Posted on 12/16/2008 12:51:20 PM PST by SmithL
The last UC Santa Cruz treesitter surrendered to campus police Saturday, moments before a chainsaw-wielding crew began to level the redwood grove they had occupied for 402 days.
“We knew they were getting ready for an extraction, so we had been preparing,” said Jennifer Charles, who had been the designated media contact for the protest.
In the end, when “about 90 police in riot gear” and the commercial tree-cutters appeared Saturday morning, only one treesitter was left in the branches, Charles said. He came down of his own volition, to be promptly booked on charges of trespassing, disturbing the peace and violation of a court order, she said.
The tree-clearing crew cleared the last platforms occupied by the treesitters and then set to work felling 48 century-old redwoods and 11 oaks on the site designated for construction of a new biomedical facility.
The tree-clearing crews didn’t need to resort to the scaffolding used to clear the last redwood at UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, where a longer arboreal occupation ended Sept. 9 after police were able to mount a structure that reached to within a dozen feet of the top of that groves tallest redwood.
Charles said the protest, mounted in opposition to plans in the Santa Cruz campus Long Range Development, didn’t end with the treesit on Science Hill and the arrest of Scott Poshian the moment his feet touched earth Saturday.
“We’re all going to continue fighting together to prevent the expansion in our own different ways,” she said.
The university’s plans will be going to the Local Agency Formation Commission in the spring.
The university’s announcement Saturday was terse, beginning: “Construction preparation activities began earlier this morning on the Science Hill site that will be home to the new Biomedical Sciences building
(Excerpt) Read more at berkeleydailyplanet.com ...
(2) It was really cold and wet.
Santa Cruz deserves this.
Barbarians.
WTF? If I have to choose between an old majestic tree and a campus of a “university” where they just spew American hating propaganda then I take the tree. Why expand this stupid school? Adding a William Ayers wing to the Anti-American Studies College of the uni of Santa Cruz?
11 oak trees is a lot of firewood at $90+ a cord and redwood is going for over $2.60 a board foot.
Given the state's budget situation they'd better mill it!
How did that play out in Berkeley, anyway. I must have missed a story.
We had a big storm in 1998 with a lot of driftwood washed up on a friends front yard & driveway. I volunteered with others to cut up the logs for firewood. I had been cutting for awhile when my chain saw threw up some red wood chips from one of the logs. The log was about a foot in diameter and you needed a magnifying glass to count some of the 100 rings. No way was that going to firewood. I had it milled up and made a lot of indoor & outdoor neat stuff. Beautiful wood.
And if you want more, just click on keyword Beserkeley.
Maybe I’m mistaken: in the article they referred to “the redwood grove”. I didn’t know it was oaks. It WAS oaks in Berkeley, however.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.