The People’s Park civic landmark status with the city ends April, 2019. The People’s Park Committee is applying for civic landmark status, state and national, I am to believe. The regents were aware of this, I am to believe. The regents should have known that the millennials were coming, and likely have had at least 50 years to plan for their arrival. I am to believe. The regents should know the importance of green urban space and how it revitalizes the community. I have an MA in urban studies, not from UCB or any UC, and I am very aware of the importance of green urban space and how it revitalizes our community; it seems that you are not aware of this.
It furthermore seems disingenuous and scandalously unfair to destroy our vital urban ecosystem in this time of poverty, pollution, and political strife. One should think that any kind of destruction to People’s Park would not take place until after April of 2019 as per any recurrent civic landmark status. 2018 in many ways marked the first time in history that people began to take for granted an urban forest in eastern People’s Park, instead 2018 will be marked by how the UC regents choose to once again put gentrification [which is a form of genocide,] before community.
The Sacred Berkeley Oak Grove and it’s systemic treesit should have taught the regents that policing is as expensive as replanting trees, and by replanting I am to mean that one would use engineering to remove and replant them elsewhere. Our point then was replace fossil fuels and our point is not much different today. We also wish to preserve nature, but you don’t seem to understand this, I am to believe.
With some sort of focus on education, in today’s terrible world of industrial haste, one might believe that the UC regents might wish that urban gardeners, at the Walnut Street student farmer and volunteer co-op garden, at Occupy The Farm in Albany [The Gil Tract Farm,] and People’s Park should be a pinnacle for social outreach, ecological / agricultural education, Native American folklore education, social justice education, and so on. But what we find from many but not all students, and people in general is that the misinformation from their ‘mainstream,’ cultural conditioning does little to help define sub-cultural phenomenology beyond the market value of a tie died t-shirt. The importance of how micro or sub cultural sociology helps to create facets and trends in the macro sociological matrix is lost on people in general and people take sub cultural values from the past for granted, yet at the same time fascism currently looms around the transnational matrix.
If you are unaware of how invaluable sub-cultural sociology is for human awareness locally, and in general, I would recommend any book, passage or article by Rebecca Solnit on the subject.
The United States is not a Democracy it is an oligarchy where capitalism is king. In a socialist country at least people don’t seem to die on the streets as much. The blight in People’s Park is systemic to a dysfunctional governance. Stop nullifying us. We had a forest. All of us. I am to believe that the regents do not value nature.
If you are unaware of how invaluable nature is to cities read any book or passage by Jane Jacobs on the subject.
The wildlife in our community hates you, and we howl in the wind.
In my opinion that makes no difference to the regents because they cannot hear anything other than themselves and capitalism while the Earth dies screaming.
— Darin Allen Bauer, artist / photographer / laborer / writer