Emergency Rally at 5:00 - Police Fence the Oak Grove

I'm supportive, but since when to UC Berkeley students not know how to spell "dying"? One of those banners uses the word "dieing."

What I meant to write was:
Die is defined as "to expire" or "cease to exist" The verb Dyeis defined as "to apply dye to cloth or other material"

Is it clear yet whether the local university police are running the area differently? People must have been up there for months, or nearly a year. It makes sense that the sports department or police wouldn't climb ladders into the trees to chase those people around because surely someone could fall. Yet they easily could have stationed police on permanent ground duty to keep people from going up and down the tree.
Now that they have this fence, are they assigning a UCPD to sit in it all night eyeing the people above, for days at a time, until they need to go retrieve new books to read and food? If not, it seems like it isn't that difficult to keep tossing support-packets up there for them. I mean, the sheer endurance of that crew is amazing. On one level, many might say that there are many serious nonlocal fights that people with such energy would be useful for. But you have to start somewhere I guess. It is surely best when those with sticktuitiveness are on your side and aiming their focus at the greedy/bad/misguided rather than vice versa.

While for most of the night there were 5-6 officers inside the cage, by dawn there was only one police officer and 2 private security guards from the same company used to do stadium security for the games. In terms of changes in police behavior they arrested 2 people for providing food to the sitters, something which they have threatened before, but never followed through with to my knowledge. The two arrestees went to court today, but I am not yet aware of the results. They soon gave this up, however, as the crowd was too large and too persistent for them to handle. In sum, I'd call the fence a failure; since it has gone up we have gotten more food, water and people into the trees.

This lifelong California and federal taxpayer calls for immediately tearing down the fence, abolishing the football team and saving all the trees. It is outrageous that any state agency can claim it has some non-existent authority to ignore local environmental laws. This is not a monarchy; it is a parliamentary democracy, and if the palm-greasing, parasitic, reactionary, wealthy members of the UC Board of Regents do not like it, they can and should resign immediately. One member of the UC Board of Regents is the husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blum.

As to UC Berkeley, it cannot claim to be promoting academic excellence so long as it has a football team. A school's academic excellence varies in inverse proportion to its promotion of money-making garbage like football.

The trees are not only beautiful, they hold the soil on the hill above most of the UC campus, all of which sits on an earthquake fault and does not need any huge structure like a stupid stadium. UC Berkeley has more than enough athletic facilities for a school which is supposed to promote academic excellence with our tax dollars. This is not some private university dedicated to stupidity; this is the fruit of our collective labor, our blood, sweat and tears, and it should not only promote academic excellence by abolishing the football team, it should provide leadership in environmental issues by never cutting down all these beautiful oak trees in this peaceful and very necessary grove.

Let's all be at the march on Saturday at noon from the Oak Grove and bring food for the people in the trees. This is an excellent Labor Day weekend activity as it is the workingclass who overwhelmingly pays the taxes for all public schools, including the University of California. Whose trees? Our trees! Whose university? Our university! Honor Labor and Save the Trees!

"non-existent authority to ignore local environmental laws."

Really? Could you expand upon this, because it's the first time I've heard of this being the case.

To the poster named "#", who the hell are you to decide that the UC campus "does not need a stadium"? 9,000 students were there last Saturday and had a fantastic time. It is THEIR stadium and THEIR fukking campus. Who the hell are you to ignore the safety of 500 students and staff, which the new building will take out of harm's way?!?!

There are over 10,000 trees on that campus, and it is up to the UC community to decide how best to manage their campus planning. The LIVES OF FIVE HUNDRED STUDENTS AND STAFF actually are a factor in this planning process, something this stupid crusade lead by outsiders and by homeowners in Panoramic Hills doesn't care to even consider (median home price in PH of $1,250,000, for the poster named "#" who was babbling about "reactionary, wealthy" people).

"Teufel", thanks at least for acknowledging in a back-handed way the stupidity of this crusade:
"On one level, many might say that there are many serious nonlocal fights that people with such energy would be useful for [no $hit!]. But you have to start somewhere I guess." Translation: not much substance here in terms of environmental impact, but let's make an example, barge in on the campus and mess up their plans.

How the hell is the new building "greedy"? ALL the money in this project is coming from donations from thousands of alumni, a grassroots effort from people who have ACTUALLY lived and walked in the area, as opposed to the treesitters who hail fromplaces like New Jersey or the Mission and who are totally unconnected with the campus.

Building a "new stadium" -Which I don't believe is their plan, by the way. I'm pretty sure they want to build a top of the line sports training facility- in Memorial Oak Grove is not a safer solution that retrofitting their stadium because, well, IT IS ON THE HAYWARD FAULT.

see video of the cops tackling the man trying to get food up to the tree-sit, and also of them cutting the ropes, search youtube, username: bcitizen

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ugyqbz8A1aY

http://youtube.com/watch?v=YKCY4MJuJeY

come by the tree-sit anytime! bring food music or art! we need support.

if you can, come out to the Berkeley City Hall meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept 3rd, and let Mayor Bates know you do NOT want the city to settle for anything less than the preservation of the grove.

thanks,
K Lim

PS Berklean, you are going to hell.

The new building will be built on safe ground. IT IS NOT ON THE FAULT (http://calbears.cstv.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/080607aac.html). If it were on the fault, it would have been against State law to build and unsafe. See excerpt from findings below. The ground NEAR the fault is actually more solid and safer than the ground in the Berkeley lowlands. It's a bit counterintuitive, but it's a well-known fact among people with a basic understanding of geotechnical sciences.

The issue here is, do you keep clinging to the fault argument against the project, knowing at this point that it's a bogus pretext to stop the project (given the conclusive scientiic evidence above) and using it as a good propaganda tool to obstruct the project, or do you fight the project on an honest basis? Your call. I know that mayor Bates and a lot of the Berkeley establishement and other zealots have chosen the former path...

"K Lim", if you'd like to argue about any of the points above or other aspects of this issue, please do so in a mature and constructive way, as opposed to telling me to go to hell.

In any issue, it's important to consider dissenting views even when they contradict some of your assumptions and go against your beliefs.



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No Active Faults under High Performance Center, Government Agencies Say

Aug. 6, 2007

BERKELEY - Two government agencies have confirmed an independent study by Oakland firm Geomatrix Consultants Inc. that no active faults lie under the footprint of the proposed Student-Athlete High Performance Center to be built adjacent to Memorial Stadium.

The interpretation by both the U.S. Geological Survey and the California Geological Survey refute claims made by the City of Berkeley and others in a lawsuit filed to halt the project that the new building would be constructed in an unsafe location on the Hayward Fault in violation of the Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Zoning Act.
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You got to love cops

I am one of the people who was inside the fence when it went up, and have been there ever since. I was also there for a couple months prior to the fence.

The police originally would tear down anything that wasn't occupied, and several structures were rebuilt numerous times. One time they tried coming up with ladders when a protester was there, unknown to them, and he dumped urine at them and stole their ladder. After that, they left things alone for the most part, just picking off people for arrest when/if they identified them in the trees and again on the ground. Primarily, Detective Wade MacAdam has been the one responsible for that.

We've always been able to get food and water and are able to get in and out discreetly (or not as we choose). However, the strong support from the community is vital to us, and is necessary to support a lot of people in the trees at once (the numbers vary, but just to give an example, at a peak time, the tree with the "Home is where the trees live" banner (which I built), had fourteen people in it at one point, and that is but one of over a dozen trees we have occupied. When supplies run low, more people leave the trees, so keeping a constant supply coming in is important.

The UC knows that very well, and the fence was an attempt to cut us off. If they could have their way sans us getting out of the trees, we'd just stay quiet behind the fence for the football game, without any fussy people out on the street to draw attention, and as we starve we'll voluntarily climb down one by one for arrest inside the fence.

It was a disastrous move on their part, because it has been entirely ineffective, has drawn a lot of attention (including publication on national news including CNN and the New York Times), and has made them look very bad.

Except for the first few days, things have been much as they were before the fence - relaxed and carefree, except that now to get from tree to tree we only have the option of traversing via rope, rather than using the ground (well, we do use the ground occasionally, but it's risky).

The first day however, the UCPD showed their true evil sides. They were unnecessarily and inhumanely cruel, and the ones who didn't break down and leave crying laughed and enjoyed their cruelty fully. The arrest I filmed was of my friend Drew, who was doing nothing but helping to get food up to us. He faces only one charge - resisting arrest, for which he received a seven day stayaway order. The violence used on him was just for show, to intimidate everyone else.

I was quoted in the Daily Californian as saying "What [the police] are doing here today is extremely inhumane and there’s no excuse for it, regardless of what the stance on the tree-sit is and what happens to this grove," and that's still the best way I can think of to say it.

Those of you who feel the need to attack and have the stupid hateful attitude against us for our peaceful protest are not using logical arguments or thinking things through. The UC is violating local law (against cutting down mature oaks, which they may override since they are a state entity), state law (against building such a facility on an earthquake fault), and federal law (because it's a native burial ground and sacred space, and because it's a World War I memorial, which requires federal approval to change).

Though there have been a couple dodgy articles claiming there isn't earthquake danger, the fact that Hayward fault runs directly through the stadium is a well-known fact, admitted by the UC, and quite obvious as both ends of the stadium are badly split from previous earthquakes. Since the tree sit started on December 2nd, there have been seven earthquakes, ranging from 2.0 to 4.2 on the richter scale. I was in the redwood tree for the 4.2 that happened early in the morning a couple months ago. When it happened, the stadium emitted a tremendous crashing noise, and though I'm not sure what happened, maintenance work was being done on it for the following week, as large equipment such as cherry-pickers were brought in and used in full visibility on the outside of the stadium.

The UC unearthed 18 native bodies when the stadium was built (over where a lake used to be on Strawberry creek - they had to fill it in in order to build the stadium, and the creek now runs underneath it in a culvert), and admitted knowledge of that as recently as in E-mail correspondence in 2004.

About two weeks ago, a lot of people came out for a World War I vigil, where 1800 names and hometowns of Berkeley residents who died in WWI were read aloud and a memorial placard was placed at the grove. The police threw it away during their last raid of our ground support (they come by every so often and throw away everything they can).

We aren't anti-football. Some of us love climbing to the highest trees to watch the games. We just don't feel that such an amazing site, or sites like it, need be torn down to support it. There are plenty of other places on UC campus where the training facility could be built.

You don't have to destroy some of the most beautiful and important parts of nature in order to enjoy life.