UC Berkeley wants to mow down urban forest

We’ll begin with the opening of a stunning report from Randy Shaw at California Progress Report:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is moving to chop down 22,000 trees in Berkeley’s historic Strawberry and Claremont Canyons and over 60,000 more in Oakland. This destructive plan is rapidly moving forward with little publicity, and FEMA cleverly scheduled its three public meetings for mid and late May while UC Berkeley students were in finals or gone for the summer.

UC Berkeley has applied for the grant to destroy the bucolic Strawberry and Claremont Canyon areas, claiming that the trees pose a fire hazard. The school has no plans to replant, and instead will cover 20% of the area in wood chips two feet deep. And it will pour between 700 and 1400 gallons of herbicide to prevent re-sprouting, including the highly toxic herbicide, Roundup. People are mobilizing against this outrageous proposal, which UC Berkeley has done its best to keep secret.

Read the rest.

The massive deforesting operation in one of the East Bay’s most scenic areas is part of a FEMA project officially entitled “East Bay Hills Hazardous Fire Risk Reduction.”

Targets of the chainsaws will be non-native trees, especially eucalyptus.

Details from the project’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement [posted here]:

UCB submitted two grant applications under the PDM [Pre-Disaster Mitigation — esnl] program: one for a 56.3-acre area designated Strawberry Canyon-PDM in this EIS and one for a 42.8-acre area designated Claremont-PDM. To reduce the potential for these areas to support and spread wildfires, UCB proposes to eliminate eucalyptus, Monterey pine, and other non-native trees that promote the spread of wildfire. Oak and bay trees and other native vegetation present under the larger non-native trees would be preserved and encouraged to expand.

The environmental review did consider alternatives, including a required “no action” version in which existing management practices would continue. Here’s the relevant portion for the UC Berkeley land:

UCB would continue annual removal of grass and light, flashy fuels (such as twigs, needles, and grasses that ignite and burn rapidly) from UCB roadsides, UCB turnouts, and within 100 feet of UCB structures and adjacent private residences. UCB would also work to maintain the strategic areas where fuel reduction projects have been completed during the past 10 years to ensure eradication of target species of vegetation that have already been removed. UCB would continue to pursue fuel reduction within 30 feet of private and public structures to create defensible space in accordance with its 2020 Hill Area Fire Fuel Management Program.

And some more details from the environmental statement focusing on the Berkeley part of the project:

The UCB grant application includes two project areas in which approximately 22,000 non-native trees would be cut down, including all eucalyptus, Monterey pine, and acacia trees. The goal is to reduce the amount of fuel in the project areas by allowing the forest to convert from a eucalyptus-dominated, non-native forest to a native forest of California bay laurel, oak, big-leaf maple, California buckeye, California hazelnut, and other native tree and shrub species currently present beneath the eucalyptus and other non-native trees. The native species would provide less fuel to potential wildfires than the non-native species currently provide.

Felled trees up to approximately 24 inches in diameter at breast height (DBH) would be cut up into chips 1 to 4 inches long and the chips would be spread on up to 20% of each site to a maximum depth of 24 inches. UCB expects the chips to largely decompose within 5 years.

Branches from trees greater than 24 inches DBH would be cut up and scattered on the site (lopped and scattered). The trunks of these trees would typically be cut into 20- to 30-foot lengths. Some tree trunks would be placed to help control sediment and erosion or support wildlife habitat. Some tree trunks may be moved to an adjacent portion of the hillside or shipped for use as fuel, a source of paper pulp, or horse bedding.

Three temporary access roads are anticipated to be required for the proposed Claremont-PDM project. The three roads would be 12 feet wide and total approximately 2,600 feet long.

Completion of the initial vegetation reduction work is expected to require up to 40 weeks spread over 2 to 3 years. Maintenance would continue for up to 10 years after initial tree cutting.

The last chance for spoken public comments will come tomorrow [Saturday] morning in Oakland, with a hearing scheduled for 10 a.m. to noon at the Claremont Middle School, 5750 College Avenue.

Written comments will be received until 17 June at the following places:

• At the project website.
• By email at EBH-EIS-FEMA-RIX@fema.dhs.gov
• By snail mail sent to P.O. Box 72379, Oakland, CA 94612-8579
• And by fax at 510-627-7147

Project opponents have created their own website here.

And here, from the environmental statement, is the site of the proposed action in Strawberry Canyon:

 

Quote of the day: Words from a famous writer

When we first met Louis L’Amour in 1981, he was the best-selling writer in history, having written more books that had sold a million copies plus each than anyone who’d ever put ink to paper.

What follows is from our  profile of Louis for the 25 October 1982 Christian Science Monitor. The words as timelier than ever:

“We are using the resources of this planet far too rapidly. No one is thinking about the future. Our country has become too much a country of ‘now.’ We forget that no one ever truly ‘owns’ the land. We possess it in trust, to pass on to those who follow. And we should leave our trust better than we found it. That’s why I’ve always planted trees wherever I’ve lived.”

>snip<

“I remember a Jicarilla Apache I met in Colorado. He was looking for arrowheads. Whenever he found one, he would open a buckskin pouch he carried and sprinkle some of its contents on the ground where he had picked up the artifact. The pouch contained earth. He was giving back to the land something to replace what he had taken.

“That’s a highly symbolic gesture that should speak to us today. The earth is not something to be looted. It is to be cherished. Instead of looting the earth, we should rebuild, and leave it a better place for the next generation.”

Headlines of the day: Blood and greed edition

From The Independent:

BP and Shell price-fixing inquiry: Oil giants raided over allegations of collusion

From Australia’s News.com:

Charity calls to ban cancer-causing chemicals used by women

• Breast Cancer UK calls for total ban on BPA chemical

• BPA is “contributing to rapid increase in breast cancer”

• Chemical commonly used in food and beverage packaging

From a BBC story on the sex slavery comments of Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto, who also calls for a “restoration” of dictatorship:

Japan WWII ‘comfort women’ were ‘necessary’ — Hashimoto

From a BBC story about those “freedom fighters” the Obama administration supports in Syria:

Outrage at Syrian rebel shown ‘eating soldier’s heart’

Finally, from Mother Jones, a story about the folks who are smiling whilst the blood flows:

Contractors Raked in $385 Billion on Overseas Bases in 12 Years

Every year, US taxpayers send billions of dollars abroad to build and maintain our military presence.

Occupy the Farm returns to UC Berkeley land

It was three days short of a year since UC Berkeley campus cops evicted Occupy the Farm from their three-week takeover [previously] of the university-owned Gill Tract in nearby Albany when protesters returned to their occupation today.

From vlogger Em Raguso:

Judith Scherr reports for the Oakland Tribune:

Chanting “Whose farm? Our farm!” some 150 people marched from Albany City Hall to a weed-strewn plot of University of California-owned land where they yanked out 3-foot-tall weeds and planted squash and tomato seedlings.

>snip<

Protesters want the Gill Tract to become an urban farm, while the university said it uses the land for agricultural research. A development is planned for an area adjacent to the land which has not been agriculturally zoned in decades, university officials have said.

As protesters entered the area Saturday, bringing with them two chickens, three goats and a rabbit, police informed them via bullhorn that they were trespassing and subject to arrest. As of late Saturday afternoon, no arrests had been made.

Read the rest.

And from the Occupy the Farm website, a report on today’s action:

Three days after UC Berkeley’s new development proposal on the Gill Tract was voted down at the City of Albany’s Planning and Zoning Commission meeting on May 8th, the organizing group Occupy the Farm has again taken a stand for public education and urban agriculture, setting down roots on the hotly contested land.

“People have been fighting to preserve this land for farming for decades, because they recognize that because this is UC land, all residents of the East Bay have a stake and a say in what happens to this public resource,” said Lesley Haddock, a third year student in UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. “After fifteen years of trying to work through UC’s undemocratic process, public protest is our last option.”

Since 1997, coalitions of local residents, non-profits, and UC students and faculty have brought forth proposals to the UC administration for the creation of a sustainable urban agriculture curriculum on the entire Gill Tract. Administrators consistently rejected these proposals, and have been accused of not giving the proposals due consideration.

“Today we’re planting on the site of the proposed commercial development because we want to remind people what they will lose if a chain store and parking lot get built here,” stated Ashoka Finley, urban farmer and UC alum. “The UC, Albany even, could be on the cutting edge of participatory, community-based urban ag research, and they’re just throwing that opportunity away.”

Building on Occupy the Farm’s action in April-May 2012, today’s protest was focused on community education around food production . Farmers and activists were seen planting vegetables together, watering crops and passing out free plant starts to passers-by. There was a range of educational activities, including a seed-ball making workshop organized by a seven year-old. The young girl stated, “I just wanted to do it at a time when I knew a lot of kids would show up.”

As one of the last large plots of fertile agricultural soil left in the East Bay, the Gill Tract holds great potential for shifting our communities towards self-sufficiency through large-scale urban agriculture education. Occupy the Farm will be working all weekend to turn the south plot of the Gill Tract from an empty lot into an urban farm and community asset.

For more visuals and interviews, see this brief clip from ABC News 7 in San Francisco.

And here’s a report from the Daily Californian on the 14 May 2012 police raid ending the last occupation:

 

Headline of the day: They’re on to something!

From Spiegel:

Less Is More: Rogue Economists Champion Prosperity without Growth

Social Security cuts: Liberal and radical takes

From The Real News Network, host Paul Jay moderates a debate of Barack Obama’s planned Social Security cuts featuring Joseph Minarik, Senior Vice President and Director of Research at the Committee for Economic Development (CED) in Washington, and chief economist of the Office of Management and Budget for the eight years of the Clinton Administration. He’s pitted against one of esnl’s favorite economists, Richard D. Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and currently a Visiting Professor of the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University in New York.

A transcript of the debate is posted here.

We are reminded of an 8 November 1954  letter from then-President Dwight David Eisenhower to his older brother Edgar:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Quote of the day: The mad wealth scramble

From James Howard Kunstler, writing at his blog, Clusterfuck Nation:

Things are breaking loose. Holes have appeared in the fabric of fraud and lies that passes for the world money system. They are black holes, gravitationally sucking in the things breaking loose, and as these things cross their event horizons, they will never be seen again. These things I speak of are the collateral for vast nebulae of falsely generated debts and obligations that were never intended to be honored (i.e. regarded as real). As they vanish down the wormholes of time, they take with them their pretenses of money value, meaning they leave reverberations of impoverishment in the shadowy place that the real world has become.

The process described above – an alchemy of physics – will begin to shed light where the shadows have been, revealing a much harsher world in sharp contours and shocking color, for instance: red, the color of ink representing losses on real balance sheets of every household, every enterprise, and every government the whole world round. A scramble for safety now ensues, not just to lay hold of anything with remaining real “moneyness,” but for the resources that drive the kind of economies we have. In other words, for gold and silver, and for oil and gas.

Chart of the day: Economy or environment?

From Gallup, the latest annual poll results focusing on a question premised on a false dichotomy:

Stunning, infuriating: ‘The Tax Free Tour’

From Dutch public television, another stunning VPRO Backlight documentary [previously featured shows], this one exploring the dirty little corporate tricks used to avoid  paying taxes:

The program notes:

“Where do multinationals pay taxes and how much?” Gaining insight from international tax experts, Backlight director Marije Meerman (‘Quants’ & ‘Money & Speed’), takes a look at tax havens, the people who live there and the routes along which tax is avoided globally.

Those routes go by resounding names like ‘Cayman Special’, ‘Double Irish’, and ‘Dutch Sandwich’. A financial world operates in the shadows surrounded by a high level of secrecy. A place where sizeable capital streams travel the world at the speed of light and avoid paying tax. The Tax Free Tour is an economic thriller mapping the systemic risk for governments and citizens alike. Is this the price we have to pay for globalised capitalism?

At the same time, the free online game “Taxodus” by Femke Herregraven is launched. In the game, the player can select the profile of a multinational and look for the global route to pay as little tax as possible.

research: William de Bruijn
camera: Jean Counet
montage: Bart van den Broek
geluid: Tim van Peppen, Benny Jansen, Joris van Ballegoijen
productie: Marie Schutgens
animaties: Bitcaves & Motoko

What becomes clear is that borders are only meaningful for the flesh-and-blood person, while they are utterly permeable for the disembodied corporate person so beloved of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Headlines of the day: From hither and yon

From EconoMonitor:

Latest US GDP Data Show Economy Weak at Year’s End but Corporate Profits Near Record High

From RT:

Obama signs ‘Monsanto Protection Act’ written by Monsanto-sponsored senator

From World Socialist Web Site:

US food stamp use swells to a record 47.8 million

From Cornell University:

You Don’t “Own” Your Own Genes

Ethos: A documentary on money and power

Hosted by actor Woody Harrelson and written and directed by Pete Gain, Ethos is a 2011 documentary that explores the relationship between banking, power, politics, personal freedom, and environmental destruction. Among those featured are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Chalmers Johnson.

It’s well worth 68 minutes of your time.

Quote of the day: ‘Democratizing’ debt

From economist Michael Hudson:

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.

Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts. For a sovereign’s debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.

By giving taxpayers this voice in government, the Dutch and British democracies provided creditors with much safer claims for payment than did kings and princes whose debts died with them. But the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs.

This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, communal infrastructure and extract tribute. In response, democracies are demanding referendums over whether to pay creditors by selling off the public domain and raising taxes to impose unemployment, falling wages and economic depression. The alternative is to write down debts or even annul them, and to re-assert regulatory control over the financial sector.

Read the rest.

Headlines of the day: Forests, being eaten away

From Al Jazeera:

Ireland mulls selling forests to pay debt

Controversial new scheme is part of efforts to meet IMF demands to reduce debt

From the Washington Post:

China’s disposable chopstick addiction is destroying its forests

‘How Your Tax Dollars Are Actually Spent’

Via Orwellwasright, a dramatic Al Jazeera visualization of the real budget battle’s driving engine, that military/industrial/academic complex Ike warned us about 52 years ago.

We suspect the real number’s larger. Nor were real impacts on, for example, academia made clear. Berkeley, with it’s bandolier of National Laboratories spawned by the search for The Bomb and expanded into engines of imperialism, as in the genetically engineered cops designed to conquer land rights and demolish peasant sovereignty on behalf of private profit and the interests of the U.S. military and their CIA drone-firing gunslingers now busily setting up shop in Africa, along with AFRICOM, the new military command launched by an Air Force general who lead the air war of Afghanistan.

And it was that same general who devixsed the strategy for converting the air force in agrofueled fleet.

Africa was also the first destination of crews from Berkeley’s BP-funded, national lab participating $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute, who launched searches for suitable crops to be turned into fuels using genetically engineered microbial refineries. If all those oil countries rebelled, at least there’d be fuel plantations, operating under the watchful missile-armed eyes droning overhead.

And that’s just one on many avenues in which the single largest burner of money shapes the landscape of possibilities. . .

Quote of the day: Seeing the future in urban form

From a stunning and very perceptive 1999 report by Robert Fishman for Fannie Mae Housing Facts & Findings on the trends shaping of American cities, past and future.

The number one trend he saw for the first half of the 21st Century is proving right on the money:

The past 30 years have seen increasing concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the income scale, relative stagnation in the middle, and worsening poverty at the bottom. Our respondents expect this trend to continue in the next 50 years, with possible dire consequences for American cities and regions. For growing disparities in income and wealth lead inevitably to an increasingly divided metropolis. If, as our respondents believe, these growing disparities of wealth will become the most important single influence on the American metropolis in the next 50 years, some of the negative consequences are detailed in the rest of the top 10 list: a perpetual “underclass” in central cities and inner-ring suburbs and the deterioration of the “first-ring” post-1945 suburb, as the struggling portions of the middle and working classes find themselves trapped in deteriorating older suburbs. On the wealthier side of the great metropolitan divide, we are likely to see the winners in our “winner-take-all society” isolate themselves in gated communities or other exclusive preserves at the edge of the region.

Other likely trends include a home-building industry increasingly focused on high-end “trophy houses” or “tract mansions;” a similar concentration in retailing on upscale malls; office parks located near the enclaves where the top executives live-locations that often leave the bulk of the employees with long, difficult commutes; and increasing disparities between the quality of the school systems and other services in elite suburbs versus less-favored suburbs and inner cities. We are also likely to see new building focused not just on the outer edge of a region but in certain “quadrants” favored by the affluent: for example, in Washington, DC, the Northwest; in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Southwest; in Atlanta and Chicago, the North. For the affluent who choose to live in gentrified neighborhoods in central cities, the rule of isolation will also obtain, as the wealthy use the techniques of privatization, ranging from private schools to special tax-and-service districts, to insulate themselves from the urban crisis around them.

Headlines of the day: Austerity in action

Both at home [from the New York Times]:

Recovery in U.S. Is Lifting Profits, but Not Adding Jobs

And abroad [also from the New York Times]:

Greece, Creditors to Discuss Public Sector Layoffs

A must-see video: Wealth Inequality in America

From vlogger politizane, a stunning visualization of wealth inequality based on research by researchers Michael I. Norton [Harvard] and Dan Ariely [Duke]  reported in “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” published in Perspectives on Psychological Science [PDF].

For more on wealth inequality, see here.

Chart of the day: The Great Global Land Grab

From BEHIND THE BRANDS: Food justice and the “Big 10” food and beverage companies, a new Oxfam report [PDF} on the power and politics of food. For more information, see this Oxfam website. Click on the image to enlarge.

Video report: The Financialization of Food

From The Real News Network, a Paul Jay interview with Sasha Breger Bush, lecturer at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. She describes her specialty as “International political economy, development studies, global financial markets, food and farming, and political theory.

A transcript of the discussion is posted here.

Chart of the day: Cruisin’ for a bruisin’

Seizing oil, suppressing those who violently resist, and towing the Israeli line on nukes — that’s not just the American foreign policy line. It’s also the sentiment of most Americans, with that oft-cited “building democracy abroad” bit getting the short shrift.

The latest sad numbers from Gallup: