New York Times: A Dose of Maturity for a California Protest

BERKELEY, Calif., Jan. 22 — It is not every day that tree-sitters are older than the tree, but on Monday three environmental activists with a combined age of 247 climbed into an oak tree here for an hour to protest a hotly contested building plan.  A stand of 50 coastal oaks just outside Memorial Stadium at the University of California, Berkeley, would be mostly cut down as part of a $125 million project to build a new athletic training center. That plan prompted protesters to begin a tree-sit (a not uncommon form of civil disobedience in California) in early December, a campaign generally staffed by a group of scruffy-looking younger people in perches 30 or 40 feet above the ground.   But the protest received a shot of maturity on Monday morning when Shirley Dean, 71, Betty Olds, 86, and Sylvia McLaughlin, 90, climbed a ladder and mounted a jury-rigged platform about 15 feet up.  “Nobody’s going to cut us down,” Ms. Dean, a former Berkeley mayor, told a crowd of about 75 supporters, “and nobody’s going to cut these oaks down.”

The pro-oak lobby is among several groups that have sued the university over the new center and elements of a larger plan for renovations and seismic retrofits on the stadium, which sits on the Hayward Fault. Marie Felde, a spokeswoman for the university, had no comment on Monday’s protest, but said the new athletic center was necessary to help move athletic personnel and student athletes out of the 83-year-old stadium, where the coaches have offices and where the athletes train.  Doug Buckwald, an organizer of the protest, said the oaks, which create a shaded acre just outside the stadium’s western gates, were too precious to lose. “An urban forest is a rare thing to have,” Mr. Buckwald said, “and we have a beautiful one here.”   Mr. Buckwald added that at least one of the oaks could be more than 200 years old, though the tree sat in on Monday was relatively youthful, probably about 90. That made it about as old as Ms. McLaughlin, a prominent California conservationist who seemed comfortable up a tree, reading a book and eating a candy bar while dangling her legs off the platform.  Not so for Ms. Dean, who stood holding tight to a branch during the hourlong sit-in, and was the first one out of the tree. “I’m scared to death because I’m scared of heights,” she said. “But maybe this will cure it.”