was near the top where the connector links the lower and upper fire roads. And you know what was traumatizing? That fucking canon when the Cal football team scored a touchdown. It was like living in the West Bank. You what else sucked? Having rich suburban alumni park their Jaguars, Mercedes Benzes and BMWs in front of our driveways on Panoramic Way because these fucking rich greedy pigs were too lazy and didn't care that we couldn't get our cars out. Even worse was having to walk or drive my bicycle past Piedmont and after games see the barbarism of drunk fratboys with their lecherous sexism towards any woman passing by. Eliminating football would put a damper on that and probably reduce the amount of date rapes at frat houses. Those disgusting frat boys are the millionaire suburban alumni rapists of tomorrow.

So Berkeleyite, pull your head out of your ass and stop trying to bullshit us.

E.C.

At least you didn't go on about how vauable that "ecosystem" was and how the oak "specimen" in that 100-feet strip between the road and the stadium had a crucial gene pool or to fight against global warming, pressing all the BS buttons of outsiders.

You stated the main motive from your perspective, that of your deep hatred for college football at Cal. That's fine, but don't expect the University and campus community to roll over and indulge your misanthropic leanings by turning itself into a park for Panoramic Hills millionaires.

(I have another suggestion: why not rip down the houses and turn the Hills around the stadium into a park, and return it to its original state, which was mostly bare rolling hills?)

And get your facts rights before calling me a liar. The median price of a house on Panoramic Hills is over a million dollars. Most of the homeowners there are millionaires. They are also by and large richer than the average alumni or Cal fan that drives to the stadium to catch a Cal game. The bohemian community is long gone, those who have moved in the last 20 years are very wealthy professionals who want to reign there like they are in a gated community, with no tolerance for the students and UNiversity who were there before anybody else over a century ago...

I agree with you about the architectural merits of those houses vs the big monstrosities that get built up in the sprawling new burbs, and that is actually part of the reason they are so expensive. The other part is that they happen to be smack in the center of the 4th largest urban agglomeration in North America yet they feel like a country village. Their dwellers want the University and city around them to be like a country village. Do you realize how pathetic (if not outragous) it is to compare the bustle and noise from 6 games per year to the traumas endured by West Bank residents?

This project is just a part of a larger scale of rampant UC Greed that has been escalating over the last few years. Student fee's going up while the Regents and top admin's bonus themselves with more $ and more benefits. If students knew how they were getting f*cked, then maybe they'd stand up for what's right. but many are apathetic and ignorant, which can't be helped by 'berkeleyite's propogating their PR and lies.

Berkeleyite-UC-brown-noser writes:

"The median price of a house on Panoramic Hills is over a million dollars"

Give me a fucking break! Even if it's true, the median house prices for whole parts of Marin County are double--even triple--that. Hell, the median for all of Marin County is well over $800,000 and The City's is around $750,000. While you're crunching numbers, I'd be willing to bet that there isn't a regent who lives in a house worth less than $10 million. Which is 10X the median on the hill. Wanna bet?

I still know lots of retired pensioners and working class people living on Panoramic Hill. My former next-door neighbor still lives there and works for the post office. And "gated community"? Again, give all of us a fucking break. Drive up that grungy steep part, with several apartments along the north side of Panoramic Way, right before it levels off at the fire trail and tell me that's a "millionaires'" neighborhood. That's the one where your head is really up your ass!

And you know when they do those annual "Open Studios," where you can visit artists, there are still many up on the hill. Some might be rich pigs playing "artist," but many carry on the earlier traditions by making their living with their art. Check it out next year and then you'll shut the fuck up and stop saying how they're "all" millionaires.

And you know what, I agree about one thing: I'd be happy to see all those houses torn down and the hillside restored to a pure natural state. And again you're wrong: some parts were barren, but there were also redwoods on many ridges. If you've read any literature about voyages into the Bay in the era of sailing ships, you'd know that there was a massive redwood, some called the "Grandfather Tree," atop the Berkeley Hills that was used as a navigation landmark.

But if we're going to return the watershed areas of Strawberry Creek to their pristine natural state, we've got to tear down that fucking university. We'll start with the "rad lab" near the Lawrence Hall of Science" where Oppenheimer, Lawrence and all those other doctors of death developed the technology that was used in the nuclear bombs that massacred thousand in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fuck, at your beloved university's lab in Livermore, all the nuclear triggers in the whole U.S. arsenal are designed. I said bring down the fucking university first, then we'll save the Julia Morgan and Bernard Maybeck houses on Panoramic Hill to turn into community centers when we return the rest of the Berkeley Hills to nature.

And again, FUCK UC! The adminstrators get raises, the regents vote themselves a fortune for being lazy bureaucratic pigs and the poor students have to mortgage their futures with exorbinant fees for a mediocre education. Berkeleyite, you're right, that whole area of the campus and the residential areas of Panoramic Hill, would benefit humanity so much more as a park--and you dare call me a "misanthrope?"

And don't get me started on late UC Berkeley Anthropology professor Alan Dundes' ideas that football is a socially condoned expression of repressed male homosexuality. And I'm no homophobe, but taking from Freud and Wilheim Reich, I think football and war and patriarchal traditions turn men's natural loving impulses into socially conditioned and taught behaviors of violence and killing. Football, along with other militaristic rituals, should be abolished. As Stoney Burke says, the war-like competitive urge can be transformed, where wars become contests to see who can sneak more kisses and hugs from the enemy. I'd be proud to win a war like that.

Save ALL the trees!

E.C.

klimber: I agree 100% about the ignomy of tuition hikes. Don't put the blame on the University though, the blame rests on the voters, who would rather fund jails than higher education.

As well, do you realize that fees would be even higher without the football program? Cal football raises millions of dollars, and those revenues fund hundreds of scholariships. Without football, student fees would be even higher. So your argument doesn't make sense. Furthermore, many of these student-athletes are from minority backgrounds. Nearly a third of the African-American male students on campus are on the football team. This is important because minority enrollment has dwindled considerably due to the short-sightedness of CA voters who have passed anti-affirmative action measures.

First, it turns out that the median home price in Panoramic Hills is actually over $1,240,000. My arguments are rooted in FACTS. Panoramic Hills is by far the richest neighborhood in Berkeley.

http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/California/Berkeley-heat_map

The great majority of the artisans you speak of are in the lowlands (http://www.berkeleyartisans.com/map_page.html), and the proportion of homeowners to renters is the highest in town in the Hills. The middle-class residents you know are in the minority. The Panoramic Hills Owners Association is the main instigator in this lawsuit. They would rather the University not exist at all, but I don't think they would go for turning their exclusive residential enclave into a park.

A bunch of rich anti-social recluses who complain of "light pollution" and bitch about 6 games per year. They have already successfully almost ruined the Greek Theater concert experience by severely limiting the volume there. You can hear a cellphone ring 20 rows below you. Those are the people you are fighting for...

The landmark tree you seak about btw was actually in the Oakland Hills, at Redwood Park, not in the Berkeley Hills. And the area where the oaks are to be cut WAS fairly bare before the stadium. You can see that in vintage turn-of-the-century photos and postcards. Those are the facts...

So you despise UC. Do you realize that you are in the same boat as most rabid right-wingers who hate UC Berkeley because it is the most liberal of the top schools in the country? Do you realize that a lot of football fans hate Cal's football team because of the school's liberal heritage, and that most Cal football fans are proud of that heritage? Do you also realize that Texas is vying for control of UC Labs, with the current administration's support, in part because Texas doesn't have the liberal climate in and around Berkeley? Think about it.

Do you also realize that Julia Morgan went to Berkeley? As did Galbraith, Warren, Didion and countless other liberal luminaries. Conservatives hate the University with the same rabid passion you display here.

Don't trash the university. UC Berkeley is also the only top university in the US with a large proportion of lower-income students. Even the top public schools back east have few lower-income students. Don't reduce the great heritage of UC Berkeley to the Regents, many of whom actually hate the Berkeley campus and have tried to undermine it (witness the anti-affirmative action cruisade of Ward Connerly.)

You speak of "benefitting humanity", yet your wishes are against the will and aspiration of the tens of thousands of people who live in the area and frequent the facilities every day: the students and staff. You hate them because they have different vision and aspirations than yours and want to impose your own vision on their environment. That is a misanthropic impulse.

You should also find out more about the Cal football team before you force the usual superficial cultural clichés. Our best player, Marshawn Lynch, is from inner-city Oakland, is a good student and good citizen who drove up to Sacramento to protest against anti-affirmative action state measures. The two other greatest players in the last 30 years are Russell White and Chuck Muncie. Muncie heads a "foundation based in Southern California, works to move youth and adolescents, many of them gang members, off the streets and into productive, responsible lives. Using mentorship programs, job training, wellness fairs and health camps, Muncie and his volunteers comb the communities to reach those in need." http://www.chuckmuncie.org/
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/magazine/summer_99/feature_alumni_muncie.html

Russell White has turned down the NFL to get a Masters degree in Social Welfare at Cal and apply what he learned in his Southern Cal inner-city urban community. Stoney Burke can rant against football, but what in the hell has he actually done for the community, and can he put together a coherent thought (a question one can ask after reading some of the posts on this site)?

Serving the Joseph Goebbels roll in hacking for UC Berkeley's roll as the think tank of corporate Amerikkka, Berkeleyite had this gem to say:

"UC Berkeley...is the most liberal of the top schools in the country"

BULLSHIT!

If it's so fucking liberal, why does Lawrence Labs run nuclear weapons research and testing facilities at Livermore and Los Alamos? If that's your idea of liberalism, fuck liberalism too!

The radical critique says that universities in general are simply the training grounds for the corporate managers and political elites of tomorrow; that, along with being the farms leagues for professional sports, where the the taxpayers foot the bills to train athletes so that the professional sports teams/corporations don't have to. Worse still, corporations can downsize their R & D and simply make meager donations to universties to do their R & D for them, again at the expense of the taxes coerced from, mostly working class, taxpayers.

What a fucking stupid myth calling U.C. Berkeley the great liberal bastion. Maybe in '64 with the FSM or '69 with the People's Park experiment, but today U.C. Berkeley students are ambitious corporate clones who only think about parlaying their degrees into corporate riches (and sure there are a few exceptions, but nothing liberal--let alone radical--has happened on that campus since the anti-apartheid movement in the mid-80s). It's like the racist, anti-Semetic lie that says the mainstream media if run by liberal Jews, when the reality is that it's one major component of the spectacular capitalist brain washing machine.

And want to compare the class distinction between UC Berkeley and another university? Simply look at the stats, or better stroll across the campus of SF State. At State, working class people of color predominate, where at Cal it's the white and Asian children of the bourgeoisie. The latter is hardly even the location of liberalism, while the former--going back to the most violent campus uprising of the 60s in the U.S. with the Third World Strike--is more radical than UC Berkeley has been for at least 30 years. Clark Kerr, good bubbling pro-capitalist New Deal bureaucrat that he was, almost hit the nail on the head when he called it a "knowledge factory." Yet he was wrong: it really is an elitist PRIVILEGE FACTORY!

For the Romans is was bread and circuses; for Amerikkkans it's SuperSized McMeals and passive enjoyment watching Tivo football and coverage of the war in Iraq from the comfort of the entertainment center in the plush IKEA furnished living room of your suburban McMansion. That's pseudo-life--or a living death.

Lastly, Berkeleyite you're a pro-UC stooge. You obviously both worship the institutions of capitalism, like the university, yet resent what you, wrongly, perceive of as the ruling class--in this case it's the anti-UC NIMBYism of the middle class homeowners of the Panoramic Hills Association. Sure there are wealthy people there, but they're mostly salaried yuppie fucks who can afford to live in those overpriced houses in this climate of astronomical real estate costs (but don't forget there are many working class renters, grandfathered with Rent Control into rental units there too). But the real enemy is the ruling class industrial-military-corporate war machine facilitated by UC's role in the globalized military economy.

UC is as right-wing as the Pentagon.

Wake up and smell the radioactive fallout.

SAVE ALL THE OAKS!

berkeleyite, spouting off facts is one thing, but do you really think that Berkeley is liberal? do you think by protesting UC greed and corruption we are opposing berkeley alumni, berkeley football players, or affirmative action? of course not. we are not equating the two.

UC Berkeley is supposed to be a PUBLIC institution. yet it is being run like a private one. UC Regents meet in closed doors meetings, ignore public input, take on huge multi-million and billion dollar projects to increase revenue, and at the same time fund huge PR campaigns do deflect criticism. Berkeleyite, I am not opposed to all of what UC Berkeley is, I am alumni myself, and there are some good things that come out of it. but, there are many more bad things that come out; bad things that are perpetuated by the 'education' that UC claims to excel in.

REAL education is teaching people about ecology, conserving resources, naturopathic medicine, sustainable building and city design, real nutrition, and even spirituality. knowledge is knowing the difference between matter and spirit.

UCB is supposed to serve the students. so if the students come forward and demand that their 'fees' be used to turn all those water intensive boring lawns into edible gardens and fruit tree forests, then the university should comply.

if ignorant berkeleyite locals are perpetuating misinformation in their comments on indybay media sites, then we have a lot of work to do.

Klimber, don't call me ignorant when I've offered facts. Have the courage and common sense to challenge your own preconceptions and to listen to a dissenting view.

-just where is the greed and corruption in this project? ALL the money is being DONATED by alumni and friends of the University! If anything, those donors should be commended for their selflessness! This project is the complete antithesis of "greed and corruption"!

-Yes, Berkeley probably is the most liberal top university in the USA. Here is the proof:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/01/24_freshmen.shtml

-Berkeley is more and more becoming like a private university because its state funding is dwindling (about one third of funding now, and decreasing), it is relying on private donations to survive. Blame the taxpayers/voters of CA, and the homeowners (prop 13). CA real estate values have skyrocketed, but homeowners like those on Panoramic Hills don't want to support education.

-Why is it so hard for you to UNDERSTAND THAT THOSE FACILITIES DO SERVE THE STUDENTS! They are BADLY needed, for the safety of hundreds of students/staff and tens of thousands of fans who could DIE if/when the big one hits. I don't like this set of Regents either, but for once in their lives they have actually done what was right and what is needed by the students.

-Weigh the impact of cutting two or three dozen trees on the campus and city tree park. There are SIX HUNDRED oak trees on the lower part of campus alone and TENS OF THOUSANDS of trees on the UC Berkeley campus.

Ecology, sustainable building and city design is about intelligent, practical tradeoffs. If you look at the way the whole area is supposed to look after the projects, you will see that there are some gains as far as green areas that do compensate for the partial loss of the narrowstrip of oak trees along Gailey Road, such as the decrease in parking lots and the new plaza where parking lots stood between Haas and Boalt Hall. The new gym has a very low profile instead of being some big ugly building, and most of the new space is blow ground.

-in any case, thanks for the considerate response klimber


to the "FVCK UC" author above:

besides the stats above showing that Berkeley is clearly a liberal campus, one-third of Berkeley students are from lower income backgrounds. That proportion is much smaller at other top schools. At Michigan, Virginia, Harvard or Stanford the proportion of lower-income students is only 10%. Give Berkeley some credit, it is a whole lot more than a weapons lab.

The "ruling class" in Berkeley is indeed the homeowners, they do run city hall. They constantly screw the students with their paternalistic suburban antisocial mindset. Shut down the Greek, ban shops from opening late, impede new stores, etc... And yes, they are very rich. And no, if you own a house that's worth more than $1.25 million, you are not "middle class". And "the ruling class industrial-military-corporate war machine" doesn't give a damn about football facilities. It might be a personal fixation of yours, but it is not part of the picture as far as the athletic facilities are concerned. If anyhing they would rather turn Berkeley into an MIT or Cal Tech with just only science/engineering schools and no major athletic programs.

Acorns of all varieties (valley, black, coast/canyon live, etc..) were and are still used by Native American peoples throughout CA for nutritional and culturally significant food sources. For a UC that claims to be liberal and accepting of people's cultures, their decision to annihilate an entire grove of coastal live oaks from their campus to be replaced by a corporate sports stadium is reason enough to boycott UC Berkeley. The nuclear radiation emmissions from Livermore is another reason..

This Nupa acorn soup recipe on native tech uses black oak acorns, though other oaks can also be substituted. Coastal live oaks may have less tannins than the black oaks, though all acorns require leaching with water to remove the bitter tannins, leaving the nutty flavored acorn meat. It would be neat if the protesters could cook up some acorn soup or acorn bread to demonstrate this tasty and nutritious cultural food of indigenous North Americans. Since all species oaks have been greatly extirpated from many regions throughout the Bay Area, leaving the oak grove at UC Berkeley standing alive is essential to the evolutionary health of this species..

"When the acorn soup, or 'Nupa' is done, the cook removes the hot rocks from the soup. Sometimes the cook will drop the rocks onto clean cedar bows and allow the acorn adhered to it to bake, making what my kids call acorn chips. Other times the cook dips her hand into clean water and cleans off each rock as she takes it out of the soup then drops it onto the earth to allow it to cool and bake clean itself. This is how we cook acorn soup, or 'nupa'. The other way we serve it is in little water dumplings or 'ulay'. For this we cook the acorn into a very thick soup, when it is done cooking we use a small basket and individually dip a basketful of the thick acorn soup into very cold running water. It immediately solidifies into like a gelatin dumpling. Many elders prefer this older style of cooked acorn. This is how my people, the Northern Sierra Mewuk (Miwok) prepare acorn. Acorn is high in protein and contains almost every essential vitamin. This we know because we had to have it analyzed before the doctors at Oak Knoll Naval hospital my grandmother was in prior to her passing would allow her to have it."

read on @;
http://www.nativetech.org/recipes/recipe.php?recipeid=115

There is no excuse for UC Berkeley to destroy the oak grove. Thanks again to all the treesitters and other activists working hard to protect this treasure from the chainsaws of UC's corporatist developers. Climb on!!

There are 600 oak trees on campus, only 40 trees will be cut (only two of which are actually older than the stadium itself and healthy) and 120 saplings planted instead. It sounds like if the project is build, you will be able to have more acorn soup a couple of decades from now. there are as well many thousands oak trees just east of the stadium.

BTW, the oak grove was planted by UC in the 1920s, the area west of the stadium was mostly grassland before the stadium was built. The oak trees were landscaping.

PS: spare us the "corporate" BS, the project is 100% funded by individual alumni who care about their campus, trees and all, far more than any of you ever will.