The end of the Tree Sitter

Disclaimer: This is just my own impressions of what went down these last few days, along with my own opinion, biases and inaccuracies - if you're after the full story, pay a visit to the Daily Cal - I know that a good part of my weekend was spent refreshing their page to get the latest and best news on what was happening down at the Oak Grove.

This morning I took a walk down to the Oak Grove on Piedmont Avenue, as I've done for the last 6 days. I knew, of course, that there weren't any trees their any more - but all the same it came as a shock to see nothing but piles of wood chips where, just a few days ago, were over 40 oak and redwood trees.

So, what's the story?

Well, first we've gotta look at a little bit of history - I know I've mentioned the tree sitters in the past, but lets go over the basics again.

On the 2nd of December 2006, Zachary RunningWolf(below), a local native American and sometime political aspirant climbed into a Pacific Coastal Oak tree in the Memorial Oak Grove just West of Berkeley's 80,000 seat Memorial Stadium. The University had plans to construct a Student High Performance Athletics Centre - training facilities for their college sports teams - on the site of the cluster of around 40 Oak and Redwood trees. At first, many people came and went to the ongoing protests, and a network of ropes and cables stretched across several trees in the Grove. In the meantime, a lawsuit was brought against the University by The California Oak Foundation, the City of Berkeley and the Panoramic Hill Association. These actions combined to delay the construction of the new Sports Facility, and the University grew increasingly strict on the tree-sitters - erecting one and then a second fence and topping the fences with barbed wire in an attempt to cut off the tree sitters.

Zachary RunningWolf

(Note that the guy I identified as Zachary RunningWolf in a previous blog was, in fact, some other dude named Zachary, and not the initiator of the Berkeley Tree Sit)

So things continued until just last week. The tree sitters grew fewer in number, and were confined to a single tree, but their presence was still felt (largely by the efforts of their ground crew, who were encamped across the road from the trees). The legal battles dragged on, but eventually, it became clear that the University of California was winning this fight. decisions were passed down by judges, appeals were made and the protest became the longest urban tree sit in American history (longer than all of those other urban tree sits that we're all familiar with, like... err...). The supporters were banned from supplying the tree sitters with food and water - a task the University took up themselves. Occasionally, the ground support team would stage a protest event, and the UC Police would get annoyed. Occasionally, the University would send up a cherry picker to hack off some limbs, and the protesters would get annoyed. But generally, by the time I arrived in Berkeley, there appeared to be a fairly stable status quo in place - sitters up the tree, supporters hanging out on the sidewalk and police standing watch over the whole thing.

Which helps to explain why I thought nothing more of it when I read last Thursday that a judge had given the UC the go-ahead to begin construction, and against which an appeal was  apparently pending. Imagine my surprise, then, when I arrived back in Berkeley from a field trip on Friday afternoon to see three helicopters hovering over the stadium. At first I was confused - had there been a major crime on campus? It took me a little while on the walk up the hill to realise that this could only be about the tree sitters. So I went home, gathered up my camera + equipment and headed out to the grove. By the time I arrived, most of the trees had already gone - the tree fellers would cut a chunk out of the base, then swing an earthmoving machine at it, battering the whole tree to the ground.

As the evening went on and more and more trees came down, the situation down at ground level became more and more heated.

At first, it was mostly hippies, standing around looking distraught - as you may well expect - when you've devoted such a great deal of your time to saving something, it must be difficult to see it so summarily destroyed.

The police, too were relatively chill at first - just standing outside the fence like they'd been doing for literally hundreds of days.

But at some point, things got more heated.

It's probably worth diverging from the plot at this point to note that there were several different types of protesters present on the ground, and they fell broadly into three categories. The largest group were the hippies - your stereotypical 'save the trees' type, for whom the key objection seemed to be philosophical - that the trees in question, as part of the wider ecosystem, should be preserved for the general well-being of the earth.

A second group was the native Americans - people like RunningWolf, who we encountered above. These people tended to emphasise the cultural importance of the site - the claim was made, for example, that the Oak Grove was a burial ground for the local Ohlone indian tribe.

The third group were what you might call the environmental radicals - these guys and girls had similar concerns to the hippies, but were more focused on the politics of the decision and the University, and tended more to anger than to sadness at the loss of the trees.

Of course, there was significant crossover between these groups, as well as significant room for outlier-craziness - RunningWolf, for example, is on record as claiming that cutting down the trees is a project of the Mormons and the Illuminati. This crossover of motivations and politics made the whole protest some what messy, with a litany of different messages and methods of protest.

Back on track, however - 

The enviro-radicals also made their appearance, and tension continued to mount.

The outbreak on Friday seems to have been started by percussion, of all things.

At some point, with the protesters lined up on one side of the road, and the police hanging back behind barricades on the opposite side, someone started banging on an empty plastic bottle, like the kind you would use in a water cooler. More people joined in, banging on whatever plastic or metal they could get their hands on - the anger and frustration of the protesters was manifesting itself as music and dance.

Unfortunately, dancing around on a major university thoroughfare doesn't win you any friends amongst the police.

Eventually, the assembled cops cleared everyone from one side of the road - at which point, they crossed the median and continued their dance on the opposite side. Things were getting more and more heated between the police and the protesters - traffic was backing up along Piedmont Ave (it didn't help that there was a big Dave Matthews Band concert on that night, just down the road at the Greek Theatre) and the tree-sitter supporters were getting more and more worked up as the trees continued to fall.

Eventually, a police car tried to come through down the road which was being blocked by dancing hippies. Probably not the greatest idea, in hindsight - a gentleman with a pair of bongos sat himself down there, and simply refused to move.

This proved the flashpoint for the evening - when police tried to forcibly remove the man with the bongos, sympathetic protesters intervened, and everything got quite chaotic quite quickly - I'll let the pictures do the talking here.

As you can see, once the cops try to remove the guy from in front of the police car, all hell breaks loose - protesters are yelling "LET HIM GO!", and several young guys (mostly of an enviro-radical bent, it seems) jump right into the fray, trying to wrestle police away from the action.In doing so, the gentleman in the last two pictures become the fray - the police's training and the majority's reluctance to get bashed around or arrested eventually wins out. Police escort the man into custody to the shouts of his fellow protesters.

One girl's obvious distress catches my eye - there's clearly a lot of emotion in the air on this Friday evening, and it can be enough to really upset a person.

So, I went home on Friday feeling very bummed out about the whole situation - Nearly all of the trees were now down, and the University had given the remaining sitters a 72 hour deadline to come out of the trees.

Over the course of the weekend, the University first cut and then chipped all but two trees in the grove - one redwood which is the be transplanted to another spot on campus, and the temporary home of the four protesters still up that tree.

Come Monday, then, when the deadline expired, the place had turned into even more of a media circus than it had been on Friday. All of the biggest TV channels, Newspapers and Radio Stations in the Bay Area (and a whole bunch of small ones, too) gathered around to wait for.... something to happen. They conducted a walkie-talkie interview with one of the remaining sitters in the morning, but it became clear that today would not see the end of the Berkeley Tree Sit.

In the end, nothing happened on Monday except some more UC 'pruning' of the last tree still to be cut down - more lower branches were cut off the tree sitters' Redwood, further tightening their living space, while the University stopped providing its usual daily food and water provisions.

Tuesday, then, was the day. I woke up to the sound of helicopters for the 4th morning in a row, and made my way back to the Oak Grove. What I saw when I arrived was surreal, and somehow darkly humourous. Around the base of the tree swarmed construction workers in white coveralls, looking for all the world like Iranian nuclear technicians. Except that these particular men in white were building stairs. Up a tree. Or, more accurately, building scaffolding around the protesters' Redwood, so that they could build stairs right up into the canopy.

Meanwhile, the Chief and Assistant Chief of the UC Berkeley Police department (Yes, the university does have its own police department) were swinging around in a basket hanging from a crane, trying to talk down the 4 remaining sitters.

At around this point, with the scaffolding about to reach the bottom of the tree sitters' nest, and with the two highest ranking police officers on campus swinging around on the end of a crane my camera ran out of batteries. Which was probably just as well, considering that if they hadn't, I probably would've stuck around for the rest of the day, and missed three lectures. But this next part is all second hand info. Basically, at around 1:30PM on Tuesday September 9th - 648 days after the tree sit began - the protest came to a peaceful end. The remaining 4 sitters climbed down from their perches, were escorted down the scaffolding and arrested.

Returning after classes that evening, I was just in time to witness the final act of the tree sitter saga - a lone tree feller started at the top of that last redwood, attaching each section of the tree to the end of a crane and cutting it free for the crane to lift away.

And, after less than half an hour, he reached the bottom - the last section of Redwood was lifted away - all that was left was a tree feller and stump and two fences between it and the people who worked for so long to save it.

So, what can we say about this whole thing?

Well, a few things, maybe. My first thought is that, while the University of California may have won the war, this collective of hippies, enviro-radicals and Native Americans won 647 battles - one for every day they defied the university and stayed up in those trees.

Of course, we can't forget the police, and what a bloody difficult job they have in all this - after all, they didn't start this battle, but it was down to them to fight it. And (with a few exceptions, when certain individuals got too rough in the heat of the moment), they did a great job, given the circumstances.

The whole experience also hammers home to me that radicalism and a spirit of dissent still have a home in Berkeley today - and while the University again finds itself on the wrong side of history (As it often has in the past), the tree sitters and their supporters can surely claim to have sent an important message.

And I feel like the message here is that there is value in symbolism, and in choosing where to draw the line. In the scheme of things, of course, 40 trees don't mean a great deal - there are thousands of trees being clear-felled every day, even in the United States. But this isn't about Carbon Dioxide emissions or urban heat islands or public greenery - at least not directly. To me, this protest was about priorities - how we value the trees and animals that we all live amongst and how we value burly 20 year olds running into each other in front of 80,000 people. The University of California has shown its hand here, and revealed what it values within its campus. But more importantly, I feel, some people have had the guts to question this. Whatever their flaws (mixed messages, lots of crazies amongst them, unruly appearance, tendency to throw human waste), these people have had the foresight to not simply allow these things to be slowly eroded, but instead to draw a line, to say 'this far but no further', and to have the guts to get outraged over something most of us would simply have let pass.

So here's to all the tree-sitters out there.

PS. Apologies for the long post - there were lots of things bouncing in my head that I needed to get out. If you're interested in seeing more from the last few days of protests, check out set 1 or set 2, or if you're really feeling adventurous, flick through the entire, unabridged collection of 306 shots taken between Friday and Tuesday.